me.  The striking agreement of the texts with the places, the marvellous harmony of the Gospel ideal with the country which served it as a framework, were like a revelation to me.  I had before my eyes a fifth Gospel, torn, but still legible, and henceforward, through the recitals of Matthew and Mark, in place of an abstract being, whose existence might have been doubted, I saw living and moving an admirable human figure.  During the summer, having to go up to Ghazir, in Lebanon, to take a little repose, I fixed, in rapid sketches, the image which had appeared to me, and from them resulted this history.  When a cruel bereavement hastened my departure, I had but a few pages to write.  In this manner the book has been composed almost entirely near the very places where Jesus was born, and where his character was developed.  Since my return, I have labored unceasingly to verify and check in detail the rough sketch which I had written in haste in a Maronite cabin, with five or six volumes around me.

[Footnote 1:  The work which will contain the results of this mission is in the press.]

Many will regret, perhaps, the biographical form which my work has thus taken.  When I first conceived the idea of a history of the origin of Christianity, what I wished to write was, in fact, a history of doctrines, in which men and their actions would have hardly had a place.  Jesus would scarcely have been named; I should have endeavored to show how the ideas which have grown under his name took root and covered the world.  But I have learned since that history is not a simple game of abstractions; that men are more than doctrines.  It was not a certain theory on justification and redemption which brought about the Reformation; it was Luther and Calvin.  Parseeism, Hellenism, Judaism might have been able to have combined under every form; the doctrines of the Resurrection and of the Word might have developed themselves during ages without producing this grand, unique, and fruitful fact, called Christianity.  This fact is the work of Jesus, of St. Paul, of St. John.  To write the history of Jesus, of St. Paul, of St. John is to write the history of the origin of Christianity.  The anterior movements belong to our subject only in so far as they serve to throw light upon these extraordinary men, who naturally could not have existed without connection with that which preceded them.

In such an effort to make the great souls of the past live again, some share of divination and conjecture must be permitted.  A great life is an organic whole which cannot be rendered by the simple agglomeration of small facts.  It requires a profound sentiment to embrace them all, moulding them into perfect unity.  The method of art in a similar subject is a good guide; the exquisite tact of a Goethe would know how to apply it.  The essential condition of the creations of art is, that they shall form a living system of which all the parts are mutually dependent and related.