The reigns of the last Asmoneans, and that of Herod, saw the excitement grow still stronger.  They were filled by an uninterrupted series of religious movements.  In the degree that power became secularized, and passed into the hands of unbelievers, the Jewish people lived less and less for the earth, and became more and more absorbed by the strange fermentation which was operating in their midst.  The world, distracted by other spectacles, had little knowledge of that which passed in this forgotten corner of the East.  The minds abreast of their age were, however, better informed.  The tender and clear-sighted Virgil seems to answer, as by a secret echo, to the second Isaiah.  The birth of a child throws him into dreams of a universal palingenesis.[1] These dreams were of every-day occurrence, and shaped into a kind of literature which was designated Sibylline.  The quite recent formation of the empire exalted the imagination; the great era of peace on which it entered, and that impression of melancholy sensibility which the mind experiences after long periods of revolution, gave birth on all sides to unlimited hopes.

[Footnote 1:  Egl. iv.  The Cumaeum carmen (v. 4) was a sort of Sibylline apocalypse, borrowed from the philosophy of history familiar to the East.  See Servius on this verse, and Carmina Sibyllina, iii. 97-817; cf.  Tac., Hist., v. 13.]

In Judea expectation was at its height.  Holy persons—­among whom may be named the aged Simeon, who, legend tells us, held Jesus in his arms; Anna, daughter of Phanuel, regarded as a prophetess[1]—­passed their life about the temple, fasting, and praying, that it might please God not to take them from the world without having seen the fulfillment of the hopes of Israel.  They felt a powerful presentiment; they were sensible of the approach of something unknown.

[Footnote 1:  Luke ii. 25, and following.]

This confused mixture of clear views and dreams, this alternation of deceptions and hopes, these ceaseless aspirations, driven back by an odious reality, found at last their interpretation in the incomparable man, to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of Son of God, and that with justice, since he has advanced religion as no other has done, or probably ever will be able to do.

CHAPTER II.

INFANCY AND YOUTH OF JESUS—­HIS FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

Jesus was born at Nazareth,[1] a small town of Galilee, which before his time had no celebrity.[2] All his life he was designated by the name of “the Nazarene,"[3] and it is only by a rather embarrassed and round-about way,[4] that, in the legends respecting him, he is made to be born at Bethlehem.  We shall see later[5] the motive for this supposition, and how it was the necessary consequence of the Messianic character attributed to Jesus.[6] The precise date of his birth is unknown.  It took place under the reign of Augustus, about the Roman year 750, probably some years before the year 1 of that era which all civilized people date from the day on which he was born.[7]