That he had no knowledge of the general state of the world is apparent from each feature of his most authentic discourses.  The earth appeared to him still divided into kingdoms warring with one another; he seemed to ignore the “Roman peace,” and the new state of society which its age inaugurated.  He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the name of “Caesar” alone reached him.  He saw building, in Galilee or its environs, Tiberias, Julias, Diocaesarea, Caesarea, gorgeous works of the Herods, who sought, by these magnificent structures, to prove their admiration for Roman civilization, and their devotion toward the members of the family of Augustus, structures whose names, by a caprice of fate, now serve, though strangely altered, to designate miserable hamlets of Bedouins.  He also probably saw Sebaste, a work of Herod the Great, a showy city, whose ruins would lead to the belief that it had been carried there ready made, like a machine which had only to be put up in its place.  This ostentatious piece of architecture arrived in Judea by cargoes; these hundreds of columns, all of the same diameter, the ornament of some insipid “Rue de Rivoli” these were what he called “the kingdoms of the world and all their glory.”  But this luxury of power, this administrative and official art, displeased him.  What he loved were his Galilean villages, confused mixtures of huts, of nests and holes cut in the rocks, of wells, of tombs, of fig-trees, and of olives.  He always clung close to Nature.  The courts of kings appeared to him as places where men wear fine clothes.  The charming impossibilities with which his parables abound, when he brings kings and the mighty ones on the stage,[1] prove that he never conceived of aristocratic society but as a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his simplicity.

[Footnote 1:  See, for example, Matt. xxii. 2, and following.]

Still less was he acquainted with the new idea, created by Grecian science, which was the basis of all philosophy, and which modern science has greatly confirmed, to wit, the exclusion of capricious gods, to whom the simple belief of ancient ages attributed the government of the universe.  Almost a century before him, Lucretius had expressed, in an admirable manner, the unchangeableness of the general system of Nature.  The negation of miracle—­the idea that everything in the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings has no share—­was universally admitted in the great schools of all the countries which had accepted Grecian science.  Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it.  Jesus knew nothing of this progress.  Although born at a time when the principle of positive science was already proclaimed, he lived entirely in the supernatural.  Never, perhaps, had the Jews been more possessed with the thirst for the marvellous.  Philo, who lived in a great intellectual centre, and who had received a very complete education, possessed only a chimerical and inferior knowledge of science.