[Footnote 1:  Theopompus, in Diog.  Laert., Proem, 9. Boundehesch, xxxi.  The traces of the doctrine of the resurrection in the Avesta are very doubtful.]

[Footnote 2:  John xi. 24.]

[Footnote 3:  Luke xvi. 22.  Cf. De Rationis Imp., 13, 16, 18.]

[Footnote 4:  Dan. xii. 2.]

[Footnote 5:  2 Macc. vii. 14.]

Jesus, as soon as he began to think, entered into the burning atmosphere which was created in Palestine by the ideas we have just stated.  These ideas were taught in no school; but they were in the very air, and his soul was early penetrated by them.  Our hesitations and our doubts never reached him.  On this summit of the mountain of Nazareth, where no man can sit to-day without an uneasy, though it may be a frivolous, feeling about his destiny, Jesus sat often untroubled by a doubt.  Free from selfishness—­that source of our troubles, which makes us seek with eagerness a reward for virtue beyond the tomb—­he thought only of his work, of his race, and of humanity.  Those mountains, that sea, that azure sky, those high plains in the horizon, were for him not the melancholy vision of a soul which interrogates Nature upon her fate, but the certain symbol, the transparent shadow, of an invisible world, and of a new heaven.

He never attached much importance to the political events of his time, and he probably knew little about them.  The court of the Herods formed a world so different to his, that he doubtless knew it only by name.  Herod the Great died about the year in which Jesus was born, leaving imperishable remembrances—­monuments which must compel the most malevolent posterity to associate his name with that of Solomon; nevertheless, his work was incomplete, and could not be continued.  Profanely ambitious, and lost in a maze of religious controversies, this astute Idumean had the advantage which coolness and judgment, stripped of morality, give over passionate fanatics.  But his idea of a secular kingdom of Israel, even if it had not been an anachronism in the state of the world in which it was conceived, would inevitably have miscarried, like the similar project which Solomon formed, owing to the difficulties proceeding from the character of the nation.  His three sons were only lieutenants of the Romans, analogous to the rajahs of India under the English dominion.  Antipater, or Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and of Peraea, of whom Jesus was a subject all his life, was an idle and useless prince,[1] a favorite and flatterer of Tiberius,[2] and too often misled by the bad influence of his second wife, Herodias.[3] Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanea, into whose dominions Jesus made frequent journeys, was a much better sovereign.[4] As to Archelaus, ethnarch of Jerusalem, Jesus could not know him, for he was about ten years old when this man, who was weak and without character, though sometimes violent, was deposed by Augustus.[5] The last trace of self-government was