[Footnote 1:  Discourse of Claudius at Lyons, Tab. ii. sub fin.  De Boisseau, Inscr.  Ant. de Lyon, p. 136.]

[Footnote 2:  2 Sam. xxiv.]

[Footnote 3:  Talmud of Babylon, Baba Kama, 113 a; Shabbath, 33 b.]

[Footnote 4:  Jos., Ant., XVIII. i. 1 and 6; B.J., II. viii. 1; Acts v. 37.  Previous to Judas the Gaulonite, the Acts place another agitator, Theudas; but this is an anachronism, the movement of Theudas took place in the year 44 of the Christian era (Jos., Ant., XX. v. 1).]

[Footnote 5:  Jos., B.J., II. xvii. 8, and following.]

Galilee was thus an immense furnace wherein the most diverse elements were seething.[1] An extraordinary contempt of life, or, more properly speaking, a kind of longing for death,[2] was the consequence of these agitations.  Experience counts for nothing in these great fanatical movements.  Algeria, at the commencement of the French occupation, saw arise, each spring, inspired men, who declared themselves invulnerable, and sent by God to drive away the infidels; the following year their death was forgotten, and their successors found no less credence.  The Roman power, very stern on the one hand, yet little disposed to meddle, permitted a good deal of liberty.  Those great, brutal despotisms, terrible in repression, were not so suspicious as powers which have a faith to defend.  They allowed everything up to the point when they thought it necessary to be severe.  It is not recorded that Jesus was even once interfered with by the civil power, in his wandering career.  Such freedom, and, above all, the happiness which Galilee enjoyed in being much less confined in the bonds of Pharisaic pedantry, gave to this district a real superiority over Jerusalem.  The revolution, or, in other words, the belief in the Messiah, caused here a general fermentation.  Men deemed themselves on the eve of the great renovation; the Scriptures, tortured into divers meanings, fostered the most colossal hopes.  In each line of the simple writings of the Old Testament they saw the assurance, and, in a manner, the programme of the future reign, which was to bring peace to the righteous, and to seal forever the work of God.

[Footnote 1:  Luke xiii. 1.  The Galilean movement of Judas, son of Hezekiah, does not appear to have been of a religious character; perhaps, however, its character has been misrepresented by Josephus (Ant., XVII. x. 5).]

[Footnote 2:  Jos., Ant., XVI. vi. 2, 3; XVIII. i. 1.]

From all time, this division into two parties, opposed in interest and spirit, had been for the Hebrew nation a principle which contributed to their moral growth.  Every nation called to high destinies ought to be a little world in itself, including opposite poles.  Greece presented, at a few leagues’ distance from each other, Sparta and Athens—­to a superficial observer, the two antipodes; but, in reality,