He followed the trade of his father, which was that of a carpenter.[1] This was not in any degree humiliating or grievous.  The Jewish customs required that a man devoted to intellectual work should learn a trade.  The most celebrated doctors did so;[2] thus St. Paul, whose education had been so carefully tended, was a tent-maker.[3] Jesus never married.  All his power of love centred upon that which he regarded as his celestial vocation.  The extremely delicate feeling toward women, which we remark in him, was not separated from the exclusive devotion which he had for his mission.  Like Francis d’Assisi and Francis de Sales, he treated as sisters the women who were loved of the same work as himself; he had his St. Clare, his Frances de Chantal.  It is, however, probable that these loved him more than the work; he was, no doubt, more beloved than loving.  Thus, as often happens in very elevated natures, tenderness of the heart was transformed in him into an infinite sweetness, a vague poetry, and a universal charm.  His relations, free and intimate, but of an entirely moral kind, with women of doubtful character, are also explained by the passion which attached him to the glory of his Father, and which made him jealously anxious for all beautiful creatures who could contribute to it.[4]

[Footnote 1:  Mark vi. 3; Justin, Dial. cum Tryph., 88.]

[Footnote 2:  For example, “Rabbi Johanan, the shoemaker, Rabbi Isaac, the blacksmith.”]

[Footnote 3:  Acts xviii. 3.]

[Footnote 4:  Luke vii. 37, and following; John iv. 7, and following; viii. 3, and following.]

What was the progress of the ideas of Jesus during this obscure period of his life?  Through what meditations did he enter upon the prophetic career?  We have no information on these points, his history having come to us in scattered narratives, without exact chronology.  But the development of character is everywhere the same; and there is no doubt that the growth of so powerful individuality as that of Jesus obeyed very rigorous laws.  A high conception of the Divinity—­which he did not owe to Judaism, and which seems to have been in all its parts the creation of his great mind—­was in a manner the source of all his power.  It is essential here that we put aside the ideas familiar to us, and the discussions in which little minds exhaust themselves.  In order properly to understand the precise character of the piety of Jesus, we must forget all that is placed between the gospel and ourselves.  Deism and Pantheism have become the two poles of theology.  The paltry discussions of scholasticism, the dryness of spirit of Descartes, the deep-rooted irreligion of the eighteenth century, by lessening God, and by limiting Him, in a manner, by the exclusion of everything which is not His very self, have stifled in the breast of modern rationalism all fertile ideas of the Divinity.  If God, in fact, is a personal being outside of us,