he who believes himself to have peculiar relations with God is a “visionary,” and as the physical and physiological sciences have shown us that all supernatural visions are illusions, the logical Deist finds it impossible to understand the great beliefs of the past.  Pantheism, on the other hand, in suppressing the Divine personality, is as far as it can be from the living God of the ancient religions.  Were the men who have best comprehended God—­Cakya-Mouni, Plato, St. Paul, St. Francis d’Assisi, and St. Augustine (at some periods of his fluctuating life)—­Deists or Pantheists?  Such a question has no meaning.  The physical and metaphysical proofs of the existence of God were quite indifferent to them.  They felt the Divine within themselves.  We must place Jesus in the first rank of this great family of the true sons of God.  Jesus had no visions; God did not speak to him as to one outside of Himself; God was in him; he felt himself with God, and he drew from his heart all he said of his Father.  He lived in the bosom of God by constant communication with Him; he saw Him not, but he understood Him, without need of the thunder and the burning bush of Moses, of the revealing tempest of Job, of the oracle of the old Greek sages, of the familiar genius of Socrates, or of the angel Gabriel of Mahomet.  The imagination and the hallucination of a St. Theresa, for example, are useless here.  The intoxication of the Soufi proclaiming himself identical with God is also quite another thing.  Jesus never once gave utterance to the sacrilegious idea that he was God.  He believed himself to be in direct communion with God; he believed himself to be the Son of God.  The highest consciousness of God which has existed in the bosom of humanity was that of Jesus.

We understand, on the other hand, how Jesus, starting with such a disposition of spirit, could never be a speculative philosopher like Cakya-Mouni.  Nothing is further from scholastic theology than the Gospel.[1] The speculations of the Greek fathers on the Divine essence proceed from an entirely different spirit.  God, conceived simply as Father, was all the theology of Jesus.  And this was not with him a theoretical principle, a doctrine more or less proved, which he sought to inculcate in others.  He did not argue with his disciples;[2] he demanded from them no effort of attention.  He did not preach his opinions; he preached himself.  Very great and very disinterested minds often present, associated with much elevation, that character of perpetual attention to themselves, and extreme personal susceptibility, which, in general, is peculiar to women.[3] Their conviction that God is in them, and occupies Himself perpetually with them, is so strong, that they have no fear of obtruding themselves upon others; our reserve, and our respect for the opinion of others, which is a part of our weakness, could not belong to them.  This exaltation of self is not egotism; for such men, possessed by their idea, give their lives freely, in order to seal