[Footnote 1:  Tobit viii. 3; Luke xi. 24.]

[Footnote 2:  Matt. iv. 1, and following; Mark i. 12, 13; Luke iv. 1, and following.  Certainly, the striking similarity that these narratives present to the analogous legends of the Vendidad (farg. xix.) and of the Lalitavistara (chap. xvii., xviii., xxi.) would lead us to regard them only as myths.  But the meagre and concise narrative of Mark, which evidently represents on this point the primitive compilation, leads us to suppose a real fact, which furnished later the theme of legendary developments.]

It was probably in coming from the desert that Jesus learned of the arrest of John the Baptist.  He had no longer any reason to prolong his stay in a country which was partly strange to him.  Perhaps he feared also being involved in the severities exercised toward John, and did not wish to expose himself, at a time in which, seeing the little celebrity he had, his death could in no way serve the progress of his ideas.  He regained Galilee,[1] his true home, ripened by an important experience, and having, through contact with a great man, very different from himself, acquired a consciousness of his own originality.

[Footnote 1:  Matt. iv. 12; Mark i. 14; Luke iv. 14; John iv. 3.]

On the whole, the influence of John had been more hurtful than useful to Jesus.  It checked his development; for everything leads us to believe that he had, when he descended toward the Jordan, ideas superior to those of John, and that it was by a sort of concession that he inclined for a time toward baptism.  Perhaps if the Baptist, whose authority it would have been difficult for him to escape, had remained free, Jesus would not have been able to throw off the yoke of external rites and ceremonies, and would then, no doubt, have remained an unknown Jewish sectary; for the world would not have abandoned its old ceremonies merely for others of a different kind.  It has been by the power of a religion, free from all external forms, that Christianity has attracted elevated minds.  The Baptist once imprisoned, his school was soon diminished, and Jesus found himself left to his own impulses.  The only things he owed to John, were lessons in preaching and in popular action.  From this moment, in fact, he preached with greater power, and spoke to the multitude with authority.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Matt. vii. 29; Mark i. 22; Luke iv. 32.]

It seems also that his sojourn with John had, not so much by the influence of the Baptist, as by the natural progress of his own thought, considerably ripened his ideas on “the kingdom of heaven.”  His watchword, henceforth, is the “good tidings,” the announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand.[1] Jesus is no longer simply a delightful moralist, aspiring to express sublime lessons in short and lively aphorisms; he is the transcendent revolutionary, who essays to renovate the world from its very basis, and to establish