[Footnote 1:  See Stobaeus, Florilegium, ch. lxii., lxxvii., lxxxvi., and following.]

[Footnote 2:  John viii. 32, and following.]

The man who is especially preoccupied with the duties of public life, does not readily forgive those who attach little importance to his party quarrels.  He especially blames those who subordinate political to social questions, and profess a sort of indifference for the former.  In one sense he is right, for exclusive power is prejudicial to the good government of human affairs.  But what progress have “parties” been able to effect in the general morality of our species?  If Jesus, instead of founding his heavenly kingdom, had gone to Rome, had expended his energies in conspiring against Tiberius, or in regretting Germanicus, what would have become of the world?  As an austere republican, or zealous patriot, he would not have arrested the great current of the affairs of his age, but in declaring that politics are insignificant, he has revealed to the world this truth, that one’s country is not everything, and that the man is before, and higher than, the citizen.

Our principles of positive science are offended by the dreams contained in the programme of Jesus.  We know the history of the earth; cosmical revolutions of the kind which Jesus expected are only produced by geological or astronomical causes, the connection of which with spiritual things has never yet been demonstrated.  But, in order to be just to great originators, they must not be judged by the prejudices in which they have shared.  Columbus discovered America, though starting from very erroneous ideas; Newton believed his foolish explanation of the Apocalypse to be as true as his system of the world.  Shall we place an ordinary man of our time above a Francis d’Assisi, a St. Bernard, a Joan of Arc, or a Luther, because he is free from errors which these last have professed?  Should we measure men by the correctness of their ideas of physics, and by the more or less exact knowledge which they possess of the true system of the world?  Let us understand better the position of Jesus and that which made his power.  The Deism of the eighteenth century, and a certain kind of Protestantism, have accustomed us to consider the founder of the Christian faith only as a great moralist, a benefactor of mankind.  We see nothing more in the Gospel than good maxims; we throw a prudent veil over the strange intellectual state in which it was originated.  There are even persons who regret that the French Revolution departed more than once from principles, and that it was not brought about by wise and moderate men.  Let us not impose our petty and commonplace ideas on these extraordinary movements so far above our every-day life.  Let us continue to admire the “morality of the gospel”—­let us suppress in our religious teachings the chimera which was its soul; but do not let us believe that with the simple ideas of happiness, or of individual morality, we stir the world.  The idea of Jesus was much more profound; it was the most revolutionary idea ever formed in a human brain; it should be taken in its totality, and not with those timid suppressions which deprive it of precisely that which has rendered it efficacious for the regeneration of humanity.