body's. The thought of communism came naturally to the mind, not in order that every one should be rich; quite the contrary. "Riches are an evil thing," they would say; "poverty is a good. It is best to give away the little that one has. Neither liberty nor happiness depends on what one has or has not." These doctrines were in the air. In the preaching of those days Jesus would speak of them, and he already practised Essenian communism. One disciple had charge of the common purse; it was replenished by gifts brought by the new members or by some who were richer than the others. Among those who heard the teachings of Jesus were some who were led to the point of giving up everything and leaving all things to follow him, solemnly promising never to leave him!

How little all this was in appearance! How humble and small it all was! A few dreamy and ignorant Oriental souls, knowing nothing either of the size of the world. or the political power of the Cæsars, nothing of the most elementary philosophy or of the law of the universe; expecting the kingdom and seeing everywhere the

signs of its approach; believing that heaven is above, and hell below, and the earth in the middle. And these souls were unsettled, disquieted, half unbelieving, even in the things that they knew and believed. And when one thinks that it is they who have transmitted Jesus to us, that we know Jesus only through their instrumentality, and that the little that they have told us of him, so imperfectly and incompletely, has overturned and changed the world; when one realizes that it is by what they have said that we live and die (for the gospel is the best that men have by which to learn to live well and die well), and that no one has found anything else, that we cannot do without it, then the teaching of Jesus, his word, his person, all his being, expand to inconceivable proportions, and the certitude of a divine message, a divine revelation, a word come down from heaven, and a being come down from heaven, forces itself upon us, dominates us, overwhelms us with its evidence.

For, after all, everything comes from him, -our laws, our morals, our civilization, all our wisdom and our newest ideas; and those who reject Jesus, blaspheme

and deny him, still are subject to his influence, and in spite of themselves in one relation or another remain his disciples; and, on the other hand, misguided Christians, full of intolerance and fanaticism, orthodox hypocrites and the proud of all denominations, and the priests of all communions, also exalt him, since they call themselves by his name; and it is even the case that those who senselessly throw down his cross, thinking themselves to be working for liberty and truth, are often impelled into error by an unrecognized motive of generosity, which by that very quality has its roots in the evangelical and Christian spirit.

Whatever, then, may be one's judgment of the Gospels and their authenticity, it remains true that there was a personality of incomparable power concerning whom these books were composed. The whole sum of facts and ideas connected with Jesus, which caused the creation of the Church, the activity of the apostles, the enthusiasm of the early martyrs, proves the appearance in the first century of a being whose influence upon those who knew and loved him was colossal.

CHAPTER II

THE LANGUAGE OF JESUS

ESUS wrote nothing, and he appears

JESUS

not to have taken the smallest precaution to secure the preservation of his words. This was perfectly natural. No one in the Jewish world of Palestine had his mind turned to the composing of books. Why write them? The world was about to come to an end; and, in fact, the Apocalypses, which are the only remaining Palestinian works of that time, are short tracts solely designed to describe the end of all things and prepare men's minds for the final catastrophe.

People also wrote letters, but only occasionally. St. Paul did not compose one line for the future; he wrote not one word with the intention that it should last. He was too well convinced that he was living in the last days of history. As to the Gospels, it was not until much later that

men thought of composing them. To write was to will to preserve, to take thought for the morrow. Certainly Jesus took thought for the future of his work, but it was by committing it to the apostles; and he seems not to have considered that the apostles themselves might have need to confide it to those who should succeed them.

How did the apostles retain the memory of Jesus' words? How were his words preserved intact, after being for a long time transmitted from lip to lip, no one so much as thinking of fixing them by writing? Simply by one of those feats of memory which the scarcity of manuscripts made an absolute necessity. The preser

vation of the maxims of the Rabbis in the Talmud offers precisely the same phenomenon; and this explanation is the right one, because it is the only one possible, and there is not the slightest doubt that the sayings of Jesus have come down to us in their authentic form.

His sayings have so peculiar a turn, so original a character, that no one can mistake them, and one can easily authenticate the very special form which he gave to his