on for Roman civilization, and their devotion toward the
members of the family of Augustus, structures whose names, by a
caprice of fate, now serve, though strangely altered, to designate
miserable hamlets of Bedouins. He also probably saw Sebaste, a work of
Herod the Great, a showy city, whose ruins would lead to the belief
that it had been carried there ready made, like a machine which had
only to be put up in its place. This ostentatious piece of
architecture arrived in Judea by cargoes; these hundreds of columns,
all of the same diameter, the ornament of some insipid "_Rue de
Rivoli_" these were what he called "the kingdoms of the world and all
their glory." But this luxury of power, this administrative and
official art, displeased him. What he loved were his Galilean
villages, confused mixtures of huts, of nests and holes cut in the
rocks, of wells, of tombs, of fig-trees, and of olives. He always
clung close to Nature. The courts of kings appeared to him as places
where men wear fine clothes. The charming impossibilities with which
his parables abound, when he brings kings and the mighty ones on the
stage,[1] prove that he never conceived of aristocratic society but as
a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his
simplicity.

[Footnote 1: See, for example, Matt. xxii. 2, and following.]

Still less was he acquainted with the new idea, created by Grecian
science, which was the basis of all philosophy, and which modern
science has greatly confirmed, to wit, the exclusion of capricious
gods, to whom the simple belief of ancient ages attributed the
government of the universe. Almost a century before him, Lucretius had
expressed, in an admirable manner, the unchangeableness of the general
system of Nature. The negation of miracle--the idea that everything in
the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of
superior beings has no share--was universally admitted in the great
schools of all the countries which had accepted Grecian science.
Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it. Jesus knew
nothing of this progress. Although born at a time when the principle
of positive science was already proclaimed, he lived entirely in the
supernatural. Never, perhaps, had the Jews been more possessed with
the thirst for the marvellous. Philo, who lived in a great
intellectual centre, and who had received a very complete education,
possessed only a chimerical and inferior knowledge of s