cience.

Jesus, on this point, differed in no respect from his companions. He
believed in the devil, whom he regarded as a kind of evil genius,[1]
and he imagined, like all the world, that nervous maladies were
produced by demons who possessed the patient and agitated him. The
marvellous was not the exceptional for him; it was his normal state.
The notion of the supernatural, with its impossibilities, is
coincident with the birth of experimental science. The man who is
strange to all ideas of physical laws, who believes that by praying he
can change the path of the clouds, arrest disease, and even death,
finds nothing extraordinary in miracle, inasmuch as the entire course
of things is to him the result of the free will of the Divinity. This
intellectual state was constantly that of Jesus. But in his great soul
such a belief produced effects quite opposed to those produced on the
vulgar. Among the latter, the belief in the special action of God led
to a foolish credulity, and the deceptions of charlatans. With him it
led to a profound idea of the familiar relations of man with God, and
an exaggerated belief in the power of man--beautiful errors, which
were the secret of his power; for if they were the means of one day
showing his deficiencies in the eyes of the physicist and the chemist,
they gave him a power over his own age of which no individual had been
possessed before his time, or has been since.

[Footnote 1: Matt. vi. 13.]

His distinctive character very early revealed itself. Legend delights
to show him even from his infancy in revolt against paternal
authority, and departing from the common way to fulfill his
vocation.[1] It is certain, at least, that he cared little for the
relations of kinship. His family do not seem to have loved him,[2]
and at times he seems to have been hard toward them.[3] Jesus, like
all men exclusively preoccupied by an idea, came to think little of
the ties of blood. The bond of thought is the only one that natures of
this kind recognize. "Behold my mother and my brethren," said he, in
extending his hand toward his disciples; "he who does the will of my
Father, he is my brother and my sister." The simple people did not
understand the matter thus, and one day a woman passing near him cried
out, "Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee
suck!" But he said, "Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word
of God, and keep it."[4] Soon, in his bold revolt agains