no doubt, more beloved than loving. Thus, as often
happens in very elevated natures, tenderness of the heart was
transformed in him into an infinite sweetness, a vague poetry, and a
universal charm. His relations, free and intimate, but of an entirely
moral kind, with women of doubtful character, are also explained by
the passion which attached him to the glory of his Father, and which
made him jealously anxious for all beautiful creatures who could
contribute to it.[4]

[Footnote 1: Mark vi. 3; Justin, _Dial. cum Tryph._, 88.]

[Footnote 2: For example, "Rabbi Johanan, the shoemaker, Rabbi Isaac,
the blacksmith."]

[Footnote 3: _Acts_ xviii. 3.]

[Footnote 4: Luke vii. 37, and following; John iv. 7, and following;
viii. 3, and following.]

What was the progress of the ideas of Jesus during this obscure period
of his life? Through what meditations did he enter upon the prophetic
career? We have no information on these points, his history having
come to us in scattered narratives, without exact chronology. But the
development of character is everywhere the same; and there is no
doubt that the growth of so powerful individuality as that of Jesus
obeyed very rigorous laws. A high conception of the Divinity--which he
did not owe to Judaism, and which seems to have been in all its parts
the creation of his great mind--was in a manner the source of all his
power. It is essential here that we put aside the ideas familiar to
us, and the discussions in which little minds exhaust themselves. In
order properly to understand the precise character of the piety of
Jesus, we must forget all that is placed between the gospel and
ourselves. Deism and Pantheism have become the two poles of theology.
The paltry discussions of scholasticism, the dryness of spirit of
Descartes, the deep-rooted irreligion of the eighteenth century, by
lessening God, and by limiting Him, in a manner, by the exclusion of
everything which is not His very self, have stifled in the breast of
modern rationalism all fertile ideas of the Divinity. If God, in fact,
is a personal being outside of us, he who believes himself to have
peculiar relations with God is a "visionary," and as the physical and
physiological sciences have shown us that all supernatural visions are
illusions, the logical Deist finds it impossible to understand the
great beliefs of the past. Pantheism, on the other hand, in
suppressing the Divine personality, is as far as it can be from the