l we
experience in passing from the history of Jesus to that of the
apostles. The evangelists themselves, who have bequeathed us the image
of Jesus, are so much beneath him of whom they speak, that they
constantly disfigure him, from their inability to attain to his
height. Their writings are full of errors and misconceptions. We feel
in each line a discourse of divine beauty, transcribed by narrators
who do not understand it, and who substitute their own ideas for those
which they have only half understood. On the whole, the character of
Jesus, far from having been embellished by his biographers, has been
lowered by them. Criticism, in order to find what he was, needs to
discard a series of misconceptions, arising from the inferiority of
the disciples. These painted him as they understood him, and often in
thinking to raise him, they have in reality lowered him.

I know that our modern ideas have been offended more than once in this
legend, conceived by another race, under another sky, and in the midst
of other social wants. There are virtues which, in some respects, are
more conformable to our taste. The virtuous and gentle Marcus
Aurelius, the humble and gentle Spinoza, not having believed in
miracles, have been free from some errors that Jesus shared. Spinoza,
in his profound obscurity, had an advantage which Jesus did not seek.
By our extreme delicacy in the use of means of conviction, by our
absolute sincerity and our disinterested love of the pure idea, we
have founded--all we who have devoted our lives to science--a new
ideal of morality. But the judgment of general history ought not to be
restricted to considerations of personal merit. Marcus Aurelius and
his noble teachers have had no permanent influence on the world.
Marcus Aurelius left behind him delightful books, an execrable son,
and a decaying nation. Jesus remains an inexhaustible principle of
moral regeneration for humanity. Philosophy does not suffice for the
multitude. They must have sanctity. An Apollonius of Tyana, with his
miraculous legend, is necessarily more successful than a Socrates with
his cold reason. "Socrates," it was said, "leaves men on the earth,
Apollonius transports them to heaven; Socrates is but a sage,
Apollonius is a god."[1] Religion, so far, has not existed without a
share of asceticism, of piety, and of the marvellous. When it was
wished, after the Antonines, to make a religion of philosophy, it was
requisite to transform th