on,
many conquests,--never accepted by themselves,--had driven them
in on themselves and kept their racial self-consciousness at a
perpetual boiling-point; and it all went into their religion,
which compensated them with unearthly dignities for the
indignities they suffered on earth .... _them_.... the Chosen
People of the Lord! It bred in them scorn of the Gentiles, for
which there was no solvent in the Roman polity, the Roman
citizenship, the Roman peace.--There must have been always noble
protest-ants among them. The common people,--as the picture in
the Gospels shows,--were ready enough to fraternize humanly with
Gentiles and Romans; but the fact remains that at the time
Judaism gave birth to Christianity, this narrow fierce antagonism
to all other religions was the official attitude of the Jewish
church. It was, perhaps, the darkest moment in Jewish spiritual
history; and it was the moment chosen by a Teacher as that in
which he should be born a Jew.

The story in the Gospels cannot, I suppose, be taken as _au pied
de lettre_ historical; but no doubt it gives a general picture
which is true enough. And the picture it gives shows the Jewish
proletariat in very favorable contrast with the officials heads
of the church and state. They, the common people, received the
Teacher well; to them, he was a gracious figure whom they came
in multitudes to hear. He was in fierce opposition to the
hierarchic aristocracy,--the "scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,"
as he called them: the body that nourished the tradition of
exclusiveness and intolerance. He preached pure ethics to the
people, and they loved him for it. He gathered round him
disciples,--men eager to learn from him that which it would have
been ridiculous to have tried to teach the mob: the Secret
Wisdom, without which to keep them sweet, ethics become
sentimentalism, and philosophy a cold corpse. It is a law
in the Schools of this Wisdom that seven years of training
are necessary before the disciple can reach that grade of
insight and self-mastery which will enable him in turn to
become a Teacher: seven years at the very least. Within
four years of the beginning of his mission, before, in the
nature of things, one single disciple could have been more
than half-trained, the hierarchic aristrocracy had had this
Teacher crucified.

Who, then, was to transmit his doctrine? he wrote nothing of it
down; in the truest sense it never can be written down: