ment he has
depicted as an incomparable artist, by features which will last
eternally. Each of us owes that which is best in himself to him. Let
us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in
great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors
of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself
shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered
him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle, to which he
might otherwise have been unequal?

We must, then, attach several meanings to the divine city conceived by
Jesus. If his only thought had been that the end of time was near, and
that we must prepare for it, he would not have surpassed John the
Baptist. To renounce a world ready to crumble, to detach one's self
little by little from the present life, and to aspire to the kingdom
about to come, would have formed the gist of his preaching. The
teaching of Jesus had always a much larger scope. He proposed to
himself to create a new state of humanity, and not merely to prepare
the end of that which was in existence. Elias or Jeremiah, reappearing
in order to prepare men for the supreme crisis, would not have
preached as he did. This is so true that this morality, attributed to
the latter days, is found to be the eternal morality, that which has
saved humanity. Jesus himself in many cases makes use of modes of
speech which do not accord with the apocalyptic theory. He often
declares that the kingdom of God has already commenced; that every
man bears it within himself; and can, if he be worthy, partake of it;
that each one silently creates this kingdom by the true conversion of
the heart.[1] The kingdom of God at such times is only the highest
form of good.[2] A better order of things than that which exists, the
reign of justice, which the faithful, according to their ability,
ought to help in establishing; or, again, the liberty of the soul,
something analogous to the Buddhist "deliverance," the fruit of the
soul's separation from matter and absorption in the divine essence.
These truths, which are purely abstract to us, were living realities
to Jesus. Everything in his mind was concrete and substantial. Jesus,
of all men, believed most thoroughly in the reality of the ideal.

[Footnote 1: Matt. vi. 10, 33; Mark xii. 34; Luke xi. 2, xii. 31,
xvii. 20, 21, and following.]

[Footnote 2: See especially Mark xii. 34.]

In accepting the Utop