ias of his time and his race, Jesus thus was able
to make high truths of them, thanks to the fruitful misconceptions of
their import. His kingdom of God was no doubt the approaching
apocalypse, which was about to be unfolded in the heavens. But it was
still, and probably above all the kingdom of the soul, founded on
liberty and on the filial sentiment which the virtuous man feels when
resting on the bosom of his Father. It was a pure religion, without
forms, without temple, and without priest; it was the moral judgment
of the world, delegated to the conscience of the just man, and to the
arm of the people. This is what was destined to live; this is what has
lived. When, at the end of a century of vain expectation, the
materialistic hope of a near end of the world was exhausted, the true
kingdom of God became apparent. Accommodating explanations threw a
veil over the material kingdom, which was then seen to be incapable of
realization. The Apocalypse of John, the chief canonical book of the
New Testament,[1] being too formally tied to the idea of an immediate
catastrophe, became of secondary importance, was held to be
unintelligible, tortured in a thousand ways and almost rejected. At
least, its accomplishment was adjourned to an indefinite future. Some
poor benighted ones who, in a fully enlightened age, still preserved
the hopes of the first disciples, became heretics (Ebionites,
Millenarians), lost in the shallows of Christianity. Mankind had
passed to another kingdom of God. The degree of truth contained in the
thought of Jesus had prevailed over the chimera which obscured it.

[Footnote 1: Justin, _Dial. cum Tryph._, 81.]

Let us not, however, despise this chimera, which has been the thick
rind of the sacred fruit on which we live. This fantastic kingdom of
heaven, this endless pursuit after a city of God, which has constantly
preoccupied Christianity during its long career, has been the
principle of that great instinct of futurity which has animated all
reformers, persistent believers in the Apocalypse, from Joachim of
Flora down to the Protestant sectary of our days. This impotent effort
to establish a perfect society has been the source of the
extraordinary tension which has always made the true Christian an
athlete struggling against the existing order of things. The idea of
the "kingdom of God," and the Apocalypse, which is the complete image
of it, are thus, in a sense, the highest and most poetic expressions