o rules which professed to realize the gospel ideal.
It is certain that this ideal, if only on account of the celibacy and
poverty it imposed, could not become the common law. The monk would be
thus, in one sense, the only true Christian. Common sense revolts at
these excesses; and if we are guided by it, to demand the impossible,
is a mark of weakness and error. But common sense is a bad judge where
great matters are in question. To obtain little from humanity we must
ask much. The immense moral progress which we owe to the Gospel is the
result of its exaggerations. It is thus that it has been, like
stoicism, but with infinitely greater fulness, a living argument for
the divine powers in man, an exalted monument of the potency of the
will.

We may easily imagine that to Jesus, at this period of his life,
everything which was not the kingdom of God had absolutely
disappeared. He was, if we may say so, totally outside nature: family,
friendship, country, had no longer any meaning for him. No doubt from
this moment he had already sacrificed his life. Sometimes we are
tempted to believe that, seeing in his own death a means of founding
his kingdom, he deliberately determined to allow himself to be
killed.[1] At other times, although such a thought only afterward
became a doctrine, death presented itself to him as a sacrifice,
destined to appease his Father and to save mankind.[2] A singular
taste for persecution and torments[3] possessed him. His blood
appeared to him as the water of a second baptism with which he ought
to be baptized, and he seemed possessed by a strange haste to
anticipate this baptism, which alone could quench his thirst.[4]

[Footnote 1: Matt. xvi. 21-23, xvii. 12, 21, 22.]

[Footnote 2: Mark x. 45.]

[Footnote 3: Luke vi. 22, and following.]

[Footnote 4: Luke xii. 50.]

The grandeur of his views upon the future was at times surprising. He
did not conceal from himself the terrible storm he was about to cause
in the world. "Think not," said he, with much boldness and beauty,
"that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but
a sword. There shall be five in one house divided, three against two,
and two against three. I am come to set a man at variance against his
father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own
household."[1] "I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I,
if it be