he death of Jesus (it
only countersigned the sentence, and even in spite of itself), ought
to bear a great share of the responsibility. In presiding at the scene
of Calvary, the state gave itself a serious blow. A legend full of
all kinds of disrespect prevailed, and became universally known--a
legend in which the constituted authorities played a hateful part, in
which it was the accused that was right, and in which the judges and
the guards were leagued against the truth. Seditious in the highest
degree, the history of the Passion, spread by a thousand popular
images, displayed the Roman eagles as sanctioning the most iniquitous
of executions, soldiers executing it, and a prefect commanding it.
What a blow for all established powers! They have never entirely
recovered from it. How can they assume infallibility in respect to
poor men, when they have on their conscience the great mistake of
Gethsemane?[1]

[Footnote 1: This popular sentiment existed in Brittany in the time of
my childhood. The gendarme was there regarded, like the Jew elsewhere,
with a kind of pious aversion, for it was he who arrested Jesus!]

CHAPTER XXVIII.

ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF THE WORK OF JESUS.

Jesus, it will be seen, limited his action entirely to the Jews.
Although his sympathy for those despised by orthodoxy led him to admit
pagans into the kingdom of God--although he had resided more than once
in a pagan country, and once or twice we surprise him in kindly
relations with unbelievers[1]--it may be said that his life was passed
entirely in the very restricted world in which he was born. He was
never heard of in Greek or Roman countries; his name appears only in
profane authors of a hundred years later, and then in an indirect
manner, in connection with seditious movements provoked by his
doctrine, or persecutions of which his disciples were the object.[2]
Even on Judaism, Jesus made no very durable impression. Philo, who
died about the year 50, had not the slightest knowledge of him.
Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing in the last years of the
century, mentions his execution in a few lines,[3] as an event of
secondary importance, and in the enumeration of the sects of his time,
he omits the Christians altogether.[4] In the _Mishnah_, also, there
is no trace of the new school; the passages in the two Gemaras in
which the founder of Christianity is named, do not go further back
than the fourth or fifth century.[5] The essenti