revolution; but circumstances only second that which is just and true.
Each branch of the development of humanity has its privileged epoch,
in which it attains perfection by a sort of spontaneous instinct, and
without effort. No labor of reflection would succeed in producing
afterward the masterpieces which Nature creates at those moments by
inspired geniuses. That which the golden age of Greece was for arts
and literature, the age of Jesus was for religion. Jewish society
exhibited the most extraordinary moral and intellectual state which
the human species has ever passed through. It was truly one of those
divine hours in which the sublime is produced by combinations of a
thousand hidden forces, in which great souls find a flood of
admiration and sympathy to sustain them. The world, delivered from the
very narrow tyranny of small municipal republics, enjoyed great
liberty. Roman despotism did not make itself felt in a disastrous
manner until much later, and it was, moreover, always less oppressive
in those distant provinces than in the centre of the empire. Our petty
preventive interferences (far more destructive than death to things of
the spirit) did not exist. Jesus, during three years, could lead a
life which, in our societies, would have brought him twenty times
before the magistrates. Our laws upon the illegal exercise of medicine
would alone have sufficed to cut short his career. The unbelieving
dynasty of the Herods, on the other hand, occupied itself little with
religious movements; under the Asmoneans, Jesus would probably have
been arrested at his first step. An innovator, in such a state of
society, only risked death, and death is a gain to those who labor for
the future. Imagine Jesus reduced to bear the burden of his divinity
until his sixtieth or seventieth year, losing his celestial fire,
wearing out little by little under the burden of an unparalleled
mission! Everything favors those who have a special destiny; they
become glorious by a sort of invincible impulse and command of fate.

This sublime person, who each day still presides over the destiny of
the world, we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus has
absorbed all the divine, or has been adequate to it (to employ an
expression of the schoolmen), but in the sense that Jesus is the one
who has caused his fellow-men to make the greatest step toward the
divine. Mankind in its totality offers an assemblage of low beings,
selfish, and superior