for
his clothes; the terrible death by which he gave the world its most
eternal symbol; and his final burial in the tomb of the rich man, his
body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though
he had been a king's son. When one contemplates all this from the point
of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme office
of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without the shedding
of blood: the mystical presentation, by means of dialogue and costume and
gesture even, of the Passion of her Lord; and it is always a source of
pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the
Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor
answering the priest at Mass.

Yet the whole life of Christ--so entirely may sorrow and beauty be made
one in their meaning and manifestation--is really an idyll, though it
ends with the veil of the temple being rent, and the darkness coming over
the face of the earth, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre.
One always thinks of him as a young bridegroom with his companions, as
indeed he somewhere describes himself; as a shepherd straying through a
valley with his sheep in search of green meadow or cool stream; as a
singer trying to build out of the music the walls of the City of God; or
as a lover for whose love the whole world was too small. His miracles
seem to me to be as exquisite as the coming of spring, and quite as
natural. I see no difficulty at all in believing that such was the charm
of his personality that his mere presence could bring peace to souls in
anguish, and that those who touched his garments or his hands forgot
their pain; or that as he passed by on the highway of life people who had
seen nothing of life's mystery, saw it clearly, and others who had been
deaf to every voice but that of pleasure heard for the first time the
voice of love and found it as 'musical as Apollo's lute'; or that evil
passions fled at his approach, and men whose dull unimaginative lives had
been but a mode of death rose as it were from the grave when he called
them; or that when he taught on the hillside the multitude forgot their
hunger and thirst and the cares of this world, and that to his friends
who listened to him as he sat at meat the coarse food seemed delicate,
and the water had the taste of good wine, and the whole house became full
of the odour and sweetness of nard.

Renan in his _Vie de Jesus_--th