in one. Its outward
expression was an elaborate ceremonial. Its heart was a passion which in
one direction dashed the little province against the whole power of Rome;
in another channel, preserved a people intact and separate through twenty
centuries of dispersal and subjection; while, in another aspect, it gave
birth to Jesus and to Christianity.

Jesus was one of the great spiritual geniuses of the race,--so far as we
know, the greatest. The highest ideas of Judaism he sublimated,
intensified, and expressed in universal forms. Indifferent to the
ceremonial of his people, he taught that the essence of religion lay in
spirit and in conduct.

The holy and awful Deity was to him a tender Father. The whole duty of
man to man was love. Chastity of the body was exalted to purity of the
heart. He lived close to the common people; taught, helped, healed them;
caressed their children, pitied their outcasts, laid hands on the lepers,
and calmed the insane. He brooded on the expectation of some great
future which earlier seers had impressed on the popular thought, and saw
as in prophetic vision the near approach of the perfect triumph of
holiness and love. Overshadowed by danger, his hope and faith menaced as
by denying Fate, he rallied from the shock, trusted the unseen Power, and
went serenely to a martyr's death.

Jesus had roused a passion of personal devotion among the poor, the
ignorant, the true-hearted whom he had taught and called. When he was
dead, that devotion flamed out in the assertion, He lives again! We have
seen him! He will speedily return! The Jewish belief in a bodily
resurrection and a Messianic kingdom gave form to this faith, and
unbounded love and imagination gave intensity and vividness. That Jesus
was risen from the dead became the cardinal article of the new society
which grew up around his grave. His moral precepts, his parables, his
acts, his personality,--the personality of one who was alike the child of
God and the friend of sinners,--these were enshrined in a new mythology.
A society, enthusiastic, aggressive; at first divided into factions; then
blending in a common creed and rule of life; a loyalty to an invisible
leader; a sanguine hope of speedy triumph, cooling into more remote
expectation, and in the finer spirits transforming into a present
spiritual communion; a growing elaboration of organization, priesthood,
ritual, mythology; a diffusion through vast masses of peopl