s of insults and injuries on the part of the people who, defying
the danger, came in multitudes to mourn the great martyr. Then Pilate
ordered his soldiers to remove the body at night, and to bury it
clandestinely in some other place, leaving the first grave open and the
guard withdrawn from it, so that the people could see that Jesus had
disappeared. But Pilate missed his end; for when, on the following
morning, the Hebrews did not find the corpse of their master in the
sepulchre, the superstitious and miracle-accepting among them thought
that he had been resurrected.

How did this legend take root? We cannot say. Possibly it existed for a
long time in a latent state and, at the beginning, spread only among the
common people; perhaps the ecclesiastic authorities of the Hebrews
looked with indulgence upon this innocent belief, which gave to the
oppressed a shadow of revenge on their oppressors. However it be, the
day when the legend of the resurrection finally became known to all,
there was no one to be found strong enough to demonstrate the
impossibility of such an occurrence.

Concerning this resurrection, it must be remarked that, according to the
Buddhists, the soul of the just Issa was united with the eternal Being,
while the Evangelists insist upon the ascension of the body. It seems to
me, however, that the Evangelists and the Apostles have done very well
to give the description of the resurrection which they have agreed upon,
for if they had not done so, _i.e._, if the miracle had been given a
less material character, their preaching would not have had, in the
eyes of the nations to whom it was presented, that divine authority,
that avowedly supernatural character, which has clothed Christianity,
until our time, as the only religion capable of elevating the human race
to a state of sublime enthusiasm, suppressing its savage instincts, and
bringing it nearer to the grand and simple nature which God has
bestowed, they say, upon that feeble dwarf called man.

_Explanatory Notes_

_Chapter III._

_Secs. 3, 4, 5, 7_

The histories of all peoples show that when a nation has reached the
apogee of its military glory and its wealth, it begins at once to sink
more or less rapidly on the declivity of moral degeneration and decay.
The Israelites having, among the first, experienced this law of the
evolution of nations, the neighboring peoples profited by the decadence
of the then effeminate and debauched desc