The Life of Jesus Part 3

Such are the rules which have been followed in the composition of this work. To the perusal of doc.u.mentary evidences I have been able to add an important source of information--the sight of the places where the events occurred. The scientific mission, having for its object the exploration of ancient Phoenicia, which I directed in 1860 and 1861,[1] led me to reside on the frontiers of Galilee and to travel there frequently. I have traversed, in all directions, the country of the Gospels; I have visited Jerusalem, Hebron, and Samaria; scarcely any important locality of the history of Jesus has escaped me. All this history, which at a distance seems to float in the clouds of an unreal world, thus took a form, a solidity, which astonished me. The striking agreement of the texts with the places, the marvellous harmony of the Gospel ideal with the country which served it as a framework, were like a revelation to me. I had before my eyes a fifth Gospel, torn, but still legible, and henceforward, through the recitals of Matthew and Mark, in place of an abstract being, whose existence might have been doubted, I saw living and moving an admirable human figure. During the summer, having to go up to Ghazir, in Lebanon, to take a little repose, I fixed, in rapid sketches, the image which had appeared to me, and from them resulted this history.

When a cruel bereavement hastened my departure, I had but a few pages to write. In this manner the book has been composed almost entirely near the very places where Jesus was born, and where his character was developed. Since my return, I have labored unceasingly to verify and check in detail the rough sketch which I had written in haste in a Maronite cabin, with five or six volumes around me.

[Footnote 1: The work which will contain the results of this mission is in the press.]

Many will regret, perhaps, the biographical form which my work has thus taken. When I first conceived the idea of a history of the origin of Christianity, what I wished to write was, in fact, a history of doctrines, in which men and their actions would have hardly had a place. Jesus would scarcely have been named; I should have endeavored to show how the ideas which have grown under his name took root and covered the world. But I have learned since that history is not a simple game of abstractions; that men are more than doctrines. It was not a certain theory on justification and redemption which brought about the Reformation; it was Luther and Calvin. Pa.r.s.eeism, h.e.l.lenism, Judaism might have been able to have combined under every form; the doctrines of the Resurrection and of the Word might have developed themselves during ages without producing this grand, unique, and fruitful fact, called Christianity. This fact is the work of Jesus, of St. Paul, of St. John. To write the history of Jesus, of St. Paul, of St. John is to write the history of the origin of Christianity. The anterior movements belong to our subject only in so far as they serve to throw light upon these extraordinary men, who naturally could not have existed without connection with that which preceded them.

In such an effort to make the great souls of the past live again, some share of divination and conjecture must be permitted. A great life is an organic whole which cannot be rendered by the simple agglomeration of small facts. It requires a profound sentiment to embrace them all, moulding them into perfect unity. The method of art in a similar subject is a good guide; the exquisite tact of a Goethe would know how to apply it. The essential condition of the creations of art is, that they shall form a living system of which all the parts are mutually dependent and related.

In histories such as this, the great test that we have got the truth is, to have succeeded in combining the texts in such a manner that they shall const.i.tute a logical, probable narrative, harmonious throughout. The secret laws of life, of the progression of organic products, of the melting of minute distinctions, ought to be consulted at each moment; for what is required to be reproduced is not the material circ.u.mstance, which it is impossible to verify, but the very soul of history; what must be sought is not the petty certainty about trifles, it is the correctness of the general sentiment, the truthfulness of the coloring. Each trait which departs from the rules of cla.s.sic narration ought to warn us to be careful; for the fact which has to be related has been living, natural, and harmonious. If we do not succeed in rendering it such by the recital, it is surely because we have not succeeded in seeing it aright. Suppose that, in restoring the Minerva of Phidias according to the texts, we produced a dry, jarring, artificial whole; what must we conclude? Simply that the texts want an appreciative interpretation; that we must study them quietly until they dovetail and furnish a whole in which all the parts are happily blended. Should we then be sure of having a perfect reproduction of the Greek statue? No; but at least we should not have the caricature of it; we should have the general spirit of the work--one of the forms in which it could have existed.

This idea of a living organism we have not hesitated to take as our guide in the general arrangement of the narrative. The perusal of the Gospels would suffice to prove that the compilers, although having a very true plan of the _Life of Jesus_ in their minds, have not been guided by very exact chronological data; Papias, besides, expressly teaches this.[1] The expressions: "At this time ... after that ...

then ... and it came to pa.s.s ...," etc., are the simple transitions intended to connect different narratives with each other. To leave all the information furnished by the Gospels in the disorder in which tradition supplies it, would only be to write the history of Jesus as the history of a celebrated man would be written, by giving pell-mell the letters and anecdotes of his youth, his old age, and of his maturity. The Koran, which presents to us, in the loosest manner, fragments of the different epochs in the life of Mahomet, has yielded its secret to an ingenious criticism; the chronological order in which the fragments were composed has been discovered so as to leave little room for doubt. Such a rearrangement is much more difficult in the case of the Gospels, the public life of Jesus having been shorter and less eventful than the life of the founder of Islamism. Meanwhile, the attempt to find a guiding thread through this labyrinth ought not to be taxed with gratuitous subtlety. There is no great abuse of hypothesis in supposing that a founder of a new religion commences by attaching himself to the moral aphorisms already in circulation in his time, and to the practices which are in vogue; that, when riper, and in full possession of his idea, he delights in a kind of calm and poetical eloquence, remote from all controversy, sweet and free as pure feeling; that he warms by degrees, becomes animated by opposition, and finishes by polemics and strong invectives. Such are the periods which may plainly be distinguished in the Koran. The order adopted with an extremely fine tact by the synoptics, supposes an a.n.a.logous progress. If Matthew be attentively read, we shall find in the distribution of the discourses, a gradation perfectly a.n.a.logous to that which we have just indicated. The reserved turns of expression of which we make use in unfolding the progress of the ideas of Jesus will also be observed. The reader may, if he likes, see in the divisions adopted in doing this, only the indispensable breaks for the methodical exposition of a profound, complicated thought.

[Footnote 1: _Loc. cit._]

If the love of a subject can help one to understand it, it will also, I hope, be recognized that I have not been wanting in this condition.

To write the history of a religion, it is necessary, firstly, to have believed it (otherwise we should not be able to understand how it has charmed and satisfied the human conscience); in the second place, to believe it no longer in an absolute manner, for absolute faith is incompatible with sincere history. But love is possible without faith.

To abstain from attaching one's self to any of the forms which captivate the adoration of men, is not to deprive ourselves of the enjoyment of that which is good and beautiful in them. No transitory appearance exhausts the Divinity; G.o.d was revealed before Jesus--G.o.d will reveal Himself after him. Profoundly unequal, and so much the more Divine, as they are grander and more spontaneous, the manifestations of G.o.d hidden in the depths of the human conscience are all of the same order. Jesus cannot belong solely to those who call themselves his disciples. He is the common honor of all who share a common humanity. His glory does not consist in being relegated out of history; we render him a truer wors.h.i.+p in showing that all history is incomprehensible without him.

LIFE OF JESUS

CHAPTER I.

PLACE OF JESUS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

The great event of the History of the world is the revolution by which the n.o.blest portions of humanity have pa.s.sed from the ancient religions, comprised under the vague name of Paganism, to a religion founded on the Divine Unity, the Trinity, and the Incarnation of the Son of G.o.d. It has taken nearly a thousand years to accomplish this conversion. The new religion had itself taken at least three hundred years in its formation. But the origin of the revolution in question with which we have to do is a fact which took place under the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. At that time there lived a superior personage, who, by his bold originality, and by the love which he was able to inspire, became the object and fixed the starting-point of the future faith of humanity.

As soon as man became distinguished from the animal, he became religious; that is to say, he saw in Nature something beyond the phenomena, and for himself something beyond death. This sentiment, during some thousands of years, became corrupted in the strangest manner. In many races it did not pa.s.s beyond the belief in sorcerers, under the gross form in which we still find it in certain parts of Oceania. Among some, the religious sentiment degenerated into the shameful scenes of butchery which form the character of the ancient religion of Mexico. Amongst others, especially in Africa, it became pure Fetichism, that is, the adoration of a material object, to which were attributed supernatural powers. Like the instinct of love, which at times elevates the most vulgar man above himself, yet sometimes becomes perverted and ferocious, so this divine faculty of religion during a long period seems only to be a cancer which must be extirpated from the human race, a cause of errors and crimes which the wise ought to endeavor to suppress.

The brilliant civilizations which were developed from a very remote antiquity in China, in Babylonia, and in Egypt, caused a certain progress to be made in religion. China arrived very early at a sort of mediocre good sense, which prevented great extravagances. She neither knew the advantages nor the abuses of the religious spirit. At all events, she had not in this way any influence in directing the great current of humanity. The religions of Babylonia and Syria were never freed from a substratum of strange sensuality; these religions remained, until their extinction in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, schools of immorality, in which at intervals glimpses of the divine world were obtained by a sort of poetic intuition. Egypt, notwithstanding an apparent kind of Fetichism, had very early metaphysical dogmas and a lofty symbolism. But doubtless these interpretations of a refined theology were not primitive. Man has never, in the possession of a clear idea, amused himself by clothing it in symbols: it is oftener after long reflections, and from the impossibility felt by the human mind of resigning itself to the absurd, that we seek ideas under the ancient mystic images whose meaning is lost. Moreover, it is not from Egypt that the faith of humanity has come. The elements which, in the religion of a Christian, pa.s.sing through a thousand transformations, came from Egypt and Syria, are exterior forms of little consequence, or dross of which the most purified wors.h.i.+ps always retain some portion. The grand defect of the religions of which we speak was their essentially superst.i.tious character. They only threw into the world millions of amulets and charms. No great moral thought could proceed from races oppressed by a secular despotism, and accustomed to inst.i.tutions which precluded the exercise of individual liberty.

The poetry of the soul--faith, liberty, virtue, devotion--made their appearance in the world with the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity, viz., the Indo-European and the Semitic races. The first religious intuitions of the Indo-European race were essentially naturalistic. But it was a profound and moral naturalism, a loving embrace of Nature by man, a delicious poetry, full of the sentiment of the Infinite--the principle, in fine, of all that which the Germanic and Celtic genius, of that which a Shakespeare and a Goethe should express in later times. It was neither theology nor moral philosophy--it was a state of melancholy, it was tenderness, it was imagination; it was, more than all, earnestness, the essential condition of morals and religion. The faith of humanity, however, could not come from thence, because these ancient forms of wors.h.i.+ps had great difficulty in detaching themselves from Polytheism, and could not attain to a very clear symbol. Brahminism has only survived to the present day by virtue of the astonis.h.i.+ng faculty of conservation which India seems to possess. Buddhism failed in all its approaches toward the West. Druidism remained a form exclusively national, and without universal capacity. The Greek attempts at reform, Orpheism, the Mysteries, did not suffice to give a solid aliment to the soul. Persia alone succeeded in making a dogmatic religion, almost Monotheistic, and skilfully organized; but it is very possible that this organization itself was but an imitation, or borrowed. At all events, Persia has not converted the world; she herself, on the contrary, was converted when she saw the flag of the Divine unity as proclaimed by Mohammedanism appear on her frontiers.

It is the Semitic race[1] which has the glory of having made the religion of humanity. Far beyond the confines of history, resting under his tent, free from the taint of a corrupted world, the Bedouin patriarch prepared the faith of mankind. A strong antipathy against the voluptuous wors.h.i.+ps of Syria, a grand simplicity of ritual, the complete absence of temples, and the idol reduced to insignificant _theraphim_, const.i.tuted his superiority. Among all the tribes of the nomadic Semites, that of the Beni-Israel was already chosen for immense destinies. Ancient relations with Egypt, whence perhaps resulted some purely material ingredients, did but augment their repulsion to idolatry. A "Law" or _Thora_, very anciently written on tables of stone, and which they attributed to their great liberator Moses, had become the code of Monotheism, and contained, as compared with the inst.i.tutions of Egypt and Chaldea, powerful germs of social equality and morality. A chest or portable ark, having staples on each side to admit of bearing poles, const.i.tuted all their religious _materiel_; there were collected the sacred objects of the nation, its relics, its souvenirs, and, lastly, the "book,"[2] the journal of the tribe, always open, but which was written in with great discretion.

The family charged with bearing the ark and watching over the portable archives, being near the book and having the control of it, very soon became important. From hence, however, the inst.i.tution which was to control the future did not come. The Hebrew priest did not differ much from the other priests of antiquity. The character which essentially distinguishes Israel among theocratic peoples is, that its priesthood has always been subordinated to individual inspiration. Besides its priests, each wandering tribe had its _nabi_ or prophet, a sort of living oracle who was consulted for the solution of obscure questions supposed to require a high degree of clairvoyance. The _nabis_ of Israel, organized in groups or schools, had great influence. Defenders of the ancient democratic spirit, enemies of the rich, opposed to all political organization, and to whatsoever might draw Israel into the paths of other nations, they were the true authors of the religious preeminence of the Jewish people. Very early they announced unlimited hopes, and when the people, in part the victims of their impolitic counsels, had been crushed by the a.s.syrian power, they proclaimed that a kingdom without bounds was reserved for them, that one day Jerusalem would be the capital of the whole world, and the human race become Jews. Jerusalem and its temples appeared to them as a city placed on the summit of a mountain, toward which all people should turn, as an oracle whence the universal law should proceed, as the centre of an ideal kingdom, in which the human race, set at rest by Israel, should find again the joys of Eden.[3]

[Footnote 1: I remind the reader that this word means here simply the people who speak or have spoken one of the languages called Semitic.

Such a designation is entirely defective; but it is one of those words, like "Gothic architecture," "Arabian numerals," which we must preserve to be understood, even after we have demonstrated the error that they imply.]

[Footnote 2: I Sam. x. 25.]

[Footnote 3: Isa. ii. 1-4, and especially chaps. xl., and following, lx., and following; Micah iv. 1, and following. It must be recollected that the second part of the book of Isaiah, beginning at chap. xl., is not by Isaiah.]

Mystical utterances already made themselves heard, tending to exalt the martyrdom and celebrate the power of the "Man of Sorrows."

Respecting one of those sublime sufferers, who, like Jeremiah, stained the streets of Jerusalem with their blood, one of the inspired wrote a song upon the sufferings and triumph of the "servant of G.o.d," in which all the prophetic force of the genius of Israel seemed concentrated.[1] "For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness. He is despised and rejected of men; and we hid, as it were, our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of G.o.d, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastis.e.m.e.nt of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. And he made his grave with the wicked. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand."

[Footnote 1: Isa. lii. 13, and following, and liii. entirely.]

Important modifications were made at the same time in the _Thora_. New texts, pretending to represent the true law of Moses, such as Deuteronomy, were produced, and inaugurated in reality a very different spirit from that of the old nomads. A marked fanaticism was the dominant feature of this spirit. Furious believers unceasingly instigated violence against all who wandered from the wors.h.i.+p of Jehovah--they succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng a code of blood, making death the penalty for religious faults. Piety brings, almost always, singular contradictions of vehemence and mildness. This zeal, unknown to the coa.r.s.er simplicity of the time of the Judges, inspired tones of moving prophecy and tender unction, which the world had never heard till then. A strong tendency toward social questions already made itself felt; Utopias, dreams of a perfect society, took a place in the code. The Pentateuch, a mixture of patriarchal morality and ardent devotion, primitive intuitions and pious subtleties, like those which filled the souls of Hezekiah, of Josiah, and of Jeremiah, was thus fixed in the form in which we now see it, and became for ages the absolute rule of the national mind.

This great book once created, the history of the Jewish people unfolded itself with an irresistible force. The great empires which followed each other in Western Asia, in destroying its hope of a terrestrial kingdom, threw it into religious dreams, which it cherished with a kind of sombre pa.s.sion. Caring little for the national dynasty or political independence, it accepted all governments which permitted it to practise freely its wors.h.i.+p and follow its usages. Israel will henceforward have no other guidance than that of its religious enthusiasts, no other enemies than those of the Divine unity, no other country than its Law.

And this Law, it must be remarked, was entirely social and moral. It was the work of men penetrated with a high ideal of the present life, and believing that they had found the best means of realizing it. The conviction of all was, that the _Thora_, well observed, could not fail to give perfect felicity. This _Thora_ has nothing in common with the Greek or Roman "Laws," which, occupying themselves with scarcely anything but abstract right, entered little into questions of private happiness and morality. We feel beforehand that the results which will proceed from it will be of a social, and not a political order, that the work at which this people labors is a kingdom of G.o.d, not a civil republic; a universal inst.i.tution, not a nationality or a country.

Notwithstanding numerous failures, Israel admirably sustained this vocation. A series of pious men, Ezra, Nehemiah, Onias, the Maccabees, consumed with zeal for the Law, succeeded each other in the defense of the ancient inst.i.tutions. The idea that Israel was a holy people, a tribe chosen by G.o.d and bound to Him by covenant, took deeper and firmer root. An immense expectation filled their souls. All Indo-European antiquity had placed paradise in the beginning; all its poets had wept a vanished golden age. Israel placed the age of gold in the future. The perennial poesy of religious souls, the Psalms, blossomed from this exalted piety, with their divine and melancholy harmony. Israel became truly and specially the people of G.o.d, while around it the pagan religions were more and more reduced, in Persia and Babylonia, to an official charlatanism, in Egypt and Syria to a gross idolatry, and in the Greek and Roman world to mere parade. That which the Christian martyrs did in the first centuries of our era, that which the victims of persecuting orthodoxy have done, even in the bosom of Christianity, up to our time, the Jews did during the two centuries which preceded the Christian era. They were a living protest against superst.i.tion and religious materialism. An extraordinary movement of ideas, ending in the most opposite results, made of them, at this epoch, the most striking and original people in the world.

Their dispersion along all the coast of the Mediterranean, and the use of the Greek language, which they adopted when out of Palestine, prepared the way for a propagandism, of which ancient societies, divided into small nationalities, had never offered a single example.

Up to the time of the Maccabees, Judaism, in spite of its persistence in announcing that it would one day be the religion of the human race, had had the characteristic of all the other wors.h.i.+ps of antiquity, it was a wors.h.i.+p of the family and the tribe. The Israelite thought, indeed, that his wors.h.i.+p was the best, and spoke with contempt of strange G.o.ds; but he believed also that the religion of the true G.o.d was made for himself alone. Only when a man entered into the Jewish family did he embrace the wors.h.i.+p of Jehovah.[1] No Israelite cared to convert the stranger to a wors.h.i.+p which was the patrimony of the sons of Abraham. The development of the pietistic spirit, after Ezra and Nehemiah, led to a much firmer and more logical conception. Judaism became the true religion in a more absolute manner; to all who wished, the right of entering it was given;[2] soon it became a work of piety to bring into it the greatest number possible.[3] Doubtless the refined sentiment which elevated John the Baptist, Jesus, and St. Paul above the petty ideas of race, did not yet exist; for, by a strange contradiction, these converts were little respected and were treated with disdain.[4] But the idea of a sovereign religion, the idea that there was something in the world superior to country, to blood, to laws--the idea which makes apostles and martyrs--was founded. Profound pity for the pagans, however brilliant might be their worldly fortune, was henceforth the feeling of every Jew.[5] By a cycle of legends destined to furnish models of immovable firmness, such as the histories of Daniel and his companions, the mother of the Maccabees and her seven sons,[6] the romance of the race-course of Alexandria[7]--the guides of the people sought above all to inculcate the idea, that virtue consists in a fanatical attachment to fixed religious inst.i.tutions.

[Footnote 1: Ruth i. 16.]

[Footnote 2: Esther ix. 27.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xxiii. 15; Josephus, _Vita_, 23; _B.J._, II. xvii.

10, VII. iii. 3; _Ant._, XX. ii. 4; Horat., Sat. I., iv., 143; Juv., xiv. 96, and following; Tacitus, _Ann._, II. 85; _Hist._, V. 5; Dion Ca.s.sius, x.x.xvii. 17.]

[Footnote 4: Mishnah, _Shebiit_, X. 9; Talmud of Babylon, _Niddah_, fol. 13 _b_; _Jebamoth_, 47 _b_, _Kiddus.h.i.+m_, 70 _b_; Midrash, _Jalkut Ruth_, fol. 163 _d_.]

[Footnote 5: Apocryphal letter of Baruch, in Fabricius, _Cod. pseud., V.T._, ii., 147, and following.]

[Footnote 6: II. Book of Maccabees, ch. vii. and the _De Maccabaeis_, attributed to Josephus. Cf. Epistle to the Hebrews xi. 33, and following.]

[Footnote 7: III. Book (Apocr.) of Maccabees; Rufin, Suppl. ad Jos., _Contra Apionem_, ii. 5.]

The persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes made this idea a pa.s.sion, almost a frenzy. It was something very a.n.a.logous to that which happened under Nero, two hundred and thirty years later. Rage and despair threw the believers into the world of visions and dreams. The first apocalypse, "The Book of Daniel," appeared. It was like a revival of prophecy, but under a very different form from the ancient one, and with a much larger idea of the destinies of the world. The Book of Daniel gave, in a manner, the last expression to the Messianic hopes. The Messiah was no longer a king, after the manner of David and Solomon, a theocratic and Mosaic Cyrus; he was a "Son of man"

appearing in the clouds[1]--a supernatural being, invested with human form, charged to rule the world, and to preside over the golden age.

Perhaps the _Sosiosh_ of Persia, the great prophet who was to come, charged with preparing the reign of Ormuzd, gave some features to this new ideal.[2] The unknown author of the Book of Daniel had, in any case, a decisive influence on the religious event which was about to transform the world. He supplied the _mise-en-scene_, and the technical terms of the new belief in the Messiah; and we might apply to him what Jesus said of John the Baptist: Before him, the prophets; after him, the kingdom of G.o.d.

[Footnote 1: Chap. vii. 13, and following.]

[Footnote 2: _Vendidad_, chap. xix. 18, 19; _Minokhired_, a pa.s.sage published in the "_Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft_," chap. i. 263; _Boundehesch_, chap. x.x.xi. The want of certain chronology for the Zend and Pehlvis texts leaves much doubt hovering over the relations between the Jewish and Persian beliefs.]

It must not, however, be supposed that this profoundly religious and soul-stirring movement had particular dogmas for its primary impulse, as was the case in all the conflicts which have disturbed the bosom of Christianity. The Jew of this epoch was as little theological as possible. He did not speculate upon the essence of the Divinity; the beliefs about angels, about the destinies of man, about the Divine personality, of which the first germs might already be perceived, were quite optional--they were meditations, to which each one surrendered himself according to the turn of his mind, but of which a great number of men had never heard. They were the most orthodox even, who did not share in these particular imaginations, and who adhered to the simplicity of the Mosaic law. No dogmatic power a.n.a.logous to that which orthodox Christianity has given to the Church then existed. It was only at the beginning of the third century, when Christianity had fallen into the hands of reasoning races, mad with dialectics and metaphysics, that that fever for definitions commenced which made the history of the Church but the history of one immense controversy.

There were disputes also among the Jews--excited schools brought opposite solutions to almost all the questions which were agitated; but in these contests, of which the Talmud has preserved the princ.i.p.al details, there is not a single word of speculative theology. To observe and maintain the law, because the law was just, and because, when well observed, it gave happiness--such was Judaism. No _credo_, no theoretical symbol. One of the disciples of the boldest Arabian philosophy, Moses Maimonides, was able to become the oracle of the synagogue, because he was well versed in the canonical law.

The reigns of the last Asmoneans, and that of Herod, saw the excitement grow still stronger. They were filled by an uninterrupted series of religious movements. In the degree that power became secularized, and pa.s.sed into the hands of unbelievers, the Jewish people lived less and less for the earth, and became more and more absorbed by the strange fermentation which was operating in their midst. The world, distracted by other spectacles, had little knowledge of that which pa.s.sed in this forgotten corner of the East. The minds abreast of their age were, however, better informed. The tender and clear-sighted Virgil seems to answer, as by a secret echo, to the second Isaiah. The birth of a child throws him into dreams of a universal palingenesis.[1] These dreams were of every-day occurrence, and shaped into a kind of literature which was designated Sibylline.

The quite recent formation of the empire exalted the imagination; the great era of peace on which it entered, and that impression of melancholy sensibility which the mind experiences after long periods of revolution, gave birth on all sides to unlimited hopes.

[Footnote 1: Egl. iv. The _c.u.maeum carmen_ (v. 4) was a sort of Sibylline apocalypse, borrowed from the philosophy of history familiar to the East. See Servius on this verse, and _Carmina Sibyllina_, iii.

97-817; cf. Tac., _Hist._, v. 13.]

In Judea expectation was at its height. Holy persons--among whom may be named the aged Simeon, who, legend tells us, held Jesus in his arms; Anna, daughter of Phanuel, regarded as a prophetess[1]--pa.s.sed their life about the temple, fasting, and praying, that it might please G.o.d not to take them from the world without having seen the fulfillment of the hopes of Israel. They felt a powerful presentiment; they were sensible of the approach of something unknown.