he has drawn in the materials out of which he has composed it.  The world is tolerably familiar with them.  If there is a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in the Gospel records, it is that of the gravity, the plain downright seriousness, the laborious earnestness, impressed from first to last on the story.  When we turn from these to his pages it is difficult to exaggerate the astounding impression which his epithets and descriptions have on the mind.  We are told that there is a broad distinction between the early Galilean days of hope in our Lord’s ministry, and the later days of disappointment and conflict; and that if we look, we shall find in Galilee the “fin et joyeux moraliste,” full of a “conversation pleine de gaiete et de charme,” of “douce gaiete et aimables plaisanteries,” with a “predication suave et douce, toute pleine de la nature et du parfum des champs,” creating out of his originality of mind his “innocents aphorismes,” and the “genre d’elicieux” of parabolic teaching; “le charmant docteur qui pardonnait a tous pourvu qu’on l’aimat.”  He lived in what was then an earthly paradise, in “la joyeuse Galilee” in the midst of the “nature ravissante” which gave to everything about the Sea of Galilee “un tour idyllique et charmant.”  So the history of Christianity at its birth is a “delicieuse pastorale” an “idylle,” a “milieu enivrant” of joy and hope.  The master was surrounded by a “bande de joyeux enfants,” a “troupe gaie et vagabonde,” whose existence in the open air was a “perpetual enchantment.”  The disciples were “ces petits comites de bonnes gens,” very simple, very credulous, and like their country full of a “sentiment gai et tendre de la vie,” and of an “imagination riante.”  Everything is spoken of as “delicious”—­“delicieuse pastorale,” “delicieuse beaute,” “delicieuses sentences,” “delicieuse theologie d’amour.”  Among the “tender and delicate souls of the North”—­it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans—­was set up an “aimable communisme.”  Is it possible to imagine a more extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself inaccurately conceived of?—­

Il parcourait ainsi la Galilee au milieu d’une fete perpetuelle.  Il se servait d’une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sure, et dont le grand oeil noir, ombrage de longs cils, a beaucoup de douceur.  Ses disciples deployarent quelquefois autour de lui une pompe rustique, dont leurs vetements, tenant lieu de tapis, faisaient les frais.  Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait, ou les etendaient a terre sur son passage.

History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions, that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an idyllic gipsying party is