dangerous man.  The most selfish, proud, hard and worldly of all human beings, a Louis XIV. for instance, would find priests to persuade him, in spite of the Gospel, that he was a Christian.  But, on the other hand, there would always be found holy men who would take the sublime paradoxes of Jesus literally.  Perfection being placed beyond the ordinary conditions of society, and a complete Gospel life being only possible away from the world, the principle of asceticism and of monasticism was established.  Christian societies would have two moral rules; the one moderately heroic for common men, the other exalted in the extreme for the perfect man; and the perfect man would be the monk, subjected to rules which professed to realize the gospel ideal.  It is certain that this ideal, if only on account of the celibacy and poverty it imposed, could not become the common law.  The monk would be thus, in one sense, the only true Christian.  Common sense revolts at these excesses; and if we are guided by it, to demand the impossible, is a mark of weakness and error.  But common sense is a bad judge where great matters are in question.  To obtain little from humanity we must ask much.  The immense moral progress which we owe to the Gospel is the result of its exaggerations.  It is thus that it has been, like stoicism, but with infinitely greater fulness, a living argument for the divine powers in man, an exalted monument of the potency of the will.

We may easily imagine that to Jesus, at this period of his life, everything which was not the kingdom of God had absolutely disappeared.  He was, if we may say so, totally outside nature:  family, friendship, country, had no longer any meaning for him.  No doubt from this moment he had already sacrificed his life.  Sometimes we are tempted to believe that, seeing in his own death a means of founding his kingdom, he deliberately determined to allow himself to be killed.[1] At other times, although such a thought only afterward became a doctrine, death presented itself to him as a sacrifice, destined to appease his Father and to save mankind.[2] A singular taste for persecution and torments[3] possessed him.  His blood appeared to him as the water of a second baptism with which he ought to be baptized, and he seemed possessed by a strange haste to anticipate this baptism, which alone could quench his thirst.[4]

[Footnote 1:  Matt. xvi. 21-23, xvii. 12, 21, 22.]

[Footnote 2:  Mark x. 45.]

[Footnote 3:  Luke vi. 22, and following.]

[Footnote 4:  Luke xii. 50.]

The grandeur of his views upon the future was at times surprising.  He did not conceal from himself the terrible storm he was about to cause in the world.  “Think not,” said he, with much boldness and beauty, “that I am come to send peace on earth:  I came not to send peace, but a sword.  There shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.  I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter