Free from our polished conventionalities, exempt from the uniform education which refines us, but which so greatly dwarfs our individuality, these mighty souls carried a surprising energy into action.  They appear to us like the giants of an heroic age, which could not have been real.  Profound error!  Those men were our brothers; they were of our stature, felt and thought as we do.  But the breath of God was free in them; with us, it is restrained by the iron bonds of a mean society, and condemned to an irremediable mediocrity.

Let us place, then, the person of Jesus at the highest summit of human greatness.  Let us not be misled by exaggerated doubts in the presence of a legend which keeps us always in a superhuman world.  The life of Francis d’Assisi is also but a tissue of miracles.  Has any one, however, doubted of the existence of Francis d’Assisi, and of the part played by him?  Let us say no more that the glory of the foundation of Christianity belongs to the multitude of the first Christians, and not to him whom legend has deified.  The inequality of men is much more marked in the East than with us.  It is not rare to see arise there, in the midst of a general atmosphere of wickedness, characters whose greatness astonishes us.  So far from Jesus having been created by his disciples, he appeared in everything as superior to his disciples.  The latter, with the exception of St. Paul and St. John, were men without either invention or genius.  St. Paul himself bears no comparison with Jesus, and as to St. John, I shall show hereafter, that the part he played, though very elevated in one sense, was far from being in all respects irreproachable.  Hence the immense superiority of the Gospels among the writings of the New Testament.  Hence the painful fall we experience in passing from the history of Jesus to that of the apostles.  The evangelists themselves, who have bequeathed us the image of Jesus, are so much beneath him of whom they speak, that they constantly disfigure him, from their inability to attain to his height.  Their writings are full of errors and misconceptions.  We feel in each line a discourse of divine beauty, transcribed by narrators who do not understand it, and who substitute their own ideas for those which they have only half understood.  On the whole, the character of Jesus, far from having been embellished by his biographers, has been lowered by them.  Criticism, in order to find what he was, needs to discard a series of misconceptions, arising from the inferiority of the disciples.  These painted him as they understood him, and often in thinking to raise him, they have in reality lowered him.