Doubtless, circumstances much aided the success of this marvellous revolution; but circumstances only second that which is just and true.  Each branch of the development of humanity has its privileged epoch, in which it attains perfection by a sort of spontaneous instinct, and without effort.  No labor of reflection would succeed in producing afterward the masterpieces which Nature creates at those moments by inspired geniuses.  That which the golden age of Greece was for arts and literature, the age of Jesus was for religion.  Jewish society exhibited the most extraordinary moral and intellectual state which the human species has ever passed through.  It was truly one of those divine hours in which the sublime is produced by combinations of a thousand hidden forces, in which great souls find a flood of admiration and sympathy to sustain them.  The world, delivered from the very narrow tyranny of small municipal republics, enjoyed great liberty.  Roman despotism did not make itself felt in a disastrous manner until much later, and it was, moreover, always less oppressive in those distant provinces than in the centre of the empire.  Our petty preventive interferences (far more destructive than death to things of the spirit) did not exist.  Jesus, during three years, could lead a life which, in our societies, would have brought him twenty times before the magistrates.  Our laws upon the illegal exercise of medicine would alone have sufficed to cut short his career.  The unbelieving dynasty of the Herods, on the other hand, occupied itself little with religious movements; under the Asmoneans, Jesus would probably have been arrested at his first step.  An innovator, in such a state of society, only risked death, and death is a gain to those who labor for the future.  Imagine Jesus reduced to bear the burden of his divinity until his sixtieth or seventieth year, losing his celestial fire, wearing out little by little under the burden of an unparalleled mission!  Everything favors those who have a special destiny; they become glorious by a sort of invincible impulse and command of fate.

This sublime person, who each day still presides over the destiny of the world, we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus has absorbed all the divine, or has been adequate to it (to employ an expression of the schoolmen), but in the sense that Jesus is the one who has caused his fellow-men to make the greatest step toward the divine.  Mankind in its totality offers an assemblage of low beings, selfish, and superior to the animal only in that its selfishness is more reflective.  From the midst of this uniform mediocrity, there are pillars that rise toward the sky, and bear witness to a nobler destiny.  Jesus is the highest of these pillars which show to man whence he comes, and whither he ought to tend.  In him was condensed all that is good and elevated in our nature.  He was not sinless; he has conquered the same passions that we combat; no angel of God comforted him, except