CHAPTER VII.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEAS OF JESUS RELATIVE TO THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

Up to the arrest of John, which may be dated approximately in the summer of the year 29, Jesus did not quit the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea and of the Jordan. A sojourn in the desert of Judæa was generally considered as the preparation for great things, as a sort of “retreat” before public acts. Jesus in this respect followed the example of others, and passed forty days in no other society than that of the wild beasts, maintaining a rigorous fast. The minds of the disciples were much exercised in regard to this sojourn. The desert was, according to popular belief, the abode of demons. There are to be found in the world few regions more desolate, more God-forsaken, more shut off from all outward life, than the rocky declivity which forms the western border of the Dead Sea. It was believed that, during the time Jesus passed in this frightful country, he had gone through terrible trials; that Satan had assailed him with his illusions or tempted him by seductive 67promises, and that finally, to reward him for his victory, angels had come and ministered to him.

It was probably in returning from the desert that Jesus was informed of the arrest of John the Baptist. He had no further reason now to prolong his stay in a country which was comparatively strange to him. Perhaps he feared also being involved in the severities exercised towards John, and did not wish to expose himself at a time in which, seeing the little celebrity he had, his death could in no way serve the advancement of his ideas. He accordingly went back to Galilee, his true fatherland, ripened by an important experience, and having acquired, through contact with a great man very different from himself, a consciousness of his own originality.

On the whole, the influence of John had been more harmful than useful to Jesus. It checked his development; for everything leads us to believe that when he went towards Jordan he had ideas superior to those of John, and it was out of a kind of concession that he inclined for a moment towards baptism. Probably if the Baptist, to whose authority it would have been difficult to submit himself, had remained at liberty, he would not have thought of casting off the yoke of rites and of materialistic practices, and henceforth might have remained an unknown Jewish sectary; for the world had not yet abandoned these practices for others. It is the charm of a religion stripped of all exterior forms that has attracted the most elevated minds to Christianity. The Baptist once imprisoned, his followers became rapidly fewer, and Jesus found himself at liberty to follow his own bent. The only things he was indebted in a sort of way to John for were instruction in the art of preaching and in attracting popularity. From that moment, 68in fact, he preached with much more force, and awed the multitude with his authority.

It appears also that his close intercourse with John, not so much by the influence of the Baptist as by the natural development of his own mind, matured many of his ideas about the “kingdom of heaven.” His watchword henceforth is “glad tidings;” and the announcement that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Jesus is no longer a delightful moralist merely, aspiring to embody in a few vivid and concise aphorisms sublime lessons; he is a transcendental revolutionary who attempts to renovate the world from its very basis, and to found on earth the ideal which he has conceived. “The kingdom of God” is at hand is to be synonymous with being a disciple of Jesus. The phrase “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of Heaven,” as we have already said, had been long familiar to the Jews. Jesus, however, gave to it a moral sense—a social application, that the author of the book of Daniel himself, in his enthusiastic apocalypse, dared hardly venture upon.

In the world, as it is constituted, it is the evil that prevails. Satan is the “king of this world,” and everything obeys him. The priests and the doctors do not the things which they order others to do. The just are persecuted, and the sole portion of the good is to weep. The “world” is a species of enemies of God and His saints; but God will reveal Himself and avenge His saints. The day is at hand; for abomination is rampant. The reign of justice is to have its turn.

The advent of the reign of justice is to be a great and unexpected revolution. The world is to be turned upside down; the present state being bad, to represent the future, it is sufficient to conceive as near as may be the contrary of that which exists. The first shall be last. A new order will rule 69humanity. At present the good and the bad are mixed like wheat and tares in a field. The Master allows them to grow together; but the hour of abrupt separation is to come. The kingdom of God is to be like a great net, which gathers both good and bad fish; we put the good into vessels, and cast the bad away. The beginning of that great revolution will be hardly recognisable. It will be like the grain of mustard seed, which, though the least of all seeds, being cast into the earth, becomes a tree under the leaves of whose branches the birds come and repose; or again, it will be like the leaven, which, put into bread, leavens the whole lump. A series of often obscure parables was designed to express the surprises of that unexpected advent, its apparent injustices, its inevitable and definite character.

Who is to establish this kingdom of God? Let us recall that the first thought of Jesus—a thought so deeply rooted in him that it was probably intuitive forming part of his very being—was that he was the son of God, the bosom friend of his father, the executor of His decrees. The response of Jesus to such a question could not then be doubtful. The persuasion that he should found the kingdom of God took, in the most absolute manner, possession of his mind. He looked upon himself as the universal reformer. Heaven, earth, all nature, depravity, disease, and death are only his instruments. In the glow of his heroic will, he believes himself to be all powerful. If the earth does not lend itself to this complete transformation, it will be broken up, purified by fire and by the breath of God. A new heaven will be created, and the whole earth peopled with the angels of God.

A complete revolution, extending to nature itself —such was the fundamental idea of Jesus. Henceforth, it is certain, he renounced politics; the 70example of Judas the Gaulonite showed him the uselessness of popular seditions. He never dreamt of revolting against the Romans and the tetrarchs. The wild and anarchical principles of the Gaulonite found no favour with him. His submission to the powers that be, derisive at bottom no doubt, was outwardly complete. He paid tribute to Cæsar, to avoid trouble. Liberty and right do not belong to this world; why then trouble himself with vain susceptibilities? Despising the earth, convinced that the world did not merit solicitude, he sought refuge in his ideal kingdom; he established that great doctrine of transcendent contempt, the true doctrine of the freedom of mind which alone can bring peace. But so far he had not said. “My kingdom is not of this world.” Much obscurity was mixed up with his most perfect views. Sometimes singular temptations crossed his mind. In the desert of Judæa, Satan proposed to give him the kingdoms of this world. Not knowing the power of the Roman Empire, he could, with the amount of enthusiasm there was in Judæa, resulting soon after in so terrible a military resistance, he could, I say, considering the daring and the numbers of his partisans, hope to establish a kingdom. Many times, no doubt, this was the supreme thought with him: The kingdom of God, is it to be realised by force or by gentleness, by revolt or by patience? One day, we are told that the common people of Galilee sought to carry him away and make him king; but Jesus fled into the mountains, and remained there for some time alone. His lofty nature shielded him from the error which would make him an agitator or a chief of rebels, a Theudas or a Barkokeba.

The revolution that he sought to bring about was a moral revolution; but he had not yet reached the point of trusting to the angels and the last trumpet 71for its execution. It was only upon men and through men that he wished to act. A visionary, who had no other idea than the approximateness of the last judgment, would not have had this care for the amelioration of human souls, and would not have laid down the finest moral precepts humanity has ever received. There was no doubt still much vagueness in his ideas; and it was exalted sentiment rather than fixed design which urged him on to the sublime work he had conceived, though in a manner quite different from what he imagined.

It is in fact the kingdom of God, I mean, the kingdom of mind, that he founded, and, if Jesus from the bosom of his father sees his work bearing fruit through the ages, he may indeed truly say: “This is what I wished.” That which Jesus founded, and which will remain his to all eternity—deductions being made for the imperfections which enter into everything accomplished by mankind—is the doctrine of freedom of mind. Greece had already exalted ideas on the subject. Several stoics had discovered the means of being free under a tyrant. But, in general, the ancient world only understood liberty as attached to certain political forms; Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus and Cassius were concrete examples of such liberty. The true Christian is much more free from all restraints; here below he is a stranger; what boots it to him who is the temporary ruler of this earth, which is not his country? Liberty to him means truth. Jesus was not sufficiently acquainted with history to comprehend how opportune such a doctrine was—the very moment when republican liberty was expiring, and when the small municipal institutions of antiquity were being absorbed in the Roman Empire. But his admirable sound sense and the truly prophetic instinct that he had of his mission, guided him here with marvellous 72certainty. By these words: “Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's, and unto God the things which are God's,” he originated something unknown to politics—a refuge for souls in the midst of an empire of brute force. To be sure, such a doctrine had its dangers. To establish as a principle that to look at a coin was a symbol of the acknowledgment of legitimate authority, to proclaim that the perfect man contemptuously pays tribute without question, was to annihilate the ancient forms of republicanism and to encourage all kinds of tyranny. Christianity, in this sense, has contributed much to weaken the sense of duty in the citizen, as well as to place the world absolutely in the power of existing circumstances. But in constituting an immense free association, which, during three hundred years, eschewed politics, Christianity amply compensated for the wrong it had done to civic virtue. Thanks to him, the power of the State was limited to terrestrial things; the mind was freed, or at all events, the terrible sceptre of Roman authority was broken for ever.

The man who is especially preoccupied with the duties of public life does not spare those who place some other object above his party strifes. He especially blames those who subordinate political to social questions, and profess for the former a sort of indifference. In one sense he is right; for exclusiveness is prejudicial to the good government of human affairs. But what have parties done to promote the general morality of our species? If Jesus, instead of founding his heavenly kingdom, had betaken himself to Rome, and had worn his life out in conspiring against Tiberius, or in regretting Germanicus, what would have become of this world? Neither as a stern republican nor as a zealous patriot could he have stemmed the great public 73current of his age, though in pooh-poohing politics he has revealed to the world the truth that country is not everything, and that the man is anterior and superior to the citizen.

The principles of our positive science have been injured by the dreams embraced in the scheme of Jesus. We know the history of the world. The kind of revolutions expected by Jesus are only produced by geological or astronomical causes, and no one has ever been able to connect them with things moral. But to be just to great originators, they must not be fastened with the prejudices they only shared. Columbus discovered America, though he started out with the most erroneous ideas; Newton believed his silly explanation of the Apocalypse to be as certain as his theory of gravitation. Shall we place a mediocre man of our times above a Francis d'Assisi, a St. Bernard, a Joan of Arc, or a Luther, because he is exempt from the errors that these persons have taught? Ought we to measure men by the correctness of their ideas of physics, and by the more or less exact knowledge they possess of the true natural laws of the universe? Let us understand better the position of Jesus and whence he derived his power. The Deism of the eighteenth century and a certain kind of Protestantism have accustomed us to regard the founder of the Christian faith merely as a great moralist, a benefactor of mankind. We see no more in the gospel than good maxims; we throw a convenient veil over the strange intellectual state whence it had its origin. There are some people who regret even that the French Revolution departed more than once from principle, and that it was not brought about by wise and moderate men. Let us not impose our petty plans and commonplace notions on those extraordinary movements which are so far above our grasp! Let us continue to 74admire the “morality of the Gospel;” let us suppress in our religious teachings the chimera which was the soul of it, but do not let us imagine that with the simple ideas of happiness or of individual morality we can again move the world. The idea of Jesus was much more profound. His was the most revolutionary idea that human brain ever conceived. But the historian must take it in its entirety, and not with those timid suppressions which strip it of the very thing which has rendered it efficacious for the regeneration of humanity.

At bottom, the ideal is always a Utopia. When we wish at the present time to represent the Christ of the modern conscience, the consoler, the judge of these times, what do we do? That which Jesus himself did over 1800 years ago. We suppose the conditions of the real world quite other than they are; we represent a moral liberator breaking without weapons the chains of the negro, bettering the condition of the common people, delivering oppressed nations. We forget that that implies the subversion of the world, the climate of Virginia and that of the Congo modified, the blood and the race of millions of men changed, our social complications restored to a chimerical simplicity, and the political stratifications of Europe displaced from their natural order. The “restitution of all things” desired by Jesus was not more difficult. That new earth, that new heaven, that new Jerusalem, which comes from above, this cry, “Behold I make all things new,” are the characteristics common to reformers. The contrast of the ideal with the sad reality invariably produces in mankind those revolts against cold reason which mediocre minds consider as follies, until the day of their triumph arrives, and then those who have combated them are the first to acknowledge their great wisdom. That there may have been a contradiction between 75the belief in the approaching end of the world and the general moral system of Jesus, conceived in prospect of a permanent state of humanity, nearly analogous to that which now exists, no one will attempt to deny. It was exactly this contradiction that ensured the success of his work. The millenarian alone would have done nothing lasting; the moralist alone would have done nothing powerful. The millenarian gave the impulse, the moralist ensured the future. Hence Christianity united the two conditions of great success in this world—a revolutionary starting point and the possibility of vitality. Everything which is intended to succeed ought to respond to these two wants; for the world seeks both to change and to endure. Jesus, at the same time that he announced an unparalleled subversion in human affairs, proclaimed the principles upon which society has reposed for eighteen hundred years. That which, in fact, distinguishes Jesus from the agitators of his time and from those of all times is his perfect idealism. In some respects Jesus was an anarchist, for he had no notion of civil government. The latter seemed to him an abuse, pure and simple. He spoke of it in vague terms, after the manner of one of the commonalty who knows nothing of politics. Every magistrate appeared to him a natural enemy of the people of God; and he forewarned his disciples of conflicts with the civil powers without imagining for a moment that there was anything in this to be ashamed of. But the desire to supplant the rich and powerful never manifests itself in him. His aim is to annihilate wealth and power, but not to seize upon them. He prepares his disciples for persecutions and punishments, but in no single instance is the idea of armed resistance foreshadowed. The idea that man is all-powerful through suffering and resignation, that man triumphs over force through purity 76of heart, is an idea unique with Jesus. Jesus is not a spiritualist; for everything to him had a palpable realisation. But he is a thorough idealist, matter being for him but the symbol of the idea, and the real the vivid expression of that which does not manifest itself.

To whom shall we apply, upon whom shall we rely, to found the kingdom of God? The opinion of Jesus never wavered upon this point. That which is cherished by man is an abomination in the sight of God. The founders of the kingdom of God are the weak and lowly. Neither the rich, the learned, nor the priests; but women, common people, the humble, little children. The grand distinguishing mark of the Messiah is:—“The poor have the gospel preached to them.” The idyllic and gentle nature of Jesus here asserted its superiority. A great social revolution, in which rank should be levelled, in which all authority should be brought under, was his dream. The world will not believe him; the world will kill him. But his followers will not be of this world. They will be a small band of the lowly and humble, who will conquer the world by their very humility. The sentiment which made the “world” the antithesis of “Christian” has, in the mind of the Master, its full justification.