of this unreal reality was his magnificent certainty, and like his master John, he stepped forth as its herald. Even now we can see, in the oldest Gospels that were embodied into the New Testament, gleams of this period in which he was, in his consciousness, nothing but a prophet.[1]
But there was a moment in his life when an inkling, and then high certainty, came over him — "Thou art thyself It!" It was a secret that he at first hardly admitted to himself, and only later imparted to his nearest friends and companions, who thereafter shared with him, in all stillness, the blessed mission, till finally they dared to reveal the truths before all the world by the momentous journey to Jerusalem. If there is anything at all that clouds the complete purity and honour of his thought, it is that doubt as to whether he has deceived himself which from time to time seizes him, and of which, later, his disciples told quite frankly. He comes to his home. The village crowds to him, recognizes the former carpenter who left his work, is angered. The family — mother and all the brothers and sisters — are ashamed of him and would have arrested him. And with all these familiar eyes upon him he was confused and felt the magic power depart from him (Mark vi). In Gethsemane doubts of his mission[2] mingled themselves in the terrible, fear of coming things, and even on the cross men heard the anguished cry that God had forsaken him.
Even in these last hours he lived entirely in the form of his own apocalyptic world, which alone was ever real to him. What to the Roman sentries standing below him was reality was for him an object of helpless wonder, an illusion that might at any moment without warning vanish into nothingness. He possessed the pure and unadulterated soul of the townless land. The life of the cities and their spirit were to him utterly alien. Did he really see the semi-Classical Jerusalem, into which he rode as the Son of Man, and understand its historical nature? This is what thrills us in the last days — and the collision of facts with truths, of two worlds that will never understand one another, and his entire incomprehension of what was happening about him.
So he went, proclaiming his message without reservation, through his country. But this country was Palestine. He was born in the Classical Empire and lived under the eyes of the Judaism of Jerusalem, and when his soul, fresh from the awful revelation of its mission, looked about, it was confronted by the actuality of the Roman State and that of Pharisaism. His repugnance for the stiff and selfish ideal of the latter, which he shared with all Mandæanism and doubtless with the peasant Jewry of the wide East, is the hall-mark of all his discourses from first to last. It angered him that this wilderness of cold-hearted formulæ was reputed to be the only way to salvation. Still, thus far it was only
