The "miraculous" birth of Jesus took place at Nazareth in Galilee, in the reign of Cæsar Augustus, about 750 A. U. C., as the Romans reckoned time. Tradition afterward fixed his birthday on the 25th December, which, curiously enough, although, perhaps, explaining the choice, was the day dedicated to the sun-god Mithra, an Oriental deity to whom altars had been raised and sacrifices performed, with rites of baptisms of blood, in hospitable Rome. Jesus is said to have lived in the obscurity of his native mountain village till his thirtieth year. Except one doubtful story of his going to Jerusalem with his parents when he was twelve years old, nothing is recorded in the various biographies of him between his birth and his appearance as a public teacher. Probably he followed his father's trade as a carpenter. The event that seems to have called him from home was the preaching of an enthusiastic ascetic named John the Baptist. At his hands Jesus submitted to the baptismal rite, and then entered on his career, wandering from place to place. The fragments of his discourses, which have survived in the short biographies known as the Gospels, show him to have been gifted with a simple, winning style, and his sermons, brightened by happy illustration or striking parable, went home to the hearts of his hearers. Women, often of the outcast class, were drawn to him by the sympathy which attracted even more than his teaching. Among a people to whom the unvarying order of Nature was an idea wholly foreign--for Greek speculations had not penetrated into Palestine--stories of miracle-working found easy credit, falling in, as they did, with popular belief in the constant intervention of deity. Thus, to the reports of what Jesus taught were added those of the wonders which he had wrought, from feeding thousands of folk with a few loaves of bread to raising the dead to life. His itinerant mission secured him a few devoted followers from various towns and villages, while the effect of success upon himself was to heighten his own conception of the importance of his work. The skill of the Romans in fusing together subject races had failed them in the case of the Jews, whose belief in their special place in the world as the "chosen people" never forsook them. Nor had their misfortunes weakened their belief that the Messiah predicted by their prophets would appear to deliver them, and plant their feet on the neck of the hated conqueror. This hope, as became a pious Jew, Jesus shared, but it set him brooding on some nobler, because more spiritual, conception of it than his fellow-countrymen nurtured. Finally, it led him to the belief, fostered by the ambition of his nearer disciples, which was, however, material in its hopes, that he was the spiritual Messiah. In that faith he repaired to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast when the city was crowded with devotees, that he might, before the chief priests and elders, make his appeal to the nation.