Nearly a year passed over during which they lived this charmed life, suspended, as it were, between heaven and earth.[2.20] The charm, far from diminishing, increased. It is the peculiarity of grand and holy enterprises, that they always become grander and more pure of themselves. The feeling towards a beloved one whom we have lost is always more intense than on the day following his death. The more distant it is, the more intense does this feeling become. The sorrow which at first was part of it, and in a certain sense diminished it, is changed into a serene piety. The image of the departed one is transfigured, idealized, and becomes the soul of life, the principle of every action, the source of every joy, the oracle which we consult, the consolation which we seek in times of despondency. Death is a necessary condition of every apotheosis. Jesus, so beloved during His life, was even more so after His last breath; or rather His last breath became the commencement of His actual life in the bosom of His Church. He became the intimate friend, the confidant, the travelling companion, the one who, at the corner of the road, joins you and follows you, sits down to table with you, and reveals Himself as He vanishes out of your sight.[2.21] The absolute want of scientific exactitude in the minds of these new believers, was the reason why no question was ever propounded as to the nature of His existence. They represented Him as impassible, endowed with a subtle body, passing through open windows, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, but always alive. Sometimes they thought that His body was not a material body; that it was a pure shadow or apparition.[2.22] At other times they accorded to Him a material body with flesh and bones; with an unaffected minuteness, and as if the hallucination had wished to be on its guard against itself, they represented Him as drinking and eating; nay even as feeling.[2.23] Their ideas on this point were as vague and uncertain as the waves of the sea. With difficulty have we thus far dreamed, in order to propose a trifling question, but one which admits not of easy solution. Whilst Jesus rose again in this real manner, that is to say in the hearts of those who loved Him; while the immovable conviction of the apostles was being formed and the faith of the world being prepared--in what place did the worms consume the lifeless corpse which, on the Saturday evening, had been deposited in the sepulchre? This detail will be always steadily ignored; for, naturally, the Christian traditions can give us no information on the subject. It is the spirit which quickeneth; the flesh is nothing.[2.24] The resurrection was the triumph of the idea concerning its reality. The idea once entered upon its immortality, what need of discussion about the body?