RETURN OF THE APOSTLES TO JERUSALEM.--END OF THE PERIOD OF APPARITIONS. The apparitions, in the meanwhile, as is usually the case in all movements of too credulous enthusiasm, began to diminish. Popular chimeras are nearly allied to contagious diseases; quickly do they become stale and change their shape. The activity of these ardent souls was already turned in another direction. That which they believed they had heard from the lips of their beloved and resuscitated friend, was the command to go before him to preach and to convert the world. But where should they commence? Naturally at Jerusalem.[3.1] The return to Jerusalem was accordingly resolved upon by those who at this time directed the movements of the sect. As these journeys were ordinarily made in caravanseries at the periods of the feasts, we may suppose, with sufficient probability, that the return of which we are treating, took place at the feast of Tabernacles at the end of the year thirty-three or at the Paschal feast of the year thirty-four. Galilee was, accordingly, abandoned by Christianity, and abandoned for all time. The little church which remained there, doubtless, still existed; but we intend to speak no more of it. It was probably crushed, like all the rest, by the frightful catastrophe which overwhelmed the country during the war of Vespasian; the residue of the dispersed society took refuge, from that time, in Jerusalem. After the war, it was not Christianity which was replanted in Galilee; it was Judaism. In the second, third, and fourth centuries, Galilee was altogether a Jewish country, the centre of Judaism, the country of the Talmud.[3.2] Thus Galilee was considered as of no account whatsoever in the history of Christianity; but this was the sacred time of the church, _par excellence_; it conferred on the new religion its enduring qualities, its poetry, its penetrating charms. "_The Gospel_," according to the theory of the synoptics, was a Galilean work. But we shall endeavor to show, further on, that "_The Gospel_," thus understood, has been the principal cause of the success of Christianity, and continues to be the surest guarantee of its future history.