A new spirit has breathed; Gnosticism has already commenced; the Galilean era of the kingdom of God is finished; the hope of the near advent of Christ is more distant; we enter on the barrenness of metaphysics, into the darkness of abstract dogma. The spirit of Jesus is not there, and, if the son of Zebedee has truly traced these pages, he had certainly, in writing them, quite forgotten the Lake of Gennesareth, and the charming discourses which he had heard upon its shores. [Footnote 1: See, for example, chaps. ix. and xi. Notice especially, the effect which such passages as John xix. 35, xx. 31, xxi. 20-23, 24, 25, produce, when we recall the absence of all comments which distinguishes the synoptics.] [Footnote 2: For example, chap. iv. 1, and following, xv. 12, and following. Many words remembered by John are found in the synoptics (chap. xii. 16, xv. 20).] One circumstance, moreover, which strongly proves that the discourses given us by the fourth Gospel are not historical, but compositions intended to cover with the authority of Jesus certain doctrines dear to the compiler, is their perfect harmony with the intellectual state of Asia Minor at the time when they were written. Asia Minor was then the theatre of a strange movement of syncretical philosophy; all the germs of Gnosticism existed there already. John appears to have drunk deeply from these strange springs. It may be that, after the crisis of the year 68 (the date of the Apocalypse) and of the year 70 (the destruction of Jerusalem), the old apostle, with an ardent and plastic spirit, disabused of the belief in a near appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds, may have inclined toward the ideas that he found around him, of which several agreed sufficiently well with certain Christian doctrines. In attributing these new ideas to Jesus, he only followed a very natural tendency. Our remembrances are transformed with our circumstances; the ideal of a person that we have known changes as we change.[1] Considering Jesus as the incarnation of truth, John could not fail to attribute to him that which he had come to consider as the truth. [Footnote 1: It was thus that Napoleon became a liberal in the remembrances of his companions in exile, when these, after their return, found themselves thrown in the midst of the political society of the time.]