[Footnote 1: This popular sentiment existed in Brittany in the time of my childhood. The gendarme was there regarded, like the Jew elsewhere, with a kind of pious aversion, for it was he who arrested Jesus!] CHAPTER XXVIII. ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF THE WORK OF JESUS. Jesus, it will be seen, limited his action entirely to the Jews. Although his sympathy for those despised by orthodoxy led him to admit pagans into the kingdom of God--although he had resided more than once in a pagan country, and once or twice we surprise him in kindly relations with unbelievers[1]--it may be said that his life was passed entirely in the very restricted world in which he was born. He was never heard of in Greek or Roman countries; his name appears only in profane authors of a hundred years later, and then in an indirect manner, in connection with seditious movements provoked by his doctrine, or persecutions of which his disciples were the object.[2] Even on Judaism, Jesus made no very durable impression. Philo, who died about the year 50, had not the slightest knowledge of him. Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing in the last years of the century, mentions his execution in a few lines,[3] as an event of secondary importance, and in the enumeration of the sects of his time, he omits the Christians altogether.[4] In the _Mishnah_, also, there is no trace of the new school; the passages in the two Gemaras in which the founder of Christianity is named, do not go further back than the fourth or fifth century.[5] The essential work of Jesus was to create around him a circle of disciples, whom he inspired with boundless affection, and amongst whom he deposited the germ of his doctrine. To have made himself beloved, "to the degree that after his death they ceased not to love him," was the great work of Jesus, and that which most struck his contemporaries.[6] His doctrine was so little dogmatic, that he never thought of writing it or of causing it to be written. Men did not become his disciples by believing this thing or that thing, but in being attached to his person and in loving him. A few sentences collected from memory, and especially the type of character he set forth, and the impression it had left, were what remained of him. Jesus was not a founder of dogmas, or a maker of creeds; he infused into the world a new spirit. The least Christian men were, on the one hand, the doctors of the Greek Church, who, beginning from the fourth century, entangled Christianity in a path of puerile metaphysical discussions, and, on the other, the scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages, who wished to draw from the Gospel the thousands of articles of a colossal system. To follow Jesus in expectation of the kingdom of God, was all that at first was implied by being Christian. [Footnote 1: Matt. viii. 5, and following; Luke vii. 1, and following; John xii. 20, and following. Comp. Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. iii. 3.]