Thus He rode, on His long‐eyelashed gentle mule, from village to village, from town to town. The sweet theology of love (_la délicieuse théologie de l’amour_) won Him all hearts. His preaching was gentle and mild (_suave et douce_), full of nature and the fragrance of the country. Wherever He went the people kept festival. At marriages He was a welcome guest; to the feasts which He gave He invited women who were sinners, and publicans like the good Zacchaeus. “The Frenchman,” remarks Noack, “takes the mummied figure of the Galilaean Rabbi, which criticism has exhumed, endows it with life and energy, and brings Him upon the stage, first amid the lustre of the earthly happiness which it was His pleasure to bestow, and then in the moving aspect of one doomed to suffer.” When Jesus goes up to the Passover at the end of this first year, He comes into conflict with the Rabbis of the capital. The “winsome teacher, who offered forgiveness to all on the sole condition of loving Him,” found in the capital people upon whom His charm had no effect. When He returned to Galilee He had entirely abandoned His Jewish beliefs, and a revolutionary ardour glowed in His heart. The second act begins. “The action becomes more serious and gloomy, and the pupil of Strauss turns down the footlights of his stage.”(108) The erstwhile “winsome moralist” has become a transcendental revolutionary. Up to this point He had thought to bring about the triumph of the Kingdom of God by natural means, by teaching and influencing men. The Jewish eschatology stood vaguely in the background. Now it becomes prominent. The tension set up between His purely ethical ideas and these eschatological expectations gives His words from this time forward a special force. The period of joyous simplicity is past.