Napoleon could not understand; he was the child of force, the son of
the sword, the very type of that hard efficiency of will and intellect
which turns the heart to flint, and scorns the witness of the softer
intuitions. Francis could understand because he was in part
feminine--not weakly so, but nobly, as all poets and dreamers and
visionaries are. Paul could understand for the same reason, and so
could John and Peter; each, in varying degrees, belonging to the same
type; but Pilate could not understand, because he had been trained in
the hard efficiency of Rome; nor Judas, because the masculine vice of
ambition had overgrown his affections, and deflowered his heart. What
is it then in Paul and John and Peter, what element or quality, which
we do not find in Pilate, Judas, or Napoleon? Clearly there is no lack
of force, for the personality of these three first apostles lifted a
world out of its groove and changed the course of history. Was it not
just this, that each had beneath his masculine strength a feminine
tenderness, a power of loving and of begetting love in others? John
lying on the bosom of Jesus in sheer abandonment of love and sorrow at
the last Supper; Peter, plunging naked into the Galilean sea, and
struggling to the shore at the mere suspicion that the strange figure
outlined there upon the morning mist is the Lord; Paul praying not only
to share the wounds of Jesus, but if there be any pang left over, any
anguish unfulfilled, that this anguish may be his--these are not alone
immortal pictures, but they are revelations of a temperament, the
temperament that understands Jesus.
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