That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead us a world apparently out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and childish idiocy keep a tryst must, in any case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity, in order to understand it at all in their sight the type could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould.