'What! my lords, this Nazarene would annihilate all family ties!'
'Yes, annihilate them by dividing them,' said Caiphus: 'annihilate them by sowing discord and hatred in the domestic hearth! by arming the son against the father! and servants against their masters!'
'Seigneurs,' continued Gremion, with an air of doubt, 'can a project so abominable enter the head of a man?'
"Of a man, no," replied the high priest; "but of a Beelzebub like this Nazarene; here's the proof from the undoubted report of the emissaries, whom I spoke of; this cursed fellow pronounced the other day, the horrible words following, speaking to the bands of beggars who never quit him: 'Believe not that I have come to bring peace on earth, I have brought the sword: I am come to bring fire on the earth, and all my desire is that it may rise to a flame: it is disunion, I repeat, and not peace, that I bring you; I am come to sow division between the father and the son, the daughter and the mother, the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law: a man's own servants shall declare themselves his enemies; in every house of five persons, two of them shall be against the other three.'"
'Why, ‘tis frightful!' exclaimed at once the banker Jonas, and the intendant Chusa.
'‘Tis preaching the dissolution of family by hatred.'
'‘Tis preaching civil war!' exclaimed Gremion, the Roman: 'social war, like that stirred up by Spartacus, the rebellious slave.'
"What! he has the hardihood to say, 'I am come to bring fire on the earth, and all I desire is that it may rise to a flame; a man's own servants shall declare themselves his enemies: in every house of five persons, there shall be two against the others!' it is, as he had the infernal audacity to say, 'bringing fire on the earth.'"
Jane had listened with painful impatience to all the accusations made against the Nazarene; she therefore cried with a firm and animated voice:
'Ah! my seigneurs, I am tired of listening to your calumnies; you do not comprehend the sense of the words of the young man of Nazareth to his disciples. When he speaks of the divisions that will spring up in families, it signifies that in one house, some sharing his doctrine of love and tenderness to one's neighbor, which he preaches from his heart and lips, and the others persisting in their hardness of heart, they shall be divided; he means that servants shall declare themselves the enemies of their masters, if the master has been wicked and unjust; he means, lastly, that in every family some shall be for and some against him.