Project Gutenberg's Preface to Androcles and the Lion, by George Bernard Shaw

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Title: Preface to Androcles and the Lion

Author: George Bernard Shaw

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Release Date; May, 2003
First Posted: October 4, 2001

Language: English

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PREFACE TO ANDROCLES AND THE LION:

ON THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY


BERNARD SHAW

1912



CONTENTS:

  Why not give Christianity a Trial?
  Why Jesus more than Another?
  Was Jesus a Coward?
  Was Jesus a Martyr?
  The Gospels without Prejudice
  The Gospels now unintelligible to Novices
  Worldliness of the Majority
  Religion of the Minority. Salvationism
  The Difference between Atonement and Punishment
  Salvation at first a Class Privilege; and the Remedy
  Retrospective Atonement; and the Expectation of the Redeemer
  Completion of the Scheme by Luther and Calvin
  John Barleycorn
  Looking for the End of the World
  The Honor of Divine Parentage


MATTHEW

  The Annunciation: the Massacre: the Flight
  John the Baptist
  Jesus joins the Baptists
  The Savage John and the Civilized Jesus
  Jesus not a Proselytist
  The Teachings of Jesus
  The Miracles
  Matthew imputes Bigotry to Jesus
  The Great Change
  Jerusalem and the Mystical Sacrifice
  Not this Man but Barabbas
  The Resurrection
  Date of Matthew's Narrative
  Class Type of Matthew's Jesus


MARK

  The Women Disciples and the Ascension


LUKE

  Luke the Literary Artist
  The Charm of Luke's Narrative
  The Touch of Parisian Romance
  Waiting for the Messiah


JOHN

  A New Story and a New Character
  John the Immortal Eye Witness
  The Peculiar Theology of Jesus
  John agreed as to the Trial and Crucifixion
  Credibility of the Gospels
  Fashions of Belief
  Credibility and Truth
  Christian Iconolatry and the Peril of the Iconoclast
  The Alternative to Barabbas
  The Reduction to Modern Practice of Christianity
  Modern Communism
  Redistribution
  Shall He Who Makes, Own?
  Labor Time
  The Dream of Distribution According to Merit
  Vital Distribution
  Equal Distribution
  The Captain and the Cabin Boy
  The Political and Biological Objections to Inequality
  Jesus as Economist
  Jesus as Biologist
  Money the Midwife of Scientific Communism
  Judge Not
  Limits to Free Will
  Jesus on Marriage and the Family
  Why Jesus did not Marry
  Inconsistency of the Sex Instinct For Better for Worse
  The Remedy
  The Case for Marriage
  Celibacy no Remedy
  After the Crucifixion
  The Vindictive Miracles and the Stoning of Stephen
  Paul
  Confusion of Christendom
  Secret of Paul's Success
  Paul's Qualities
  Acts of the Apostles
  The Controversies on Baptism and Transubstantiation
  The Alternative Christs
  Credulity no Criterion
  Belief in Personal Immortality no Criterion
  The Secular View Natural, not Rational, therefore Inevitable
  "The Higher Criticism"
  The Perils of Salvationism
  The Importance of Hell in the Salvation Scheme
  The Right to refuse Atonement
  The Teaching of Christianity
  Christianity and the Empire




PREFACE ON THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

WHY NOT GIVE CHRISTIANITY A TRIAL?

The question seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of resolute
adherence to the old cry of "Not this man, but Barabbas." Yet it is
beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of his strong
right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of money, and his
moralities and churches and political constitutions. "This man" has not
been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his
way. But he has had one quaint triumph. Barabbas has stolen his name
and taken his cross as a standard. There is a sort of compliment in
that. There is even a sort of loyalty in it, like that of the brigand
who breaks every law and yet claims to be a patriotic subject of the
king who makes them. We have always had a curious feeling that though
we crucified Christ on a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the
right end of it, and that if we were better men we might try his plan.
There have been one or two grotesque attempts at it by inadequate
people, such as the Kingdom of God in Munster, which was ended by
crucifixion so much more atrocious than the one on Calvary that the
bishop who took the part of Annas went home and died of horror. But
responsible people have never made such attempts. The moneyed,
respectable, capable world has been steadily anti-Christian and
Barabbasque since the crucifixion; and the specific doctrine of Jesus
has not in all that time been put into political or general social
practice. I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle
reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and
Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world
and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the
world's misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will
if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman. Pray do
not at this early point lose patience with me and shut the book. I
assure you I am as sceptical and scientific and modern a thinker as you
will find anywhere. I grant you I know a great deal more about
economics and politics than Jesus did, and can do things he could not
do. I am by all Barabbasque standards a person of much better character
and standing, and greater practical sense. I have no sympathy with
vagabonds and talkers who try to reform society by taking men away from
their regular productive work and making vagabonds and talkers of them
too; and if I had been Pilate I should have recognized as plainly as he
the necessity for suppressing attacks on the existing social order,
however corrupt that order might be, by people with no knowledge of
government and no power to construct political machinery to carry out
their views, acting on the very dangerous delusion that the end of the
world was at hand. I make no defence of such Christians as Savonarola
and John of Leyden: they were scuttling the ship before they had
learned how to build a raft; and it became necessary to throw them
overboard to save the crew. I say this to set myself right with
respectable society; but I must still insist that if Jesus could have
worked out the practical problems of a Communist constitution, an
admitted obligation to deal with crime without revenge or punishment,
and a full assumption by humanity of divine responsibilities, he would
have conferred an incalculable benefit on mankind, because these
distinctive demands of his are now turning out to be good sense and
sound economics.

I say distinctive, because his common humanity and his subjection to
time and space (that is, to the Syrian life of his period) involved his
belief in many things, true and false, that in no way distinguish him
from other Syrians of that time. But such common beliefs do not
constitute specific Christianity any more than wearing a beard, working
in a carpenter's shop, or believing that the earth is flat and that the
stars could drop on it from heaven like hailstones. Christianity
interests practical statesmen now because of the doctrines that
distinguished Christ from the Jews and the Barabbasques generally,
including ourselves.



WHY JESUS MORE THAN ANOTHER?

I do not imply, however, that these doctrines were peculiar to Christ.
A doctrine peculiar to one man would be only a craze, unless its
comprehension depended on a development of human faculty so rare that
only one exceptionally gifted man possessed it. But even in this case
it would be useless, because incapable of spreading. Christianity is a
step in moral evolution which is independent of any individual
preacher. If Jesus had never existed (and that he ever existed in any
other sense than that in which Shakespear's Hamlet existed has been
vigorously questioned) Tolstoy would have thought and taught and
quarrelled with the Greek Church all the same. Their creed has been
fragmentarily practised to a considerable extent in spite of the fact
that the laws of all countries treat it, in effect, as criminal. Many
of its advocates have been militant atheists. But for some reason the
imagination of white mankind has picked out Jesus of Nazareth as THE
Christ, and attributed all the Christian doctrines to him; and as it is
the doctrine and not the man that matters, and, as, besides, one symbol
is as good as another provided everyone attaches the same meaning to
it, I raise, for the moment, no question as to how far the gospels are
original, and how far they consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations.
The record that Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a
demonstration that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a
literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery
that the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not
just now concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records of
fact; for I am not acting as a detective, but turning our modern lights
on to certain ideas and doctrines in them which disentangle themselves
from the rest because they are flatly contrary to common practice,
common sense, and common belief, and yet have, in the teeth of dogged
incredulity and recalcitrance, produced an irresistible impression that
Christ, though rejected by his posterity as an unpractical dreamer, and
executed by his contemporaries as a dangerous anarchist and blasphemous
madman, was greater than his judges.



WAS JESUS A COWARD?

I know quite well that this impression of superiority is not produced
on everyone, even of those who profess extreme susceptibility to it.
Setting aside the huge mass of inculcated Christ-worship which has no
real significance because it has no intelligence, there is, among
people who are really free to think for themselves on the subject, a
great deal of hearty dislike of Jesus and of contempt for his failure
to save himself and overcome his enemies by personal bravery and
cunning as Mahomet did. I have heard this feeling expressed far more
impatiently by persons brought up in England as Christians than by
Mahometans, who are, like their prophet, very civil to Jesus, and allow
him a place in their esteem and veneration at least as high as we
accord to John the Baptist. But this British bulldog contempt is
founded on a complete misconception of his reasons for submitting
voluntarily to an ordeal of torment and death. The modern Secularist is
often so determined to regard Jesus as a man like himself and nothing
more, that he slips unconsciously into the error of assuming that Jesus
shared that view. But it is quite clear from the New Testament writers
(the chief authorities for believing that Jesus ever existed) that
Jesus at the time of his death believed himself to be the Christ, a
divine personage. It is therefore absurd to criticize his conduct
before Pilate as if he were Colonel Roosevelt or Admiral von Tirpitz or
even Mahomet. Whether you accept his belief in his divinity as fully as
Simon Peter did, or reject it as a delusion which led him to submit to
torture and sacrifice his life without resistance in the conviction
that he would presently rise again in glory, you are equally bound to
admit that, far from behaving like a coward or a sheep, he showed
considerable physical fortitude in going through a cruel ordeal against
which he could have defended himself as effectually as he cleared the
moneychangers out of the temple. "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" is a
snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels. St.
Matthew would as soon have thought of applying such adjectives to Judas
Maccabeus as to Jesus; and even St. Luke, who makes Jesus polite and
gracious, does not make him meek. The picture of him as an English
curate of the farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a policeman, and
everybody's butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften children; but
that such a figure could ever have become a centre of the world's
attention is too absurd for discussion; grown men and women may speak
kindly of a harmless creature who utters amiable sentiments and is a
helpless nincompoop when he is called on to defend them; but they will
not follow him, nor do what he tells them, because they do not wish to
share his defeat and disgrace.



WAS JESUS A MARTYR?

It is important therefore that we should clear our minds of the notion
that Jesus died, as some are in the habit of declaring, for his social
and political opinions. There have been many martyrs to those opinions;
but he was not one of them, nor, as his words show, did he see any more
sense in martyrdom than Galileo did. He was executed by the Jews for
the blasphemy of claiming to be a God; and Pilate, to whom this was a
mere piece of superstitious nonsense, let them execute him as the
cheapest way of keeping them quiet, on the formal plea that he had
committed treason against Rome by saying that he was the King of the
Jews. He was not falsely accused, nor denied full opportunities of
defending himself. The proceedings were quite straightforward and
regular; and Pilate, to whom the appeal lay, favored him and despised
his judges, and was evidently willing enough to be conciliated. But
instead of denying the charge, Jesus repeated the offence. He knew what
he was doing: he had alienated numbers of his own disciples and been
stoned in the streets for doing it before. He was not lying: he
believed literally what he said. The horror of the High Priest was
perfectly natural: he was a Primate confronted with a heterodox street
preacher uttering what seemed to him an appalling and impudent
blasphemy. The fact that the blasphemy was to Jesus a simple statement
of fact, and that it has since been accepted as such by all western
nations, does not invalidate the proceedings, nor give us the right to
regard Annas and Caiaphas as worse men than the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Head Master of Eton. If Jesus had been indicted in a
modern court, he would have been examined by two doctors; found to be
obsessed by a delusion; declared incapable of pleading; and sent to an
asylum: that is the whole difference. But please note that when a man
is charged before a modern tribunal (to take a case that happened the
other day) of having asserted and maintained that he was an officer
returned from the front to receive the Victoria Cross at the hands of
the King, although he was in fact a mechanic, nobody thinks of treating
him as afflicted with a delusion. He is punished for false pretences,
because his assertion is credible and therefore misleading. Just so,
the claim to divinity made by Jesus was to the High Priest, who looked
forward to the coming of a Messiah, one that might conceivably have
been true, and might therefore have misled the people in a very
dangerous way. That was why he treated Jesus as an imposter and a
blasphemer where we should have treated him as a madman.



THE GOSPELS WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

All this will become clear if we read the gospels without prejudice.
When I was young it was impossible to read them without fantastic
confusion of thought. The confusion was so utterly confounded that it
was called the proper spirit to read the Bible in. Jesus was a baby;
and he was older than creation. He was a man who could be persecuted,
stoned, scourged, and killed; and he was a god, immortal and
all-powerful, able to raise the dead and call millions of angels to his
aid. It was a sin to doubt either view of him: that is, it was a sin to
reason about him; and the end was that you did not reason about him,
and read about him only when you were compelled. When you heard the
gospel stories read in church, or learnt them from painters and poets,
you came out with an impression of their contents that would have
astonished a Chinaman who had read the story without prepossession.
Even sceptics who were specially on their guard, put the Bible in the
dock, and read the gospels with the object of detecting discrepancies
in the four narratives to show that the writers were as subject to
error as the writers of yesterday's newspaper.

All this has changed greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is
so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly
becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old
tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books" lingers
more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster,
retranslations into modern English have been introduced perforce to
save its bare intelligibility. It is quite easy today to find
cultivated persons who have never read the New Testament, and on whom
therefore it is possible to try the experiment of asking them to read
the gospels and state what they have gathered as to the history and
views and character of Christ.



THE GOSPELS NOW UNINTELLIGIBLE TO NOVICES.

But it will not do to read the gospels with a mind furnished only for
the reception of, say, a biography of Goethe. You will not make sense
of them, nor even be able without impatient weariness to persevere in
the task of going steadily through them, unless you know something of
the history of the human imagination as applied to religion. Not long
ago I asked a writer of distinguished intellectual competence whether
he had made a study of the gospels since his childhood. His reply was
that he had lately tried, but "found it all such nonsense that I could
not stick it." As I do not want to send anyone to the gospels with this
result, I had better here give a brief exposition of how much of the
history of religion is needed to make the gospels and the conduct and
ultimate fate of Jesus intelligible and interesting.



WORLDLINESS OF THE MAJORITY.

The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a
great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It
consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of
persons deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own
souls and other peoples'; and this section consists mostly of those who
are passionately affirming the established religion and those who are
passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few.
Thus you never have a nation of millions of Wesleys and one Tom Paine.
You have a million Mr. Worldly Wisemans, one Wesley, with his small
congregation, and one Tom Paine, with his smaller congregation. The
passionately religious are a people apart; and if they were not
hopelessly outnumbered by the worldly, they would turn the world upside
down, as St. Paul was reproached, quite justly, for wanting to do. Few
people can number among their personal acquaintances a single atheist
or a single Plymouth Brother. Unless a religious turn in ourselves has
led us to seek the little Societies to which these rare birds belong,
we pass our lives among people who, whatever creeds they may repeat,
and in whatever temples they may avouch their respectability and wear
their Sunday clothes, have robust consciences, and hunger and thirst,
not for righteousness, but for rich feeding and comfort and social
position and attractive mates and ease and pleasure and respect and
consideration: in short, for love and money. To these people one
morality is as good as another provided they are used to it and can put
up with its restrictions without unhappiness; and in the maintenance of
this morality they will fight and punish and coerce without scruple.
They may not be the salt of the earth, these Philistines; but they are
the substance of civilization; and they save society from ruin by
criminals and conquerors as well as by Savonarolas and Knipperdollings.
And as they know, very sensibly, that a little religion is good for
children and serves morality, keeping the poor in good humor or in awe
by promising rewards in heaven or threatening torments in hell, they
encourage the religious people up to a certain point: for instance, if
Savonarola only tells the ladies of Florence that they ought to tear
off their jewels and finery and sacrifice them to God, they offer him a
cardinal's hat, and praise him as a saint; but if he induces them to
actually do it, they burn him as a public nuisance.



RELIGION OF THE MINORITY.  SALVATIONISM.

The religion of the tolerated religious minority has always been
essentially the same religion: that is why its changes of name and form
have made so little difference. That is why, also, a nation so
civilized as the English can convert negroes to their faith with great
ease, but cannot convert Mahometans or Jews. The negro finds in
civilized Salvationism an unspeakably more comforting version of his
crude creed; but neither Saracen nor Jew sees any advantage in it over
his own version. The Crusader was surprised to find the Saracen quite
as religious and moral as himself, and rather more than less civilized.
The Latin Christian has nothing to offer the Greek Christian that Greek
Christianity has not already provided. They are all, at root,
Salvationists.

Let us trace this religion of Salvation from its beginnings. So many
things that man does not himself contrive or desire are always
happening: death, plagues, tempests, blights, floods, sunrise and
sunset, growths and harvests and decay, and Kant's two wonders of the
starry heavens above us and the moral law within us, that we conclude
that somebody must be doing it all, or that somebody is doing the good
and somebody else doing the evil, or that armies of invisible persons,
benefit-cut and malevolent, are doing it; hence you postulate gods and
devils, angels and demons. You propitiate these powers with presents,
called sacrifices, and flatteries, called praises. Then the Kantian
moral law within you makes you conceive your god as a judge; and
straightway you try to corrupt him, also with presents and flatteries.
This seems shocking to us; but our objection to it is quite a recent
development: no longer ago than Shakespear's time it was thought quite
natural that litigants should give presents to human judges; and the
buying off of divine wrath by actual money payments to priests, or, in
the reformed churches which discountenance this, by subscriptions to
charities and church building and the like, is still in full swing. Its
practical disadvantage is that though it makes matters very easy for
the rich, it cuts off the poor from all hope of divine favor. And this
quickens the moral criticism of the poor to such an extent, that they
soon find the moral law within them revolting against the idea of
buying off the deity with gold and gifts, though they are still quite
ready to buy him off with the paper money of praise and professions of
repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may last
unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the
conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the
process of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the
means of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet
when commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the people
into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can barely live, a
movement for religious reform will arise among the poor, and will be
essentially a movement for cheap or entirely gratuitous salvation. To
understand what the poor mean by propitiation, we must examine for a
moment what they mean by justice.



THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly
expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that
two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should
be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine
majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be
inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on
other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will show that
this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For
example, the shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the
shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for
the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy
sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead
of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the
gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives
without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of
sacrifice and expiation. However much the Philistines have succeeded in
confusing these things in practice, they are to the Salvationist sense
distinct and even contrary. The Baronet's cousin in Dickens's novel,
who, perplexed by the failure of the police to discover the murderer of
the baronet's solicitor, said "Far better hang wrong fellow than no
fellow," was not only expressing a very common sentiment, but trembling
on the brink of the rarer Salvationist opinion that it is much better
to hang the wrong fellow: that, in fact, the wrong fellow is the right
fellow to hang.

The point is a cardinal one, because until we grasp it not only does
historical Christianity remain unintelligible to us, but those who do
not care a rap about historical Christianity may be led into the
mistake of supposing that if we discard revenge, and treat murderers
exactly as God treated Cain: that is, exempt them from punishment by
putting a brand on them as unworthy to be sacrificed, and let them face
the world as best they can with that brand on them, we should get rid
both of punishment and sacrifice. It would not at all follow: on the
contrary, the feeling that there must be an expiation of the murder
might quite possibly lead to our putting some innocent person--the more
innocent the better--to a cruel death to balance the account with
divine justice.



SALVATION AT FIRST A CLASS PRIVILEGE; AND THE REMEDY

Thus, even when the poor decide that the method of purchasing salvation
by offering rams and goats or bringing gold to the altar must be wrong
because they cannot afford it, we still do not feel "saved" without a
sacrifice and a victim. In vain do we try to substitute mystical rites
that cost nothing, such as circumcision, or, as a substitute for that,
baptism. Our sense of justice still demands an expiation, a sacrifice,
a sufferer for our sins. And this leaves the poor man still in his old
difficulty; for if it was impossible for him to procure rams and goats
and shekels, how much more impossible is it for him to find a neighbor
who will voluntarily suffer for his sins: one who will say cheerfully
"You have committed a murder. Well, never mind: I am willing to be
hanged for it in your stead?"

Our imagination must come to our rescue. Why not, instead of driving
ourselves to despair by insisting on a separate atonement by a separate
redeemer for every sin, have one great atonement and one great redeemer
to compound for the sins of the world once for all? Nothing easier,
nothing cheaper. The yoke is easy, the burden light. All you have to do
when the redeemer is once found (or invented by the imagination) is to
believe in the efficacy of the transaction, and you are saved. The rams
and goats cease to bleed; the altars which ask for expensive gifts and
continually renewed sacrifices are torn down; and the Church of the
single redeemer and the single atonement rises on the ruins of the old
temples, and becomes a single Church of the Christ.



RETROSPECTIVE ATONEMENT, AND THE EXPECTATION OF THE REDEEMER

But this does not happen at once. Between the old costly religion of
the rich and the new gratuitous religion of the poor there comes an
interregnum in which the redeemer, though conceived by the human
imagination, is not yet found. He is awaited and expected under the
names of the Christ, the Messiah, Baldur the Beautiful, or what not;
but he has not yet come. Yet the sinners are not therefore in despair.
It is true that they cannot say, as we say, "The Christ has come, and
has redeemed us;" but they can say "The Christ will come, and will
redeem us," which, as the atonement is conceived as retrospective, is
equally consoling. There are periods when nations are seething with
this expectation and crying aloud with prophecy of the Redeemer through
their poets. To feel that atmosphere we have only to take up the Bible
and read Isaiah at one end of such a period and Luke and John at the
other.



COMPLETION OF THE SCHEME BY LUTHER AND CALVIN

We now see our religion as a quaint but quite intelligible evolution
from crude attempts to propitiate the destructive forces of Nature
among savages to a subtle theology with a costly ritual of sacrifice
possible only to the rich as a luxury, and finally to the religion of
Luther and Calvin. And it must be said for the earlier forms that they
involved very real sacrifices. The sacrifice was not always vicarious,
and is not yet universally so. In India men pay with their own skins,
torturing themselves hideously to attain holiness. In the west, saints
amazed the world with their austerities and self-scourgings and
confessions and vigils. But Luther delivered us from all that. His
reformation was a triumph of imagination and a triumph of cheapness. It
brought you complete salvation and asked you for nothing but faith.
Luther did not know what he was doing in the scientific sociological
way in which we know it; but his instinct served him better than
knowledge could have done; for it was instinct rather than theological
casuistry that made him hold so resolutely to Justification by Faith as
the trump card by which he should beat the Pope, or, as he would have
put it, the sign in which he should conquer. He may be said to have
abolished the charge for admission to heaven. Paul had advocated this;
but Luther and Calvin did it.



JOHN BARLEYCORN

There is yet another page in the history of religion which must be
conned and digested before the career of Jesus can be fully understood.
People who can read long books will find it in Frazer's Golden Bough.
Simpler folk will find it in the peasant's song of John Barleycorn, now
made accessible to our drawingroom amateurs in the admirable
collections of Somersetshire Folk Songs by Mr. Cecil Sharp. From
Frazer's magnum opus you will learn how the same primitive logic which
makes the Englishman believe today that by eating a beefsteak he can
acquire the strength and courage of the bull, and to hold that belief
in the face of the most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and
racers and bicyclists, led the first men who conceived God as capable
of incarnation to believe that they could acquire a spark of his
divinity by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And from the song
of John Barleycorn you may learn how the miracle of the seed, the
growth, and the harvest, still the most wonderful of all the miracles
and as inexplicable as ever, taught the primitive husbandman, and, as
we must now affirm, taught him quite rightly, that God is in the seed,
and that God is immortal. And thus it became the test of Godhead that
nothing that you could do to it could kill it, and that when you buried
it, it would rise again in renewed life and beauty and give mankind
eternal life on condition that it was eaten and drunk, and again slain
and buried, to rise again for ever and ever. You may, and indeed must,
use John Barleycorn "right barbarouslee," cutting him "off at knee"
with your scythes, scourging him with your flails, burying him in the
earth; and he will not resist you nor reproach you, but will rise again
in golden beauty amidst a great burst of sunshine and bird music, and
save you and renew your life. And from the interweaving of these two
traditions with the craving for the Redeemer, you at last get the
conviction that when the Redeemer comes he will be immortal; he will
give us his body to eat and his blood to drink; and he will prove his
divinity by suffering a barbarous death without resistance or reproach,
and rise from the dead and return to the earth in glory as the giver of
life eternal.



LOOKING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Yet another persistent belief has beset the imagination of the
religious ever since religion spread among the poor, or, rather, ever
since commercial civilization produced a hopelessly poor class cut off
from enjoyment in this world. That belief is that the end of this world
is at hand, and that it will presently pass away and be replaced by a
kingdom of happiness, justice, and bliss in which the rich and the
oppressors and the unjust shall have no share. We are all familiar with
this expectation: many of us cherish some pious relative who sees in
every great calamity a sign of the approaching end. Warning pamphlets
are in constant circulation: advertisements are put in the papers and
paid for by those who are convinced, and who are horrified at the
indifference of the irreligious to the approaching doom. And revivalist
preachers, now as in the days of John the Baptist, seldom fail to warn
their flocks to watch and pray, as the great day will steal upon them
like a thief in the night, and cannot be long deferred in a world so
wicked. This belief also associates itself with Barleycorn's second
coming; so that the two events become identified at last.

There is the other and more artificial side of this belief, on which it
is an inculcated dread. The ruler who appeals to the prospect of heaven
to console the poor and keep them from insurrection also curbs the
vicious by threatening them with hell. In the Koran we find Mahomet
driven more and more to this expedient of government; and experience
confirms his evident belief that it is impossible to govern without it
in certain phases of civilization. We shall see later on that it gives
a powerful attraction to the belief in a Redeemer, since it adds to
remorse of conscience, which hardened men bear very lightly, a definite
dread of hideous and eternal torture.



THE HONOR OF DIVINE PARENTAGE

One more tradition must be noted. The consummation of praise for a king
is to declare that he is the son of no earthly father, but of a god.
His mother goes into the temple of Apollo, and Apollo comes to her in
the shape of a serpent, or the like. The Roman emperors, following the
example of Augustus, claimed the title of God. Illogically, such divine
kings insist a good deal on their royal human ancestors. Alexander,
claiming to be the son of Apollo, is equally determined to be the son
of Philip. As the gospels stand, St. Matthew and St. Luke give
genealogies (the two are different) establishing the descent of Jesus
through Joseph from the royal house of David, and yet declare that not
Joseph but the Holy Ghost was the father of Jesus. It is therefore now
held that the story of the Holy Ghost is a later interpolation borrowed
from the Greek and Roman imperial tradition. But experience shows that
simultaneous faith in the descent from David and the conception by the
Holy Ghost is possible. Such double beliefs are entertained by the
human mind without uneasiness or consciousness of the contradiction
involved. Many instances might be given: a familiar one to my
generation being that of the Tichborne claimant, whose attempt to pass
himself off as a baronet was supported by an association of laborers on
the ground that the Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to
do a laborer out of his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew and
Luke may have been unconscious of the contradiction: indeed the
interpolation theory does not remove the difficulty, as the
interpolators themselves must have been unconscious of it. A better
ground for suspecting interpolation is that St. Paul knew nothing of
the divine birth, and taught that Jesus came into the world at his
birth as the son of Joseph, but rose from the dead after three days as
the son of God. Here again, few notice the discrepancy: the three views
are accepted simultaneously without intellectual discomfort. We can
provisionally entertain half a dozen contradictory versions of an event
if we feel either that it does not greatly matter, or that there is a
category attainable in which the contradictions are reconciled.

But that is not the present point. All that need be noted here is that
the legend of divine birth was sure to be attached sooner or later to
very eminent persons in Roman imperial times, and that modern
theologians, far from discrediting it, have very logically affirmed the
miraculous conception not only of Jesus but of his mother.

With no more scholarly equipment than a knowledge of these habits of
the human imagination, anyone may now read the four gospels without
bewilderment, and without the contemptuous incredulity which spoils the
temper of many modern atheists, or the senseless credulity which
sometimes makes pious people force us to shove them aside in
emergencies as impracticable lunatics when they ask us to meet violence
and injustice with dumb submission in the belief that the strange
demeanor of Jesus before Pilate was meant as an example of normal human
conduct. Let us admit that without the proper clues the gospels are, to
a modern educated person, nonsensical and incredible, whilst the
apostles are unreadable. But with the clues, they are fairly plain
sailing. Jesus becomes an intelligible and consistent person. His
reasons for going "like a lamb to the slaughter" instead of saving
himself as Mahomet did, become quite clear. The narrative becomes as
credible as any other historical narrative of its period.




MATTHEW.



THE ANNUNCIATION: THE MASSACRE: THE FLIGHT

Let us begin with the gospel of Matthew, bearing in mind that it does
not profess to be the evidence of an eyewitness. It is a chronicle,
founded, like other chronicles, on such evidence and records as the
chronicler could get hold of. The only one of the evangelists who
professes to give first-hand evidence as an eyewitness naturally takes
care to say so; and the fact that Matthew makes no such pretension, and
writes throughout as a chronicler, makes it clear that he is telling
the story of Jesus as Holinshed told the story of Macbeth, except that,
for a reason to be given later on, he must have collected his material
and completed his book within the lifetime of persons contemporary with
Jesus. Allowance must also be made for the fact that the gospel is
written in the Greek language, whilst the first-hand traditions and the
actual utterances of Jesus must have been in Aramaic, the dialect of
Palestine. These distinctions were important, as you will find if you
read Holinshed or Froissart and then read Benvenuto Cellini. You do not
blame Holinshed or Froissart for believing and repeating the things
they had read or been told, though you cannot always believe these
things yourself. But when Cellini tells you that he saw this or did
that, and you find it impossible to believe him, you lose patience with
him, and are disposed to doubt everything in his autobiography. Do not
forget, then, that Matthew is Holinshed and not Benvenuto. The very
first pages of his narrative will put your attitude to the test.

Matthew tells us that the mother of Jesus was betrothed to a man of
royal pedigree named Joseph, who was rich enough to live in a house in
Bethlehem to which kings could bring gifts of gold without provoking
any comment. An angel announces to Joseph that Jesus is the son of the
Holy Ghost, and that he must not accuse her of infidelity because of
her bearing a son of which he is not the father; but this episode
disappears from the subsequent narrative: there is no record of its
having been told to Jesus, nor any indication of his having any
knowledge of it. The narrative, in fact, proceeds in all respects as if
the annunciation formed no part of it.

Herod the Tetrarch, believing that a child has been born who will
destroy him, orders all the male children to be slaughtered; and Jesus
escapes by the flight of his parents into Egypt, whence they return to
Nazareth when the danger is over. Here it is necessary to anticipate a
little by saying that none of the other evangelists accept this story,
as none of them except John, who throws over Matthew altogether, shares
his craze for treating history and biography as mere records of the
fulfillment of ancient Jewish prophecies. This craze no doubt led him
to seek for some legend bearing out Hosea's "Out of Egypt have I called
my son," and Jeremiah's Rachel weeping for her children: in fact, he
says so. Nothing that interests us nowadays turns on the credibility of
the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt. We may forget
them, and proceed to the important part of the narrative, which skips
at once to the manhood of Jesus.



JOHN THE BAPTIST

At this moment, a Salvationist prophet named John is stirring the
people very strongly. John has declared that the rite of circumcision
is insufficient as a dedication of the individual to God, and has
substituted the rite of baptism. To us, who are accustomed to baptism
as a matter of course, and to whom circumcision is a rather ridiculous
foreign practice of no consequence, the sensational effect of such a
heresy as this on the Jews is not apparent: it seems to us as natural
that John should have baptized people as that the rector of our village
should do so. But, as St. Paul found to his cost later on, the
discarding of circumcision for baptism was to the Jews as startling a
heresy as the discarding of transubstantiation in the Mass was to the
Catholics of the XVI century.



JESUS JOINS THE BAPTISTS

Jesus entered as a man of thirty (Luke says) into the religious life of
his time by going to John the Baptist and demanding baptism from him,
much as certain well-to-do young gentlemen forty years ago "joined the
Socialists." As far as established Jewry was concerned, he burnt his
boats by this action, and cut himself off from the routine of wealth,
respectability, and orthodoxy. He then began preaching John's gospel,
which, apart from the heresy of baptism, the value of which lay in its
bringing the Gentiles (that is, the uncircumcized) within the pale of
salvation, was a call to the people to repent of their sins, as the
kingdom of heaven was at hand. Luke adds that he also preached the
communism of charity; told the surveyors of taxes not to over-assess
the taxpayers; and advised soldiers to be content with their wages and
not to be violent or lay false accusations. There is no record of John
going beyond this.



THE SAVAGE JOHN AND THE CIVILIZED JESUS

Jesus went beyond it very rapidly, according to Matthew. Though, like
John, he became an itinerant preacher, he departed widely from John's
manner of life. John went into the wilderness, not into the synagogues;
and his baptismal font was the river Jordan. He was an ascetic, clothed
in skins and living on locusts and wild honey, practising a savage
austerity. He courted martyrdom, and met it at the hands of Herod.
Jesus saw no merit either in asceticism or martyrdom. In contrast to
John he was essentially a highly-civilized, cultivated person.
According to Luke, he pointed out the contrast himself, chaffing the
Jews for complaining that John must be possessed by the devil because
he was a teetotaller and vegetarian, whilst, because Jesus was neither
one nor the other, they reviled him as a gluttonous man and a
winebibber, the friend of the officials and their mistresses. He told
straitlaced disciples that they would have trouble enough from other
people without making any for themselves, and that they should avoid
martyrdom and enjoy themselves whilst they had the chance. "When they
persecute you in this city," he says, "flee into the next." He preaches
in the synagogues and in the open air indifferently, just as they come.
He repeatedly says, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," meaning
evidently to clear himself of the inveterate superstition that
suffering is gratifying to God. "Be not, as the Pharisees, of a sad
countenance," he says. He is convivial, feasting with Roman officials
and sinners. He is careless of his person, and is remonstrated with for
not washing his hands before sitting down to table. The followers of
John the Baptist, who fast, and who expect to find the Christians
greater ascetics than themselves, are disappointed at finding that
Jesus and his twelve friends do not fast; and Jesus tells them that
they should rejoice in him instead of being melancholy. He is jocular
and tells them they will all have as much fasting as they want soon
enough, whether they like it or not. He is not afraid of disease, and
dines with a leper. A woman, apparently to protect him against
infection, pours a costly unguent on his head, and is rebuked because
what it cost might have been given to the poor. He poohpoohs that
lowspirited view, and says, as he said when he was reproached for not
fasting, that the poor are always there to be helped, but that he is
not there to be anointed always, implying that you should never lose a
chance of being happy when there is so much misery in the world. He
breaks the Sabbath; is impatient of conventionality when it is
uncomfortable or obstructive; and outrages the feelings of the Jews by
breaches of it. He is apt to accuse people who feel that way of
hypocrisy. Like the late Samuel Butler, he regards disease as a
department of sin, and on curing a lame man, says "Thy sins are
forgiven" instead of "Arise and walk," subsequently maintaining, when
the Scribes reproach him for assuming power to forgive sin as well as
to cure disease, that the two come to the same thing. He has no modest
affectations, and claims to be greater than Solomon or Jonah. When
reproached, as Bunyan was, for resorting to the art of fiction when
teaching in parables, he justifies himself on the ground that art is
the only way in which the people can be taught. He is, in short, what
we should call an artist and a Bohemian in his manner of life.



JESUS NOT A PROSELYTIST

A point of considerable practical importance today is that he expressly
repudiates the idea that forms of religion, once rooted, can be weeded
out and replanted with the flowers of a foreign faith. "If you try to
root up the tares you will root up the wheat as well." Our
proselytizing missionary enterprises are thus flatly contrary to his
advice; and their results appear to bear him out in his view that if
you convert a man brought up in another creed, you inevitably
demoralize him. He acts on this view himself, and does not convert his
disciples from Judaism to Christianity. To this day a Christian would
be in religion a Jew initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and
accepting Jesus as the Messiah, and his teachings as of higher
authority than those of Moses, but for the action of the Jewish
priests, who, to save Jewry from being submerged in the rising flood of
Christianity after the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the
Temple, set up what was practically a new religious order, with new
Scriptures and elaborate new observances, and to their list of the
accursed added one Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose comic rogueries
brought him to a bad end like Punch or Til Eulenspiegel: an invention
which cost them dear when the Christians got the upper hand of them
politically. The Jew as Jesus, himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of
such things, and could follow Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.



THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS.

So much for his personal life and temperament. His public career as a
popular preacher carries him equally far beyond John the Baptist. He
lays no stress on baptism or vows, and preaches conduct incessantly. He
advocates communism, the widening of the private family with its
cramping ties into the great family of mankind under the fatherhood of
God, the abandonment of revenge and punishment, the counteracting of
evil by good instead of by a hostile evil, and an organic conception of
society in which you are not an independent individual but a member of
society, your neighbor being another member, and each of you members
one of another, as two fingers on a hand, the obvious conclusion being
that unless you love your neighbor as yourself and he reciprocates you
will both be the worse for it. He conveys all this with extraordinary
charm, and entertains his hearers with fables (parables) to illustrate
them. He has no synagogue or regular congregation, but travels from
place to place with twelve men whom he has called from their work as he
passed, and who have abandoned it to follow him.



THE MIRACLES

He has certain abnormal powers by which he can perform miracles. He is
ashamed of these powers, but, being extremely compassionate, cannot
refuse to exercise them when afflicted people beg him to cure them,
when multitudes of people are hungry, and when his disciples are
terrified by storms on the lakes. He asks for no reward, but begs the
people not to mention these powers of his. There are two obvious
reasons for his dislike of being known as a worker of miracles. One is
the natural objection of all men who possess such powers, but have far
more important business in the world than to exhibit them, to be
regarded primarily as charlatans, besides being pestered to give
exhibitions to satisfy curiosity. The other is that his view of the
effect of miracles upon his mission is exactly that taken later on by
Rousseau. He perceives that they will discredit him and divert
attention from his doctrine by raising an entirely irrelevant issue
between his disciples and his opponents.

Possibly my readers may not have studied Rousseau's Letters Written
From The Mountain, which may be regarded as the classic work on
miracles as credentials of divine mission. Rousseau shows, as Jesus
foresaw, that the miracles are the main obstacle to the acceptance of
Christianity, because their incredibility (if they were not incredible
they would not be miracles) makes people sceptical as to the whole
narrative, credible enough in the main, in which they occur, and
suspicious of the doctrine with which they are thus associated. "Get
rid of the miracles," said Rousseau, "and the whole world will fall at
the feet of Jesus Christ." He points out that miracles offered as
evidence of divinity, and failing to convince, make divinity
ridiculous. He says, in effect, there is nothing in making a lame man
walk: thousands of lame men have been cured and have walked without any
miracle. Bring me a man with only one leg and make another grow
instantaneously on him before my eyes; and I will be really impressed;
but mere cures of ailments that have often been cured before are quite
useless as evidence of anything else than desire to help and power to
cure.

Jesus, according to Matthew, agreed so entirely with Rousseau, and felt
the danger so strongly, that when people who were not ill or in trouble
came to him and asked him to exercise his powers as a sign of his
mission, he was irritated beyond measure, and refused with an
indignation which they, not seeing Rousseau's point, must have thought
very unreasonable. To be called "an evil and adulterous generation"
merely for asking a miracle worker to give an exhibition of his powers,
is rather a startling experience. Mahomet, by the way, also lost his
temper when people asked him to perform miracles. But Mahomet expressly
disclaimed any unusual powers; whereas it is clear from Matthew's story
that Jesus (unfortunately for himself, as he thought) had some powers
of healing. It is also obvious that the exercise of such powers would
give rise to wild tales of magical feats which would expose their hero
to condemnation as an impostor among people whose good opinion was of
great consequence to the movement started by his mission.

But the deepest annoyance arising from the miracles would be the
irrelevance of the issue raised by them. Jesus's teaching has nothing
to do with miracles. If his mission had been simply to demonstrate a
new method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind
would have been entirely relevant. But to say "You should love your
enemies; and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this
gentleman of cataract" would have been, to a man of Jesus's
intelligence, the proposition of an idiot. If it could be proved today
that not one of the miracles of Jesus actually occurred, that proof
would not invalidate a single one of his didactic utterances; and
conversely, if it could be proved that not only did the miracles
actually occur, but that he had wrought a thousand other miracles a
thousand times more wonderful, not a jot of weight would be added to
his doctrine. And yet the intellectual energy of sceptics and divines
has been wasted for generations in arguing about the miracles on the
assumption that Christianity is at stake in the controversy as to
whether the stories of Matthew are false or true. According to Matthew
himself, Jesus must have known this only too well; for wherever he went
he was assailed with a clamor for miracles, though his doctrine created
bewilderment.

So much for the miracles! Matthew tells us further, that Jesus declared
that his doctrines would be attacked by Church and State, and that the
common multitude were the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
His disciples, in their relations with the political and ecclesiastical
organizations, would be as sheep among wolves.



MATTHEW IMPUTES DIGNITY TO JESUS.

Matthew, like most biographers, strives to identify the opinions and
prejudices of his hero with his own. Although he describes Jesus as
tolerant even to carelessness, he draws the line at the Gentile, and
represents Jesus as a bigoted Jew who regards his mission as addressed
exclusively to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel." When a woman of
Canaan begged Jesus to cure her daughter, he first refused to speak to
her, and then told her brutally that "It is not meet to take the
children's bread and cast it to the dogs." But when the woman said,
"Truth, Lord; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their
master's table," she melted the Jew out of him and made Christ a
Christian. To the woman whom he had just called a dog he said, "O
woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt." This is
somehow one of the most touching stories in the gospel; perhaps because
the woman rebukes the prophet by a touch of his own finest quality. It
is certainly out of character; but as the sins of good men are always
out of character, it is not safe to reject the story as invented in the
interest of Matthew's determination that Jesus shall have nothing to do
with the Gentiles. At all events, there the story is; and it is by no
means the only instance in which Matthew reports Jesus, in spite of the
charm of his preaching, as extremely uncivil in private intercourse.



THE GREAT CHANGE.

So far the history is that of a man sane and interesting apart from his
special gifts as orator, healer, and prophet. But a startling change
occurs. One day, after the disciples have discouraged him for a long
time by their misunderstandings of his mission, and their speculations
as to whether he is one of the old prophets come again, and if so,
which, his disciple Peter suddenly solves the problem by exclaiming,
"Thou are the Christ, the son of the living God." At this Jesus is
extraordinarily pleased and excited. He declares that Peter has had a
revelation straight from God. He makes a pun on Peter's name, and
declares him the founder of his Church. And he accepts his destiny as a
god by announcing that he will be killed when he goes to Jerusalem; for
if he is really the Christ, it is a necessary part of his legendary
destiny that he shall be slain. Peter, not understanding this, rebukes
him for what seems mere craven melancholy; and Jesus turns fiercely on
him and cries, "Get thee behind me, Satan."

Jesus now becomes obsessed with a conviction of his divinity, and talks
about it continually to his disciples, though he forbids them to
mention it to others. They begin to dispute among themselves as to the
position they shall occupy in heaven when his kingdom is established.
He rebukes them strenuously for this, and repeats his teaching that
greatness means service and not domination; but he himself, always
instinctively somewhat haughty, now becomes arrogant, dictatorial, and
even abusive, never replying to his critics without an insulting
epithet, and even cursing a fig-tree which disappoints him when he goes
to it for fruit. He assumes all the traditions of the folk-lore gods,
and announces that, like John Barleycorn, he will be barbarously slain
and buried, but will rise from the earth and return to life. He
attaches to himself the immemorial tribal ceremony of eating the god,
by blessing bread and wine and handing them to his disciples with the
words "This is my body: this is my blood." He forgets his own teaching
and threatens eternal fire and eternal punishment. He announces, in
addition to his Barleycorn resurrection, that he will come to the world
a second time in glory and establish his kingdom on earth. He fears
that this may lead to the appearance of impostors claiming to be
himself, and declares explicitly and repeatedly that no matter what
wonders these impostors may perform, his own coming will be
unmistakable, as the stars will fall from heaven, and trumpets be blown
by angels. Further he declares that this will take place during the
lifetime of persons then present.



JERUSALEM AND THE MYSTICAL SACRIFICE.

In this new frame of mind he at last enters Jerusalem amid great
popular curiosity; drives the moneychangers and sacrifice sellers out
of the temple in a riot; refuses to interest himself in the beauties
and wonders of the temple building on the ground that presently not a
stone of it shall be left on another; reviles the high priests and
elders in intolerable terms; and is arrested by night in a garden to
avoid a popular disturbance. He makes no resistance, being persuaded
that it is part of his destiny as a god to be murdered and to rise
again. One of his followers shows fight, and cuts off the ear of one of
his captors. Jesus rebukes him, but does not attempt to heal the wound,
though he declares that if he wished to resist he could easily summon
twelve million angels to his aid. He is taken before the high priest
and by him handed over to the Roman governor, who is puzzled by his
silent refusal to defend himself in any way, or to contradict his
accusers or their witnesses, Pilate having naturally no idea that the
prisoner conceives himself as going through an inevitable process of
torment, death, and burial as a prelude to resurrection. Before the
high priest he has also been silent except that when the priest asks
him is he the Christ, the Son of God, he replies that they shall all
see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on
the clouds of heaven. He maintains this attitude with frightful
fortitude whilst they scourge him, mock him, torment him, and finally
crucify him between two thieves. His prolonged agony of thirst and pain
on the cross at last breaks his spirit, and he dies with a cry of "My
God: why hast Thou forsaken me?"



NOT THIS MAN BUT BARABBAS

Meanwhile he has been definitely rejected by the people as well as by
the priests. Pilate, pitying him, and unable to make out exactly what
he has done (the blasphemy that has horrified the high priest does not
move the Roman) tries to get him off by reminding the people that they
have, by custom, the right to have a prisoner released at that time,
and suggests that he should release Jesus. But they insist on his
releasing a prisoner named Barabbas instead, and on having Jesus
crucified. Matthew gives no clue to the popularity of Barabbas,
describing him simply as "a notable prisoner." The later gospels make
it clear, very significantly, that his offence was sedition and
insurrection; that he was an advocate of physical force; and that he
had killed his man. The choice of Barabbas thus appears as a popular
choice of the militant advocate of physical force as against the
unresisting advocate of mercy.



THE RESURRECTION.

Matthew then tells how after three days an angel opened the family
vault of one Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea, who had buried Jesus in
it, whereupon Jesus rose and returned from Jerusalem to Galilee and
resumed his preaching with his disciples, assuring them that he would
now be with them to the end of the world. At that point the narrative
abruptly stops. The story has no ending.



DATE OF MATTHEW'S NARRATIVE.

One effect of the promise of Jesus to come again in glory during the
lifetime of some of his hearers is to date the gospel without the aid
of any scholarship. It must have been written during the lifetime of
Jesus's contemporaries: that is, whilst it was still possible for the
promise of his Second Coming to be fulfilled. The death of the last
person who had been alive when Jesus said "There be some of them that
stand here that shall in no wise taste death till they see the Son of
Man coming in his kingdom" destroyed the last possibility of the
promised Second Coming, and bore out the incredulity of Pilate and the
Jews. And as Matthew writes as one believing in that Second Coming, and
in fact left his story unfinished to be ended by it, he must have
produced his gospel within a lifetime of the crucifixion. Also, he must
have believed that reading books would be one of the pleasures of the
kingdom of heaven on earth.



CLASS TYPE OF MATTHEW'S JESUS

One more circumstance must be noted as gathered from Matthew. Though he
begins his story in such a way as to suggest that Jesus belonged to the
privileged classes, he mentions later on that when Jesus attempted to
preach in his own country, and had no success there, the people said,
"Is not this the carpenter's son?" But Jesus's manner throughout is
that of an aristocrat, or at the very least the son of a rich
bourgeois, and by no means a lowly-minded one at that. We must be
careful therefore to conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian
carpenter working for weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal
descent. John the Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of
Matthew is of the Ruskin-Morris class.

This haughty characterization is so marked that if we had no other
documents concerning Jesus than the gospel of Matthew, we should not
feel as we do about him. We should have been much less loth to say,
"There is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed him as the Christ,
and who then became a monomaniac." We should have pointed out that his
delusion is a very common delusion among the insane, and that such
insanity is quite consistent with the retention of the argumentative
cunning and penetration which Jesus displayed in Jerusalem after his
delusion had taken complete hold of him. We should feel horrified at
the scourging and mocking and crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin
had been treated in that way when he also went mad, instead of being
cared for as an invalid. And we should have had no clear perception of
any special significance in his way of calling the Son of God the Son
of Man. We should have noticed that he was a Communist; that he
regarded much of what we call law and order as machinery for robbing
the poor under legal forms; that he thought domestic ties a snare for
the soul; that he agreed with the proverb "The nearer the Church, the
farther from God;" that he saw very plainly that the masters of the
community should be its servants and not its oppressors and parasites;
and that though he did not tell us not to fight our enemies, he did
tell us to love them, and warned us that they who draw the sword shall
perish by the sword. All this shows a great power of seeing through
vulgar illusions, and a capacity for a higher morality than has yet
been established in any civilized community; but it does not place
Jesus above Confucius or Plato, not to mention more modern philosophers
and moralists.




MARK.



THE WOMEN DISCIPLES AND THE ASCENSION.

Let us see whether we can get anything more out of Mark, whose gospel,
by the way, is supposed to be older than Matthew's. Mark is brief; and
it does not take long to discover that he adds nothing to Matthew
except the ending of the story by Christ's ascension into heaven, and
the news that many women had come with Jesus to Jerusalem, including
Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. On the other hand
Mark says nothing about the birth of Jesus, and does not touch his
career until his adult baptism by John. He apparently regards Jesus as
a native of Nazareth, as John does, and not of Bethlehem, as Matthew
and Luke do, Bethlehem being the city of David, from whom Jesus is said
by Matthew and Luke to be descended. He describes John's doctrine as
"Baptism of repentance unto remission of sins": that is, a form of
Salvationism. He tells us that Jesus went into the synagogues and
taught, not as the Scribes but as one having authority: that is, we
infer, he preaches his own doctrine as an original moralist instead of
repeating what the books say. He describes the miracle of Jesus
reaching the boat by walking across the sea, but says nothing about
Peter trying to do the same. Mark sees what he relates more vividly
than Matthew, and gives touches of detail that bring the event more
clearly before the reader. He says, for instance, that when Jesus
walked on the waves to the boat, he was passing it by when the
disciples called out to him. He seems to feel that Jesus's treatment of
the woman of Canaan requires some apology, and therefore says that she
was a Greek of Syrophenician race, which probably excused any
incivility to her in Mark's eyes. He represents the father of the boy
whom Jesus cured of epilepsy after the transfiguration as a sceptic who
says "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." He tells the story of
the widow's mite, omitted by Matthew. He explains that Barabbas was
"lying bound with them that made insurrection, men who in the
insurrection had committed murder." Joseph of Arimathea, who buried
Jesus in his own tomb, and who is described by Matthew as a disciple,
is described by Mark as "one who also himself was looking for the
kingdom of God," which suggests that he was an independent seeker. Mark
earns our gratitude by making no mention of the old prophecies, and
thereby not only saves time, but avoids the absurd implication that
Christ was merely going through a predetermined ritual, like the works
of a clock, instead of living. Finally Mark reports Christ as saying,
after his resurrection, that those who believe in him will be saved and
those who do not, damned; but it is impossible to discover whether he
means anything by a state of damnation beyond a state of error. The
paleographers regard this passage as tacked on by a later scribe. On
the whole Mark leaves the modern reader where Matthew left him.




LUKE.



LUKE THE LITERARY ARTIST.

When we come to Luke, we come to a later storyteller, and one with a
stronger natural gift for his art. Before you have read twenty lines of
Luke's gospel you are aware that you have passed from the chronicler
writing for the sake of recording important facts, to the artist,
telling the story for the sake of telling it. At the very outset he
achieves the most charming idyll in the Bible: the story of Mary
crowded out of the inn into the stable and laying her newly-born son in
the manger, and of the shepherds abiding in the field keeping watch
over their flocks by night, and how the angel of the Lord came upon
them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and suddenly there
was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host. These shepherds go
to the stable and take the place of the kings in Matthew's chronicle.
So completely has this story conquered and fascinated our imagination
that most of us suppose all the gospels to contain it; but it is Luke's
story and his alone: none of the others have the smallest hint of it.



THE CHARM OF LUKE'S NARRATIVE.

Luke gives the charm of sentimental romance to every incident. The
Annunciation, as described by Matthew, is made to Joseph, and is simply
a warning to him not to divorce his wife for misconduct. In Luke's
gospel it is made to Mary herself, at much greater length, with a sense
of the ecstasy of the bride of the Holy Ghost. Jesus is refined and
softened almost out of recognition: the stern peremptory disciple of
John the Baptist, who never addresses a Pharisee or a Scribe without an
insulting epithet, becomes a considerate, gentle, sociable, almost
urbane person; and the Chauvinist Jew becomes a pro-Gentile who is
thrown out of the synagogue in his own town for reminding the
congregation that the prophets had sometimes preferred Gentiles to
Jews. In fact they try to throw him down from a sort of Tarpeian rock
which they use for executions; but he makes his way through them and
escapes: the only suggestion of a feat of arms on his part in the
gospels. There is not a word of the Syrophenician woman. At the end he
is calmly superior to his sufferings; delivers an address on his way to
execution with unruffled composure; does not despair on the cross; and
dies with perfect dignity, commending his spirit to God, after praying
for the forgiveness of his persecutors on the ground that "They know
not what they do." According to Matthew, it is part of the bitterness
of his death that even the thieves who are crucified with him revile
him. According to Luke, only one of them does this; and he is rebuked
by the other, who begs Jesus to remember him when he comes into his
kingdom. To which Jesus replies, "This day shalt thou be with me in
Paradise," implying that he will spend the three days of his death
there. In short, every device is used to get rid of the ruthless horror
of the Matthew chronicle, and to relieve the strain of the Passion by
touching episodes, and by representing Christ as superior to human
suffering. It is Luke's Jesus who has won our hearts.



THE TOUCH OF PARISIAN ROMANCE.

Luke's romantic shrinking from unpleasantness, and his sentimentality,
are illustrated by his version of the woman with the ointment. Matthew
and Mark describe it as taking place in the house of Simon the Leper,
where it is objected to as a waste of money. In Luke's version the
leper becomes a rich Pharisee; the woman becomes a Dame aux Camellias;
and nothing is said about money and the poor. The woman washes the feet
of Jesus with her tears and dries them with her hair; and he is
reproached for suffering a sinful woman to touch him. It is almost an
adaptation of the unromantic Matthew to the Parisian stage. There is a
distinct attempt to increase the feminine interest all through. The
slight lead given by Mark is taken up and developed. More is said about
Jesus's mother and her feelings. Christ's following of women, just
mentioned by Mark to account for their presence at his tomb, is
introduced earlier; and some of the women are named; so that we are
introduced to Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna.
There is the quaint little domestic episode between Mary and Martha.
There is the parable of the Prodigal Son, appealing to the indulgence
romance has always shown to Charles Surface and Des Grieux. Women
follow Jesus to the cross; and he makes them a speech beginning
"Daughters of Jerusalem." Slight as these changes may seem, they make a
great change in the atmosphere. The Christ of Matthew could never have
become what is vulgarly called a woman's hero (though the truth is that
the popular demand for sentiment, as far as it is not simply human, is
more manly than womanly); but the Christ of Luke has made possible
those pictures which now hang in many ladies' chambers, in which Jesus
is represented exactly as he is represented in the Lourdes
cinematograph, by a handsome actor. The only touch of realism which
Luke does not instinctively suppress for the sake of producing this
kind of amenity is the reproach addressed to Jesus for sitting down to
table without washing his hands; and that is retained because an
interesting discourse hangs on it.



WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH.

Another new feature in Luke's story is that it begins in a world in
which everyone is expecting the advent of the Christ. In Matthew and
Mark, Jesus comes into a normal Philistine world like our own of today.
Not until the Baptist foretells that one greater than himself shall
come after him does the old Jewish hope of a Messiah begin to stir
again; and as Jesus begins as a disciple of John, and is baptized by
him, nobody connects him with that hope until Peter has the sudden
inspiration which produces so startling an effect on Jesus. But in
Luke's gospel men's minds, and especially women's minds, are full of
eager expectation of a Christ not only before the birth of Jesus, but
before the birth of John the Baptist, the event with which Luke begins
his story. Whilst Jesus and John are still in their mothers' wombs,
John leaps at the approach of Jesus when the two mothers visit one
another. At the circumcision of Jesus pious men and women hail the
infant as the Christ.

The Baptist himself is not convinced; for at quite a late period in his
former disciple's career he sends two young men to ask Jesus is he
really the Christ. This is noteworthy because Jesus immediately gives
them a deliberate exhibition of miracles, and bids them tell John what
they have seen, and ask him what he thinks now: This is in complete
contradiction to what I have called the Rousseau view of miracles as
inferred from Matthew. Luke shows all a romancer's thoughtlessness
about miracles; he regards them as "signs": that is, as proofs of the
divinity of the person performing them, and not merely of thaumaturgic
powers. He revels in miracles just as he revels in parables: they make
such capital stories. He cannot allow the calling of Peter, James, and
John from their boats to pass without a comic miraculous overdraft of
fishes, with the net sinking the boats and provoking Peter to exclaim,
"Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord," which should probably
be translated, "I want no more of your miracles: natural fishing is
good enough for my boats."

There are some other novelties in Luke's version. Pilate sends Jesus to
Herod, who happens to be in Jerusalem just then, because Herod had
expressed some curiosity about him; but nothing comes of it: the
prisoner will not speak to him. When Jesus is ill received in a
Samaritan village James and John propose to call down fire from heaven
and destroy it; and Jesus replies that he is come not to destroy lives
but to save them. The bias of Jesus against lawyers is emphasized, and
also his resolution not to admit that he is more bound to his relatives
than to strangers. He snubs a woman who blesses his mother. As this is
contrary to the traditions of sentimental romance, Luke would
presumably have avoided it had he not become persuaded that the
brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God are superior even to
sentimental considerations. The story of the lawyer asking what are the
two chief commandments is changed by making Jesus put the question to
the lawyer instead of answering it.

As to doctrine, Luke is only clear when his feelings are touched. His
logic is weak; for some of the sayings of Jesus are pieced together
wrongly, as anyone who has read them in the right order and context in
Matthew will discover at once. He does not make anything new out of
Christ's mission, and, like the other evangelists, thinks that the
whole point of it is that Jesus was the long expected Christ, and that
he will presently come back to earth and establish his kingdom, having
duly died and risen again after three days. Yet Luke not only records
the teaching as to communism and the discarding of hate, which have, of
course, nothing to do with the Second Coming, but quotes one very
remarkable saying which is not compatible with it, which is, that
people must not go about asking where the kingdom of heaven is, and
saying "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" because the kingdom of heaven is
within them. But Luke has no sense that this belongs to a quite
different order of thought to his Christianity, and retains undisturbed
his view of the kingdom as a locality as definite as Jerusalem or
Madagascar.




JOHN.



A NEW STORY AND A NEW CHARACTER.

The gospel of John is a surprise after the others. Matthew, Mark and
Luke describe the same events in the same order (the variations in Luke
are negligible), and their gospels are therefore called the synoptic
gospels. They tell substantially the same story of a wandering preacher
who at the end of his life came to Jerusalem. John describes a preacher
who spent practically his whole adult life in the capital, with
occasional visits to the provinces. His circumstantial account of the
calling of Peter and the sons of Zebedee is quite different from the
others; and he says nothing about their being fishermen. He says
expressly that Jesus, though baptized by John, did not himself practise
baptism, and that his disciples did. Christ's agonized appeal against
his doom in the garden of Gethsemane becomes a coldblooded suggestion
made in the temple at a much earlier period. Jesus argues much more;
complains a good deal of the unreasonableness and dislike with which he
is met; is by no means silent before Caiaphas and Pilate; lays much
greater stress on his resurrection and on the eating of his body
(losing all his disciples except the twelve in consequence); says many
apparently contradictory and nonsensical things to which no ordinary
reader can now find any clue; and gives the impression of an educated,
not to say sophisticated mystic, different both in character and
schooling from the simple and downright preacher of Matthew and Mark,
and the urbane easy-minded charmer of Luke. Indeed, the Jews say of him
"How knoweth this man letters, having never learnt?"



JOHN THE IMMORTAL EYEWITNESS.

John, moreover, claims to be not only a chronicler but a witness. He
declares that he is "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and that he
actually leaned on the bosom of Jesus at the last supper and asked in a
whisper which of them it was that should betray him. Jesus whispered
that he would give a sop to the traitor, and thereupon handed one to
Judas, who ate it and immediately became possessed by the devil. This
is more natural than the other accounts, in which Jesus openly
indicates Judas without eliciting any protest or exciting any comment.
It also implies that Jesus deliberately bewitched Judas in order to
bring about his own betrayal. Later on John claims that Jesus said to
Peter "If I will that John tarry til I come, what is that to thee?";
and John, with a rather obvious mock modesty, adds that he must not
claim to be immortal, as the disciples concluded; for Christ did not
use that expression, but merely remarked "If I will that he tarry till
I come." No other evangelist claims personal intimacy with Christ, or
even pretends to be his contemporary (there is no ground for
identifying Matthew the publican with Matthew the Evangelist); and John
is the only evangelist whose account of Christ's career and character
is hopelessly irreconcilable with Matthew's. He is almost as bad as
Matthew, by the way, in his repeated explanations of Christ's actions
as having no other purpose than to fulfil the old prophecies. The
impression is more unpleasant, because, as John, unlike Matthew, is
educated, subtle, and obsessed with artificial intellectual
mystifications, the discovery that he is stupid or superficial in so
simple a matter strikes one with distrust and dislike, in spite of his
great literary charm, a good example of which is his transfiguration of
the harsh episode of the Syrophenician woman into the pleasant story of
the woman of Samaria. This perhaps is why his claim to be John the
disciple, or to be a contemporary of Christ or even of any survivor of
Christ's generation, has been disputed, and finally, it seems,
disallowed. But I repeat, I take no note here of the disputes of
experts as to the date of the gospels, not because I am not acquainted
with them, but because, as the earliest codices are Greek manuscripts
of the fourth century A.D., and the Syrian ones are translations from
the Greek, the paleographic expert has no difficulty in arriving at
whatever conclusion happens to suit his beliefs or disbeliefs; and he
never succeeds in convincing the other experts except when they believe
or disbelieve exactly as he does. Hence I conclude that the dates of
the original narratives cannot be ascertained, and that we must make
the best of the evangelists' own accounts of themselves. There is, as
we have seen, a very marked difference between them, leaving no doubt
that we are dealing with four authors of well-marked diversity; but
they all end in an attitude of expectancy of the Second Coming which
they agree in declaring Jesus to have positively and unequivocally
promised within the lifetime of his contemporaries. Any believer
compiling a gospel after the last of these contemporaries had passed
away, would either reject and omit the tradition of that promise on the
ground that since it was not fulfilled, and could never now be
fulfilled, it could not have been made, or else have had to confess to
the Jews, who were the keenest critics of the Christians, that Jesus
was either an impostor or the victim of a delusion. Now all the
evangelists except Matthew expressly declare themselves to be
believers; and Matthew's narrative is obviously not that of a sceptic.
I therefore assume as a matter of common sense that, interpolations
apart, the gospels are derived from narratives written in the first
century A.D. I include John, because though it may be claimed that he
hedged his position by claiming that Christ, who specially loved him,
endowed him with a miraculous life until the Second Coming, the
conclusion being that John is alive at this moment, I cannot believe
that a literary forger could hope to save the situation by so
outrageous a pretension. Also, John's narrative is in many passages
nearer to the realities of public life than the simple chronicle of
Matthew or the sentimental romance of Luke. This may be because John
was obviously more a man of the world than the others, and knew, as
mere chroniclers and romancers never know, what actually happens away
from books and desks. But it may also be because he saw and heard what
happened instead of collecting traditions about it. The paleographers
and daters of first quotations may say what they please: John's claim
to give evidence as an eyewitness whilst the others are only compiling
history is supported by a certain verisimilitude which appeals to me as
one who has preached a new doctrine and argued about it, as well as
written stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art backed by
knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not forget that the
best dramatic art is the operation of a divinatory instinct for truth.
Be that as it may, John was certainly not the man to believe in the
Second Coming and yet give a date for it after that date had passed.
There is really no escape from the conclusion that the originals of all
the gospels date from the period within which there was still a
possibility of the Second Coming occurring at the promised time.



THE PECULIAR THEOLOGY OF JESUS.

In spite of the suspicions roused by John's idiosyncrasies, his
narrative is of enormous importance to those who go to the gospels for
a credible modern religion. For it is John who adds to the other
records such sayings as that "I and my father are one"; that "God is a
spirit"; that the aim of Jesus is not only that the people should have
life, but that they should have it "more abundantly" (a distinction
much needed by people who think a man is either alive or dead, and
never consider the important question how much alive he is); and that
men should bear in mind what they were told in the 82nd Psalm: that
they are gods, and are responsible for the doing of the mercy and
justice of God. The Jews stoned him for saying these things, and, when
he remonstrated with them for stupidly stoning one who had done nothing
to them but good works, replied "For a good work we stone thee not; but
for blasphemy, because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God." He
insists (referring to the 82nd psalm) that if it is part of their own
religion that they are gods on the assurance of God himself, it cannot
be blasphemy for him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the
world, to say "I am the son of God." But they will not have this at any
price; and he has to escape from their fury. Here the point is obscured
by the distinction made by Jesus between himself and other men. He
says, in effect, "If you are gods, then, a fortiori, I am a god." John
makes him say this, just as he makes him say "I am the light of the
world." But Matthew makes him say to the people "Ye are the light of
the world." John has no grip of the significance of these scraps which
he has picked up: he is far more interested in a notion of his own that
men can escape death and do even more extraordinary things than Christ
himself: in fact, he actually represents Jesus as promising this
explicitly, and is finally led into the audacious hint that he, John,
is himself immortal in the flesh. Still, he does not miss the
significant sayings altogether. However inconsistent they may be with
the doctrine he is consciously driving at, they appeal to some
sub-intellectual instinct in him that makes him stick them in, like a
child sticking tinsel stars on the robe of a toy angel.

John does not mention the ascension; and the end of his narrative
leaves Christ restored to life, and appearing from time to time among
his disciples. It is on one of these occasions that John describes the
miraculous draught of fishes which Luke places at the other end of
Christ's career, at the call of the sons of Zebedee.



JOHN AGREED AS TO THE TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION.

Although John, following his practice of showing Jesus's skill as a
debater, makes him play a less passive part at his trial, he still
gives substantially the same account of it as all the rest. And the
question that would occur to any modern reader never occurs to him, any
more than it occurred to Matthew, Mark, or Luke. That question is, Why
on earth did not Jesus defend himself, and make the people rescue him
from the High Priest? He was so popular that they were unable to
prevent him driving the money-changers out of the temple, or to arrest
him for it. When they did arrest him afterwards, they had to do it at
night in a garden. He could have argued with them as he had often done
in the temple, and justified himself both to the Jewish law and to
Caesar. And he had physical force at his command to back up his
arguments: all that was needed was a speech to rally his followers; and
he was not gagged. The reply of the evangelists would have been that
all these inquiries are idle, because if Jesus had wished to escape, he
could have saved himself all that trouble by doing what John describes
him as doing: that is, casting his captors to the earth by an exertion
of his miraculous power. If you asked John why he let them get up again
and torment and execute him, John would have replied that it was part
of the destiny of God to be slain and buried and to rise again, and
that to have avoided this destiny would have been to repudiate his
Godhead. And that is the only apparent explanation. Whether you believe
with the evangelists that Christ could have rescued himself by a
miracle, or, as a modern Secularist, point out that he could have
defended himself effectually, the fact remains that according to all
the narratives he did not do so. He had to die like a god, not to save
himself "like one of the princes." *

    * Jesus himself had refered to that psalm (LXXII) in which
      men who have judged unjustly and accepted the persons of the
      wicked (including by anticipation practically all the white
      inhabitants of the British Isles and the North American
      continent, to mention no other places) are condemned in the
      words, "I have said, ye are gods; and all of ye are children
      of the Most High; but ye shall die like men, and fall like
      one of the princes."

The consensus on this point is important, because it proves the
absolute sincerity of Jesus's declaration that he was a god. No
impostor would have accepted such dreadful consequences without an
effort to save himself. No impostor would have been nerved to endure
them by the conviction that he would rise from the grave and live again
after three days. If we accept the story at all, we must believe this,
and believe also that his promise to return in glory and establish his
kingdom on earth within the lifetime of men then living, was one which
he believed that he could, and indeed must fulfil. Two evangelists
declare that in his last agony he despaired, and reproached God for
forsaking him. The other two represent him as dying in unshaken
conviction and charity with the simple remark that the ordeal was
finished. But all four testify that his faith was not deceived, and
that he actually rose again after three days. And I think it
unreasonable to doubt that all four wrote their narratives in full
faith that the other promise would be fulfilled too, and that they
themselves might live to witness the Second Coming.



CREDIBILITY OF THE GOSPELS.

It will be noted by the older among my readers, who are sure to be
obsessed more or less by elderly wrangles as to whether the gospels are
credible as matter-of-fact narratives, that I have hardly raised this
question, and have accepted the credible and incredible with equal
complacency. I have done this because credibility is a subjective
condition, as the evolution of religious belief clearly shows. Belief
is not dependent on evidence and reason. There is as much evidence that
the miracles occurred as that the battle of Waterloo occurred, or that
a large body of Russian troops passed through England in 1914 to take
part in the war on the western front. The reasons for believing in the
murder of Pompey are the same as the reasons for believing in the
raising of Lazarus. Both have been believed and doubted by men of equal
intelligence. Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain,
surround us on every hand; life itself is the miracle of miracles.
Miracles in the sense of events that violate the normal course of our
experience are vouched for every day: the flourishing Church of Christ
Scientist is founded on a multitude of such miracles. Nobody believes
all the miracles: everybody believes some of them. I cannot tell why
men who will not believe that Jesus ever existed yet believe firmly
that Shakespear was Bacon. I cannot tell why people who believe that
angels appeared and fought on our side at the battle of Mons, and who
believe that miracles occur quite frequently at Lourdes, nevertheless
boggle at the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St.
Januarius, and reject it as a trick of priestcraft. I cannot tell why
people who will not believe Matthew's story of three kings bringing
costly gifts to the cradle of Jesus, believe Luke's story of the
shepherds and the stable. I cannot tell why people, brought up to
believe the Bible in the old literal way as an infallible record and
revelation, and rejecting that view later on, begin by rejecting the
Old Testament, and give up the belief in a brimstone hell before they
give up (if they ever do) the belief in a heaven of harps, crowns, and
thrones. I cannot tell why people who will not believe in baptism on
any terms believe in vaccination with the cruel fanaticism of
inquisitors. I am convinced that if a dozen sceptics were to draw up in
parallel columns a list of the events narrated in the gospels which
they consider credible and incredible respectively, their lists would
be different in several particulars. Belief is literally a matter of
taste.



FASHIONS OF BELIEF.

Now matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion. We are
conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and
modern fashions. For instance, though we are more credulous than men
were in the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of fortunetellers,
magicians, miracle workers, agents of communication with the dead,
discoverers of the elixir of life, transmuters of metals, and healers
of all sorts, as the Middle Ages never dreamed of as possible, yet we
will not take our miracles in the form that convinced the Middle Ages.
Arithmetical numbers appealed to the Middle Ages just as they do to us,
because they are difficult to deal with, and because the greatest
masters of numbers, the Newtons and Leibnitzes, rank among the greatest
men. But there are fashions in numbers too. The Middle Ages took a
fancy to some familiar number like seven; and because it was an odd
number, and the world was made in seven days, and there are seven stars
in Charles's Wain, and for a dozen other reasons, they were ready to
believe anything that had a seven or a seven times seven in it. Seven
deadly sins, seven swords of sorrow in the heart of the Virgin, seven
champions of Christendom, seemed obvious and reasonable things to
believe in simply because they were seven. To us, on the contrary, the
number seven is the stamp of superstition. We will believe in nothing
less than millions. A medieval doctor gained his patient's confidence
by telling him that his vitals were being devoured by seven worms. Such
a diagnosis would ruin a modern physician. The modern physician tells
his patient that he is ill because every drop of his blood is swarming
with a million microbes; and the patient believes him abjectly and
instantly. Had a bishop told William the Conqueror that the sun was
seventy-seven miles distant from the earth, William would have believed
him not only out of respect for the Church, but because he would have
felt that seventy-seven miles was the proper distance. The Kaiser,
knowing just as little about it as the Conqueror, would send that
bishop to an asylum. Yet he (I presume) unhesitatingly accepts the
estimate of ninety-two and nine-tenths millions of miles, or whatever
the latest big figure may be.



CREDIBILITY AND TRUTH.

And here I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by
the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earth
was flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense,
and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply,
"Look at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round are
exercising a wholesome scepticism. The modern man who believes that the
earth is round is grossly credulous. Flat Earth men drive him to fury
by confuting him with the greatest ease when he tries to argue about
it. Confront him with a theory that the earth is cylindrical, or
annular, or hour-glass shaped, and he is lost. The thing he believes
may be true, but that is not why he believes it: he believes it because
in some mysterious way it appeals to his imagination. If you ask him
why he believes that the sun is ninety-odd million miles off, either he
will have to confess that he doesn't know, or he will say that Newton
proved it. But he has not read the treatise in which Newton proved it,
and does not even know that it was written in Latin. If you press an
Ulster Protestant as to why he regards Newton as an infallible
authority, and St. Thomas Aquinas or the Pope as superstitious liars
whom, after his death, he will have the pleasure of watching from his
place in heaven whilst they roast in eternal flame, or if you ask me
why I take into serious consideration Colonel Sir Almroth Wright's
estimates of the number of streptococci contained in a given volume of
serum whilst I can only laugh at the earlier estimates of the number of
angels that can be accommodated on the point of a needle, no reasonable
reply is possible except that somehow sevens and angels are out of
fashion, and billions and streptococci are all the rage. I simply
cannot tell you why Bacon, Montaigne, and Cervantes had a quite
different fashion of credulity and incredulity from the Venerable Bede
and Piers Plowman and the divine doctors of the Aquinas-Aristotle
school, who were certainly no stupider, and had the same facts before
them. Still less can I explain why, if we assume that these leaders of
thought had all reasoned out their beliefs, their authority seemed
conclusive to one generation and blasphemous to another, neither
generation having followed the reasoning or gone into the facts of the
matter for itself at all.

It is therefore idle to begin disputing with the reader as to what he
should believe in the gospels and what he should disbelieve. He will
believe what he can, and disbelieve what he must. If he draws any lines
at all, they will be quite arbitrary ones. St. John tells us that when
Jesus explicitly claimed divine honors by the sacrament of his body and
blood, so many of his disciples left him that their number was reduced
to twelve. Many modern readers will not hold out so long: they will
give in at the first miracle. Others will discriminate. They will
accept the healing miracles, and reject the feeding of the multitude.
To some the walking on the water will be a legendary exaggeration of a
swim, ending in an ordinary rescue of Peter; and the raising of Lazarus
will be only a similar glorification of a commonplace feat of
artificial respiration, whilst others will scoff at it as a planned
imposture in which Lazarus acted as a confederate. Between the
rejection of the stories as wholly fabulous and the acceptance of them
as the evangelists themselves meant them to be accepted, there will be
many shades of belief and disbelief, of sympathy and derision. It is
not a question of being a Christian or not. A Mahometan Arab will
accept literally and without question parts of the narrative which an
English Archbishop has to reject or explain away; and many Theosophists
and lovers of the wisdom of India, who never enter a Christian Church
except as sightseers, will revel in parts of John's gospel which mean
nothing to a pious matter-of-fact Bradford manufacturer. Every reader
takes from the Bible what he can get. In submitting a precis of the
gospel narratives I have not implied any estimate either of their
credibility or of their truth. I have simply informed him or reminded
him, as the case may be, of what those narratives tell us about their
hero.



CHRISTIAN ICONOLATRY AND THE PERILS OF THE ICONOCLAST.

I must now abandon this attitude, and make a serious draft on the
reader's attention by facing the question whether, if and when the
medieval and Methodist will-to-believe the Salvationist and miraculous
side of the gospel narratives fails us, as it plainly has failed the
leaders of modern thought, there will be anything left of the mission
of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels into the
waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our
libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the
position of the man in Bunyan's riddle who found that "the more he
threw away, the more he had." We get rid, to begin with, of the
idolatrous or iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally
that worship which is given to pictures and statues of him, and to
finished and unalterable stories about him. The test of the prevalence
of this is that if you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person,
or even as a still active God, such worshippers are more horrified than
Don Juan was when the statue stepped from its pedestal and came to
supper with him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you may doubt
whether he ever existed; you may reject Christianity for Judaism,
Mahometanism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the iconolaters, placidly
contemptuous, will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen. But
if you venture to wonder how Christ would have looked if he had shaved
and had his hair cut, or what size in shoes he took, or whether he
swore when he stood on a nail in the carpenter's shop, or could not
button his robe when he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the
repartees by which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him
into sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story
in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce an
extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You will have
made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its
pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences
that may flow from this terrifying miracle. It is at such moments that
you realize that the iconolaters have never for a moment conceived
Christ as a real person who meant what he said, as a fact, as a force
like electricity, only needing the invention of suitable political
machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with revolutionary
effect.

Thus it is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society: it is
belief. The moment it strikes you (as it may any day) that Christ is
not the lifeless harmless image he has hitherto been to you, but a
rallying centre for revolutionary influences which all established
States and Churches fight, you must look to yourselves; for you have
brought the image to life; and the mob may not be able to bear that
horror.



THE ALTERNATIVE TO BARRABAS.

But mobs must be faced if civilization is to be saved. It did not need
the present war to show that neither the iconographic Christ nor the
Christ of St. Paul has succeeded in effecting the salvation of human
society. Whilst I write, the Turks are said to be massacring the
Armenian Christians on an unprecedented scale; but Europe is not in a
position to remonstrate; for her Christians are slaying one another by
every device which civilization has put within their reach as busily as
they are slaying the Turks. Barabbas is triumphant everywhere; and the
final use he makes of his triumph is to lead us all to suicide with
heroic gestures and resounding lies. Now those who, like myself, see
the Barabbasque social organization as a failure, and are convinced
that the Life Force (or whatever you choose to call it) cannot be
finally beaten by any failure, and will even supersede humanity by
evolving a higher species if we cannot master the problems raised by
the multiplication of our own numbers, have always known that Jesus had
a real message, and have felt the fascination of his character and
doctrine. Not that we should nowadays dream of claiming any
supernatural authority for him, much less the technical authority which
attaches to an educated modern philosopher and jurist. But when, having
entirely got rid of Salvationist Christianity, and even contracted a
prejudice against Jesus on the score of his involuntary connection with
it, we engage on a purely scientific study of economics, criminology,
and biology, and find that our practical conclusions are virtually
those of Jesus, we are distinctly pleased and encouraged to find that
we were doing him an injustice, and that the nimbus that surrounds his
head in the pictures may be interpreted some day as a light of science
rather than a declarations of sentiment or a label of idolatry.

The doctrines in which Jesus is thus confirmed are, roughly, the
following:

1. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You are the son of God; and God
is the son of man. God is a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in
truth, and not an elderly gentleman to be bribed and begged from. We
are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your
neighbor without injuring or helping yourself. God is your father: you
are here to do God's work; and you and your father are one.

2. Get rid of property by throwing it into the common stock. Dissociate
your work entirely from money payments. If you let a child starve you
are letting God starve. Get rid of all anxiety about tomorrow's dinner
and clothes, because you cannot serve two masters: God and Mammon.

S. Get rid of judges and punishment and revenge. Love your neighbor as
yourself, he being a part of yourself. And love your enemies: they are
your neighbors.

4. Get rid of your family entanglements. Every mother you meet is as
much your mother as the woman who bore you. Every man you meet is as
much your brother as the man she bore after you. Don't waste your time
at family funerals grieving for your relatives: attend to life, not to
death: there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and
better. In the kingdom of heaven, which, as aforesaid, is within you,
there is no marriage nor giving in marriage, because you cannot devote
your life to two divinities: God and the person you are married to.

Now these are very interesting propositions; and they become more
interesting every day, as experience and science drive us more and more
to consider them favorably. In considering them, we shall waste our
time unless we give them a reasonable construction. We must assume that
the man who saw his way through such a mass of popular passion and
illusion as stands between us and a sense of the value of such teaching
was quite aware of all the objections that occur to an average
stockbroker in the first five minutes. It is true that the world is
governed to a considerable extent by the considerations that occur to
stockbrokers in the first five minutes; but as the result is that the
world is so badly governed that those who know the truth can hardly
bear to live in it, an objection from an average stockbroker
constitutes in itself a prima facie case for any social reform.



THE REDUCTION TO MODERN PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY.

All the same, we must reduce the ethical counsels and proposals of
Jesus to modern practice if they are to be of any use to us. If we ask
our stockbroker to act simply as Jesus advised his disciples to act, he
will reply, very justly, "You are advising me to become a tramp." If we
urge a rich man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, he
will inform us that such an operation is impossible. If he sells his
shares and his lands, their purchaser will continue all those
activities which oppress the poor. If all the rich men take the advice
simultaneously the shares will fall to zero and the lands be
unsaleable. If one man sells out and throws the money into the slums,
the only result will be to add himself and his dependents to the list
of the poor, and to do no good to the poor beyond giving a chance few
of them a drunken spree. We must therefore bear in mind that whereas,
in the time of Jesus, and in the ages which grew darker and darker
after his death until the darkness, after a brief false dawn in the
Reformation and the Renascence, culminated in the commercial night of
the nineteenth century, it was believed that you could not make men
good by Act of Parliament, we now know that you cannot make them good
in any other way, and that a man who is better than his fellows is a
nuisance. The rich man must sell up not only himself but his whole
class; and that can be done only through the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The disciple cannot have his bread without money until there
is bread for everybody without money; and that requires an elaborate
municipal organization of the food supply, rate supported. Being
members one of another means One Man One Vote, and One Woman One Vote,
and universal suffrage and equal incomes and all sorts of modern
political measures. Even in Syria in the time of Jesus his teachings
could not possibly have been realized by a series of independent
explosions of personal righteousness on the part of the separate units
of the population. Jerusalem could not have done what even a village
community cannot do, and what Robinson Crusoe himself could not have
done if his conscience, and the stern compulsion of Nature, had not
imposed a common rule on the half dozen Robinson Crusoes who struggled
within him for not wholly compatible satisfactions. And what cannot be
done in Jerusalem or Juan Fernandez cannot be done in London, New York,
Paris, and Berlin. In short, Christianity, good or bad, right or wrong,
must perforce be left out of the question in human affairs until it is
made practically applicable to them by complicated political devices;
and to pretend that a field preacher under the governorship of Pontius
Pilate, or even Pontius Pilate himself in council with all the wisdom
of Rome, could have worked out applications of Christianity or any
other system of morals for the twentieth century, is to shelve the
subject much more effectually than Nero and all its other persecutors
ever succeeded in doing. Personal righteousness, and the view that you
cannot make people moral by Act of Parliament, is, in fact, the
favorite defensive resort of the people who, consciously or
subconsciously, are quite determined not to have their property meddled
with by Jesus or any other reformer.



MODERN COMMUNISM.

Now let us see what modern experience and modern sociology has to say
to the teaching of Jesus as summarized here. First, get rid of your
property by throwing it into the common stock. One can hear the
Pharisees of Jerusalem and Chorazin and Bethsaida saying, "My good
fellow, if you were to divide up the wealth of Judea equally today,
before the end of the year you would have rich and poor, poverty and
affluence, just as you have today; for there will always be the idle
and the industrious, the thrifty and the wasteful, the drunken and the
sober; and, as you yourself have very justly observed, the poor we
shall have always with us." And we can hear the reply, "Woe unto you,
liars and hypocrites; for ye have this very day divided up the wealth
of the country yourselves, as must be done every day (for man liveth
not otherwise than from hand to mouth, nor can fish and eggs endure for
ever); and ye have divided it unjustly; also ye have said that my
reproach to you for having the poor always with you was a law unto you
that this evil should persist and stink in the nostrils of God to all
eternity; wherefore I think that Lazarus will yet see you beside Dives
in hell." Modern Capitalism has made short work of the primitive pleas
for inequality. The Pharisees themselves have organized communism in
capital. Joint stock is the order of the day. An attempt to return to
individual properties as the basis of our production would smash
civilization more completely than ten revolutions. You cannot get the
fields tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator. Take the
shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to you the
particular length of rail, the particular seat in the railway carriage,
the particular lever in the engine that is his very own and nobody
else's; and he will shun you as a madman, very wisely. And if, like
Ananias and Sapphira, you try to hold back your little shop or what not
from the common stock, represented by the Trust, or Combine, or Kartel,
the Trust will presently freeze you out and rope you in and finally
strike you dead industrially as thoroughly as St. Peter himself. There
is no longer any practical question open as to Communism in production:
the struggle today is over the distribution of the product: that is,
over the daily dividing-up which is the first necessity of organized
society.



REDISTRIBUTION.

Now it needs no Christ to convince anybody today that our system of
distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have million-dollar
babies side by side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted
drudgery. One person in every five dies in a workhouse, a public
hospital, or a madhouse. In cities like London the proportion is very
nearly one in two. Naturally so outrageous a distribution has to be
effected by violence pure and simple. If you demur, you are sold up. If
you resist the selling up you are bludgeoned and imprisoned, the
process being euphemistically called the maintenance of law and order.
Iniquity can go no further. By this time nobody who knows the figures
of the distribution defends them. The most bigoted British Conservative
hesitates to say that his king should be much poorer than Mr.
Rockefeller, or to proclaim the moral superiority of prostitution to
needlework on the ground that it pays better. The need for a drastic
redistribution of income in all civilized countries is now as obvious
and as generally admitted as the need for sanitation.



SHALL HE WHO MAKES, OWN?

It is when we come to the question of the proportions in which we are
to redistribute that controversy begins. We are bewildered by an
absurdly unpractical notion that in some way a man's income should be
given to him, not to enable him to live, but as a sort of Sunday School
Prize for good behavior. And this folly is complicated by a less
ridiculous but quite as unpractical belief that it is possible to
assign to each person the exact portion of the national income that he
or she has produced. To a child it seems that the blacksmith has made a
horse-shoe, and that therefore the horse-shoe is his. But the
blacksmith knows that the horse-shoe does not belong solely to him, but
to his landlord, to the rate collector and taxgatherer, to the men from
whom he bought the iron and anvil and the coals, leaving only a scrap
of its value for himself; and this scrap he has to exchange with the
butcher and baker and the clothier for the things that he really
appropriates as living tissue or its wrappings, paying for all of them
more than their cost; for these fellow traders of his have also their
landlords and moneylenders to satisfy. If, then, such simple and direct
village examples of apparent individual production turn out on a
moment's examination to be the products of an elaborate social
organization, what is to be said of such products as dreadnoughts,
factory-made pins and needles, and steel pens? If God takes the
dreadnought in one hand and a steel pen in the other, and asks Job who
made them, and to whom they should belong by maker's right, Job must
scratch his puzzled head with a potsherd and be dumb, unless indeed it
strikes him that God is the ultimate maker, and that all we have a
right to do with the product is to feed his lambs.



LABOR TIME.

So maker's right as an alternative to taking the advice of Jesus would
not work. In practice nothing was possible in that direction but to pay
a worker by labor time so much an hour or day or week or year. But how
much? When that question came up, the only answer was "as little as he
can be starved into accepting," with the ridiculous results already
mentioned, and the additional anomaly that the largest share went to
the people who did not work at all, and the least to those who worked
hardest. In England nine-tenths of the wealth goes into the pockets of
one-tenth of the population.



THE DREAM OF DISTRIBUTION ACCORDING TO MERIT.

Against this comes the protest of the Sunday School theorists "Why not
distribute according to merit?" Here one imagines Jesus, whose smile
has been broadening down the ages as attempt after attempt to escape
from his teaching has led to deeper and deeper disaster, laughing
outright. Was ever so idiotic a project mooted as the estimation of
virtue in money? The London School of Economics is, we must suppose, to
set examination papers with such questions as, "Taking the money value
of the virtues of Jesus as 100, and of Judas Iscariot as zero, give the
correct figures for, respectively, Pontius Pilate, the proprietor of
the Gadarene swine, the widow who put her mite in the poor-box, Mr.
Horatio Bottomley, Shakespear, Mr. Jack Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton,
Palestrina, Offenbach, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mr. Paul Cinquevalli, your
family doctor, Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Siddons, your charwoman, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and the common hangman." Or "The late Mr.
Barney Barnato received as his lawful income three thousand times as
much money as an English agricultural laborer of good general
character. Name the principal virtues in which Mr. Barnato exceeded the
laborer three thousandfold; and give in figures the loss sustained by
civilization when Mr. Barnato was driven to despair and suicide by the
reduction of his multiple to one thousand." The Sunday School idea,
with its principle "to each the income he deserves" is really too silly
for discussion. Hamlet disposed of it three hundred years ago. "Use
every man after his deserts, and who shall scape whipping?" Jesus
remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the
fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries. The moment you try
to reduce the Sunday School idea to figures you find that it brings you
back to the hopeless plan of paying for a man's time; and your
examination paper will read "The time of Jesus was worth nothing (he
complained that the foxes had holes and the birds of the air nests
whilst he had not a place to lay his head). Dr. Crippen's time was
worth, say, three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Criticize this
arrangement; and, if you dispute its justice, state in pounds, dollars,
francs and marks, what their relative time wages ought to have been."
Your answer may be that the question is in extremely bad taste and that
you decline to answer it. But you cannot object to being asked how many
minutes of a bookmaker's time is worth two hours of an astronomer's?



VITAL DISTRIBUTION.

In the end you are forced to ask the question you should have asked at
the beginning. What do you give a man an income for? Obviously to keep
him alive. Since it is evident that the first condition on which he can
be kept alive without enslaving somebody else is that he shall produce
an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we may quite
rationally compel him to abstain from idling by whatever means we
employ to compel him to abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any
other crime. The one supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do
nothing; that is, to be as idle, lazy, and heartless in dealing with
him as he is in dealing with us. Even if we provided work for him
instead of basing, as we do, our whole industrial system on successive
competitive waves of overwork with their ensuing troughs of
unemployment, we should still sternly deny him the alternative of not
doing it; for the result must be that he will become poor and make his
children poor if he has any; and poor people are cancers in the
commonwealth, costing far more than if they were handsomely pensioned
off as incurables. Jesus had more sense than to propose anything of the
sort. He said to his disciples, in effect, "Do your work for love; and
let the other people lodge and feed and clothe you for love." Or, as we
should put it nowadays, "for nothing." All human experience and all
natural uncommercialized human aspiration point to this as the right
path. The Greeks said, "First secure an independent income; and then
practise virtue." We all strive towards an independent income. We all
know as well as Jesus did that if we have to take thought for the
morrow as to whether there shall be anything to eat or drink it will be
impossible for us to think of nobler things, or live a higher life than
that of a mole, whose life is from beginning to end a frenzied pursuit
of food. Until the community is organized in such a way that the fear
of bodily want is forgotten as completely as the fear of wolves already
is in civilized capitals, we shall never have a decent social life.
Indeed the whole attraction of our present arrangements lies in the
fact that they do relieve a handful of us from this fear; but as the
relief is effected stupidly and wickedly by making the favored handful
parasitic on the rest, they are smitten with the degeneracy which seems
to be the inevitable biological penalty of complete parasitism, and
corrupt culture and statecraft instead of contributing to them, their
excessive leisure being as mischievous as the excessive toil of the
laborers. Anyhow, the moral is clear. The two main problems of
organized society, how to secure the subsistence of all its members,
and how to prevent the theft of that subsistence by idlers, should be
entirely dissociated; and the practical failure of one of them to
automatically achieve the other recognized and acted on. We may not all
have Jesus's psychological power of seeing, without any enlightenment
from more modern economic phenomena, that they must fail; but we have
the hard fact before us that they do fail. The only people who cling to
the lazy delusion that it is possible to find a just distribution that
will work automatically are those who postulate some revolutionary
change like land nationalization, which by itself would obviously only
force into greater urgency the problem of how to distribute the product
of the land among all the individuals in the community.



EQUAL DISTRIBUTION.

When that problem is at last faced, the question of the proportion in
which the national income shall be distributed can have only one
answer. All our shares must be equal. It has always been so; it always
will be so. It is true that the incomes of robbers vary considerably
from individual to individual; and the variation is reflected in the
incomes of their parasites. The commercialization of certain
exceptional talents has also produced exceptional incomes, direct and
derivative. Persons who live on rent of land and capital are
economically, though not legally, in the category of robbers, and have
grotesquely different incomes. But in the huge mass of mankind
variation Of income from individual to individual is unknown, because
it is ridiculously impracticable. As a device for persuading a
carpenter that a judge is a creature of superior nature to himself, to
be deferred and submitted to even to the death, we may give a carpenter
a hundred pounds a year and a judge five thousand; but the wage for one
carpenter is the wage for all the carpenters: the salary for one judge
is the salary for all the judges.



THE CAPTAIN AND THE CABIN BOY.

Nothing, therefore, is really in question, or ever has been, but the
differences between class incomes. Already there is economic equality
between captains, and economic equality between cabin boys. What is at
issue still is whether there shall be economic equality between
captains and cabin boys. What would Jesus have said? Presumably he
would have said that if your only object is to produce a captain and a
cabin boy for the purpose of transferring you from Liverpool to New
York, or to manoeuvre a fleet and carry powder from the magazine to the
gun, then you need give no more than a shilling to the cabin boy for
every pound you give to the more expensively trained captain. But if in
addition to this you desire to allow the two human souls which are
inseparable from the captain and the cabin boy, and which alone
differentiate them from the donkey-engine, to develop all their
possibilities, then you may find the cabin boy costing rather more than
the captain, because cabin boy's work does not do so much for the soul
as captain's work. Consequently you will have to give him at least as
much as the captain unless you definitely wish him to be a lower
creature, in which case the sooner you are hanged as an abortionist the
better. That is the fundamental argument.



THE POLITICAL AND BIOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO INEQUALITY.

But there are other reasons for objecting to class stratification of
income which have heaped themselves up since the time of Jesus. In
politics it defeats every form of government except that of a
necessarily corrupt oligarchy. Democracy in the most democratic modern
republics: Prance and the United States for example, is an imposture
and a delusion. It reduces justice and law to a farce: law becomes
merely an instrument for keeping the poor in subjection; and accused
workmen are tried, not by a jury of their peers, but by conspiracies of
their exploiters. The press is the press of the rich and the curse of
the poor: it becomes dangerous to teach men to read. The priest becomes
the mere complement of the policeman in the machinery by which the
countryhouse oppresses the village. Worst of all, marriage becomes a
class affair: the infinite variety of choice which nature offers to the
young in search of a mate is narrowed to a handful of persons of
similar income; and beauty and health become the dreams of artists and
the advertisements of quacks instead of the normal conditions of life.
Society is not only divided but actually destroyed in all directions by
inequality of income between classes: such stability as it has is due
to the huge blocks of people between whom there is equality of income.



JESUS AS ECONOMIST.

It seems therefore that we must begin by holding the right to an income
as sacred and equal, just as we now begin by holding the right to life
as sacred and equal. Indeed the one right is only a restatement of the
other. To hang me for cutting a dock laborer's throat after making much
of me for leaving him to starve when I do not happen to have a ship for
him to unload is idiotic; for as he does far less mischief with his
throat cut than when he is starving, a rational society would esteem
the cutthroat more highly than the capitalist. The thing has become so
obvious, and the evil so unendurable, that if our attempt at
civilization is not to perish like all the previous ones, we shall have
to organize our society in such a way as to be able to say to every
person in the land, "Take no thought, saying What shall we eat? or What
shall we drink? or Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" We shall then no
longer have a race of men whose hearts are in their pockets and safes
and at their bankers. As Jesus said, where your treasure is, there will
your heart be also. That was why he recommended that money should cease
to be a treasure, and that we should take steps to make ourselves
utterly reckless of it, setting our minds free for higher uses. In
other words, that we should all be gentlemen and take care of our
country because our country takes care of us, instead of the
commercialized cads we are, doing everything and anything for money,
and selling our souls and bodies by the pound and the inch after
wasting half the day haggling over the price. Decidedly, whether you
think Jesus was God or not, you must admit that he was a first-rate
political economist.



JESUS AS BIOLOGIST.

He was also, as we now see, a first-rate biologist. It took a century
and a half of evolutionary preachers, from Buffon and Goethe to Butler
and Bergson, to convince us that we and our father are one; that as the
kingdom of heaven is within us we need not go about looking for it and
crying Lo here! and Lo there!; that God is not a picture of a pompous
person in white robes in the family Bible, but a spirit; that it is
through this spirit that we evolve towards greater abundance of life;
that we are the lamps in which the light of the world burns: that, in
cohort, we are gods though we die like men. All that is today sound
biology and psychology; and the efforts of Natural Selectionists like
Weismann to reduce evolution to mere automatism have not touched the
doctrine of Jesus, though they have made short work of the theologians
who conceived God as a magnate keeping men and angels as Lord
Rothschild keeps buffaloes and emus at Tring.



MONEY THE MIDWIFE OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNISM.

It may be asked here by some simple-minded reader why we should not
resort to crude Communism as the disciples were told to do. This would
be quite practicable in a village where production was limited to the
supply of the primitive wants which nature imposes on all human beings
alike. We know that people need bread and boots without waiting for
them to come and ask for these things and offer to pay for them. But
when civilization advances to the point at which articles are produced
that no man absolutely needs and that only some men fancy or can use,
it is necessary that individuals should be able to have things made to
their order and at their own cost. It is safe to provide bread for
everybody because everybody wants and eats bread; but it would be
absurd to provide microscopes and trombones, pet snakes and polo
mallets, alembics and test tubes for everybody, as nine-tenths of them
would be wasted; and the nine-tenths of the population who do not use
such things would object to their being provided at all. We have in the
invaluable instrument called money a means of enabling every individual
to order and pay for the particular things he desires over and above
the things he must consume in order to remain alive, plus the things
the State insists on his having and using whether he wants to or not;
for example, clothes, sanitary arrangements, armies and navies. In
large communities, where even the most eccentric demands for
manufactured articles average themselves out until they can be foreseen
within a negligible margin of error, direct communism (Take what you
want without payment, as the people do in Morris's News From Nowhere)
will, after a little experience, be found not only practicable but
highly economical to an extent that now seems impossible. The
sportsmen, the musicians, the physicists, the biologists will get their
apparatus for the asking as easily as their bread, or, as at present,
their paving, street lighting, and bridges; and the deaf man will not
object to contribute to communal flutes when the musician has to
contribute to communal ear trumpets. There are cases (for example,
radium) in which the demand may be limited to the merest handful of
laboratory workers, and in which nevertheless the whole community must
pay because the price is beyond the means of any individual worker. But
even when the utmost allowance is made for extensions of communism that
now seem fabulous, there will still remain for a long time to come
regions of supply and demand in which men will need and use money or
individual credit, and for which, therefore, they must have individual
incomes. Foreign travel is an obvious instance. We are so far from even
national communism still, that we shall probably have considerable
developments of local communism before it becomes possible for a
Manchester man to go up to London for a day without taking any money
with him. The modern practical form of the communism of Jesus is
therefore, for the present, equal distribution of the surplus of the
national income that is not absorbed by simple communism.



JUDGE NOT.

In dealing with crime and the family, modern thought and experience
have thrown no fresh light on the views of Jesus. When Swift had
occasion to illustrate the corruption of our civilization by making a
catalogue of the types of scoundrels it produces, he always gave judges
a conspicuous place alongside of them they judged. And he seems to have
done this not as a restatement of the doctrine of Jesus, but as the
outcome of his own observation and judgment. One of Mr. Gilbert
Chesterton's stories has for its hero a judge who, whilst trying a
criminal case, is so overwhelmed by the absurdity of his position and
the wickedness of the things it forces him to do, that he throws off
the ermine there and then, and goes out into the world to live the life
of an honest man instead of that of a cruel idol. There has also been a
propaganda of a soulless stupidity called Determinism, representing man
as a dead object driven hither and thither by his environment,
antecedents, circumstances, and so forth, which nevertheless does
remind us that there are limits to the number of cubits an individual
can add to his stature morally or physically, and that it is silly as
well as cruel to torment a man five feet high for not being able to
pluck fruit that is within the reach of men of average height. I have
known a case of an unfortunate child being beaten for not being able to
tell the time after receiving an elaborate explanation of the figures
on a clock dial, the fact being that she was short-sighted and could
not see them. This is a typical illustration of the absurdities and
cruelties into which we are led by the counter-stupidity to
Determinism: the doctrine of Free Will. The notion that people can be
good if they like, and that you should give them a powerful additional
motive for goodness by tormenting them when they do evil, would soon
reduce itself to absurdity if its application were not kept within the
limits which nature sets to the self-control of most of us. Nobody
supposes that a man with no ear for music or no mathematical faculty
could be compelled on pain of death, however cruelly inflicted, to hum
all the themes of Beethoven's symphonies or to complete Newton's work
on fluxions.



LIMITS TO FREE WILL.

Consequently such of our laws as are not merely the intimidations by
which tyrannies are maintained under pretext of law, can be obeyed
through the exercise of a quite common degree of reasoning power and
self-control. Most men and women can endure the ordinary annoyances and
disappointments of life without committing murderous assaults. They
conclude therefore that any person can refrain from such assaults if he
or she chooses to, and proceed to reinforce self-control by threats of
severe punishment. But in this they are mistaken. There are people,
some of them possessing considerable powers of mind and body, who can
no more restrain the fury into which a trifling mishap throws them than
a dog can restrain himself from snapping if he is suddenly and
painfully pinched. People fling knives and lighted paraffin lamps at
one another in a dispute over a dinner-table. Men who have suffered
several long sentences of penal servitude for murderous assaults will,
the very day after they are released, seize their wives and cast them
under drays at an irritating word. We have not only people who cannot
resist an opportunity of stealing for the sake of satisfying their
wants, but even people who have a specific mania for stealing, and do
it when they are in no need of the things they steal. Burglary
fascinates some men as sailoring fascinates some boys. Among
respectable people how many are there who can be restrained by the
warnings of their doctors and the lessons of experience from eating and
drinking more than is good for them? It is true that between
self-controlled people and ungovernable people there is a narrow margin
of moral malingerers who can be made to behave themselves by the fear
of consequences; but it is not worth while maintaining an abominable
system of malicious, deliberate, costly and degrading ill-treatment of
criminals for the sake of these marginal cases. For practical dealing
with crime, Determinism or Predestination is quite a good working rule.
People without self-control enough for social purposes may be killed,
or may be kept in asylums with a view to studying their condition and
ascertaining whether it is curable. To torture them and give ourselves
virtuous airs at their expense is ridiculous and barbarous; and the
desire to do it is vindictive and cruel. And though vindictiveness and
cruelty are at least human qualities when they are frankly proclaimed
and indulged, they are loathsome when they assume the robes of Justice.
Which, I take it, is why Shakespear's Isabella gave such a
dressing-down to Judge Angelo, and why Swift reserved the hottest
corner of his hell for judges. Also, of course, why Jesus said "Judge
not that ye be not judged" and "If any man hear my words and believe
not, I judge him not" because "he hath one that judgeth him": namely,
the Father who is one with him.

When we are robbed we generally appeal to the criminal law, not
considering that if the criminal law were effective we should not have
been robbed. That convicts us of vengeance.

I need not elaborate the argument further. I have dealt with it
sufficiently elsewhere. I have only to point out that we have been
judging and punishing ever since Jesus told us not to; and I defy
anyone to make out a convincing case for believing that the world has
been any better than it would have been if there had never been a
judge, a prison, or a gallows in it all that time. We have simply added
the misery of punishment to the misery of crime, and the cruelty of the
judge to the cruelty of the criminal. We have taken the bad man, and
made him worse by torture and degradation, incidentally making
ourselves worse in the process. It does not seem very sensible, does
it? It would have been far easier to kill him as kindly as possible, or
to label him and leave him to his conscience, or to treat him as an
invalid or a lunatic is now treated (it is only of late years, by the
way, that madmen have been delivered from the whip, the chain, and the
cage; and this, I presume, is the form in which the teaching of Jesus
could have been put into practice.)



JESUS ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY.

When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus making the same
objection to that individual appropriation of human beings which is the
essence of matrimony as to the individual appropriation of wealth. A
married man, he said, will try to please his wife, and a married woman
to please her husband, instead of doing the work of God. This is
another version of "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also." Eighteen hundred years later we find a very different person
from Jesus, Talleyrand to wit, saying the same thing. A married man
with a family, said Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this,
though not a scientifically precise statement, is true enough to be a
moral objection to marriage. As long as a man has a right to risk his
life or his livelihood for his ideas he needs only courage and
conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he forfeits that
right when he marries. It took a revolution to rescue Wagner from his
Court appointment at Dresden; and his wife never forgave him for being
glad and feeling free when he lost it and threw her back into poverty.
Millet might have gone on painting potboiling nudes to the end of his
life if his wife had not been of a heroic turn herself. Women, for the
sake of their children and parents, submit to slaveries and
prostitutions that no unattached woman would endure.

This was the beginning and the end of the objection of Jesus to
marriage and family ties, and the explanation of his conception of
heaven as a place where there should be neither marrying nor giving in
marriage. Now there is no reason to suppose that when he said this he
did not mean it. He did not, as St. Paul did afterwards in his name,
propose celibacy as a rule of life; for he was not a fool, nor, when he
denounced marriage, had he yet come to believe, as St. Paul did, that
the end of the world was at hand and there was therefore no more need
to replenish the earth. He must have meant that the race should be
continued without dividing with women and men the allegiance the
individual owes to God within him. This raises the practical problem of
how we are to secure the spiritual freedom and integrity of the priest
and the nun without their barrenness and uncompleted experience. Luther
the priest did not solve the problem by marrying a nun: he only
testified in the most convincing and practical way to the fact that
celibacy was a worse failure than marriage.



WHY JESUS DID NOT MARRY.

To all appearance the problem oppresses only a few exceptional people.
Thoroughly conventional women married to thoroughly conventional men
should not be conscious of any restriction: the chain not only leaves
them free to do whatever they want to do, but greatly facilitates their
doing it. To them an attack on marriage is not a blow struck in defence
of their freedom but at their rights and privileges. One would expect
that they would not only demur vehemently to the teachings of Jesus in
this matter, but object strongly to his not having been a married man
himself. Even those who regard him as a god descended from his throne
in heaven to take on humanity for a time might reasonably declare that
the assumption of humanity must have been incomplete at its most vital
point if he were a celibate. But the facts are flatly contrary. The
mere thought of Jesus as a married man is felt to be blasphemous by the
most conventional believers; and even those of us to whom Jesus is no
supernatural personage, but a prophet only as Mahomet was a prophet,
feel that there was something more dignified in the bachelordom of
Jesus than in the spectacle of Mahomet lying distracted on the floor of
his harem whilst his wives stormed and squabbled and henpecked round
him. We are not surprised that when Jesus called the sons of Zebedee to
follow him, he did not call their father, and that the disciples, like
Jesus himself, were all men without family entanglements. It is evident
from his impatience when people excused themselves from following him
because of their family funerals, or when they assumed that his first
duty was to his mother, that he had found family ties and domestic
affections in his way at every turn, and had become persuaded at last
that no man could follow his inner light until he was free from their
compulsion. The absence of any protest against this tempts us to
declare on this question of marriage there are no conventional people;
and that everyone of us is at heart a good Christian sexually.



INCONSISTENCY OF THE SEX INSTINCT.

But the question is not so simple as that. Sex is an exceedingly subtle
and complicated instinct; and the mass of mankind neither know nor care
much about freedom of conscience, which is what Jesus was thinking
about, and are concerned almost to obsession with sex, as to which
Jesus said nothing. In our sexual natures we are torn by an
irresistible attraction and an overwhelming repugnance and disgust. We
have two tyrannous physical passions: concupiscence and chastity. We
become mad in pursuit of sex: we become equally mad in the persecution
of that pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost: unless
we restrain it we destroy ourselves. We are thus led to devise marriage
institutions which will at the same time secure opportunities for the
gratification of sex and raise up innumerable obstacles to it; which
will sanctify it and brand it as infamous; which will identify it with
virtue and with sin simultaneously. Obviously it is useless to look for
any consistency in such institutions; and it is only by continual
reform and readjustment, and by a considerable elasticity in their
enforcement, that a tolerable result can be arrived at. I need not
repeat here the long and elaborate examination of them that I prefixed
to my play entitled Getting Married. Here I am concerned only with the
views of Jesus on the question; and it is necessary, in order to
understand the attitude of the world towards them, that we should not
attribute the general approval of the decision of Jesus to remain
unmarried as an endorsement of his views. We are simply in a state of
confusion on the subject; but it is part of the confusion that we
should conclude that Jesus was a celibate, and shrink even from the
idea that his birth was a natural one, yet cling with ferocity to the
sacredness of the institution which provides a refuge from celibacy.



FOR BETTER OR WORSE.

Jesus, however, did not express a complicated view of marriage. His
objection to it was quite simple, as we have seen. He perceived that
nobody could live the higher life unless money and sexual love were
obtainable without sacrificing it; and he saw that the effect of
marriage as it existed among the Jews (and as it still exists among
ourselves) was to make the couples sacrifice every higher consideration
until they had fed and pleased one another. The worst of it is that
this dangerous preposterousness in marriage, instead of improving as
the general conduct of married couples improves, becomes much worse.
The selfish man to whom his wife is nothing but a slave, the selfish
woman to whom her husband is nothing but a scapegoat and a breadwinner,
are not held back from spiritual or any other adventures by fear of
their effect on the welfare of their mates. Their wives do not make
recreants and cowards of them: their husbands do not chain them to the
cradle and the cooking range when their feet should be beautiful on the
mountains. It is precisely as people become more kindly, more
conscientious, more ready to shoulder the heavier part of the burden
(which means that the strong shall give way to the weak and the slow
hold back the swift), that marriage becomes an intolerable obstacle to
individual evolution. And that is why the revolt against marriage of
which Jesus was an exponent always recurs when civilization raises the
standard of marital duty and affection, and at the same time produces a
greater need for individual freedom in pursuit of a higher evolution.
This, fortunately, is only one side of marriage; and the question
arises, can it not be eliminated? The reply is reassuring: of course it
can. There is no mortal reason in the nature of things why a married
couple should be economically dependent on one another. The Communism
advocated by Jesus, which we have seen to be entirely practicable, and
indeed inevitable if our civilization is to be saved from collapse,
gets rid of that difficulty completely. And with the economic
dependence will go the force of the outrageous claims that derive their
real sanction from the economic pressure behind them. When a man allows
his wife to turn him from the best work he is capable of doing, and to
sell his soul at the highest commercial prices obtainable; when he
allows her to entangle him in a social routine that is wearisome and
debilitating to him, or tie him to her apron strings when he needs that
occasional solitude which is one of the most sacred of human rights, he
does so because he has no right to impose eccentric standards of
expenditure and unsocial habits on her, and because these conditions
have produced by their pressure so general a custom of chaining wedded
couples to one another that married people are coarsely derided when
their partners break the chain. And when a woman is condemned by her
parents to wait in genteel idleness and uselessness for a husband when
all her healthy social instincts call her to acquire a profession and
work, it is again her economic dependence on them that makes their
tyranny effective.



THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE.

Thus, though it would be too much to say that everything that is
obnoxious in marriage and family life will be cured by Communism, yet
it can be said that it will cure what Jesus objected to in these
institutions. He made no comprehensive study of them: he only expressed
his own grievance with an overwhelming sense that it is a grievance so
deep that all the considerations on the other side are as dust in the
balance. Obviously there are such considerations, and very weighty ones
too. When Talleyrand said that a married man with a family is capable
of anything, he meant anything evil; but an optimist may declare, with
equal half truth, that a married man is capable of anything good; that
marriage turns vagabonds into steady citizens; and that men and women
will, for love of their mates and children, practise virtues that
unattached individuals are incapable of. It is true that too much of
this domestic virtue is self-denial, which is not a virtue at all; but
then the following of the inner light at all costs is largely
self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal, just as weak, just as
cowardly as self-denial. Ibsen, who takes us into the matter far more
resolutely than Jesus, is unable to find any golden rule: both Brand
and Peer Gynt come to a bad end; and though Brand does not do as much
mischief as Peer, the mischief he does do is of extraordinary intensity.



CELIBACY NO REMEDY.

We must, I think, regard the protest of Jesus against marriage and
family ties as the claim of a particular kind of individual to be free
from them because they hamper his own work intolerably. When he said
that if we are to follow him in the sense of taking up his work we must
give up our family ties, he was simply stating a fact; and to this day
the Roman Catholic priest, the Buddhist lama, and the fakirs of all the
eastern denominations accept the saying. It is also accepted by the
physically enterprising, the explorers, the restlessly energetic of all
kinds, in short, by the adventurous. The greatest sacrifice in marriage
is the sacrifice of the adventurous attitude towards life: the being
settled. Those who are born tired may crave for settlement; but to
fresher and stronger spirits it is a form of suicide. Now to say of any
institution that it is incompatible with both the contemplative and
adventurous life is to disgrace it so vitally that all the moralizings
of all the Deans and Chapters cannot reconcile our souls to its
slavery. The unmarried Jesus and the unmarried Beethoven, the unmarried
Joan of Arc, Clare, Teresa, Florence Nightingale seem as they should
be; and the saying that there is always something ridiculous about a
married philosopher becomes inevitable. And yet the celibate is still
more ridiculous than the married man: the priest, in accepting the
alternative of celibacy, disables himself; and the best priests are
those who have been men of this world before they became men of the
world to come. But as the taking of vows does not annul an existing
marriage, and a married man cannot become a priest, we are again
confronted with the absurdity that the best priest is a reformed rake.
Thus does marriage, itself intolerable, thrust us upon intolerable
alternatives. The practical solution is to make the individual
economically independent of marriage and the family, and to make
marriage as easily dissoluble as any other partnership: in other words,
to accept the conclusions to which experience is slowly driving both
our sociologists and our legislators. This will not instantly cure all
the evils of marriage, nor root up at one stroke its detestable
tradition of property in human bodies. But it will leave Nature free to
effect a cure; and in free soil the root may wither and perish.

This disposes of all the opinions and teachings of Jesus which are
still matters of controversy. They are all in line with the best modern
thought. He told us what we have to do; and we have had to find the way
to do it. Most of us are still, as most were in his own time, extremely
recalcitrant, and are being forced along that way by painful pressure
of circumstances, protesting at every step that nothing will induce us
to go; that it is a ridiculous way, a disgraceful way, a socialistic
way, an atheistic way, an immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to
be ashamed of themselves and must be made to turn back at once. But
they find that they have to follow the vanguard all the same if their
lives are to be worth living.



AFTER THE CRUCIFIXION.

Let us now return to the New Testament narrative; for what happened
after the disappearance of Jesus is instructive. Unfortunately, the
crucifixion was a complete political success. I remember that when I
described it in these terms once before, I greatly shocked a most
respectable newspaper in my native town, the Dublin Daily Express,
because my journalistic phrase showed that I was treating it as an
ordinary event like Home Rule or the Insurance Act: that is (though
this did not occur to the editor), as a real event which had really
happened, instead of a portion of the Church service. I can only
repeat, assuming as I am that it was a real event and did actually
happen, that it was as complete a success as any in history.
Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and
utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you
please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the
level of the thing it has remained ever since. And that thing the
intelligent heathen may study, if they would be instructed in it by
modern books, in Samuel Butler's novel, The Way of All Flesh.



THE VINDICTIVE MIRACLES AND THE STONING OF STEPHEN.

Take, for example, the miracles. Of Jesus alone of all the Christian
miracle workers there is no record, except in certain gospels that all
men reject, of a malicious or destructive miracle. A barren fig-tree
was the only victim of his anger. Every one of his miracles on sentient
subjects was an act of kindness. John declares that he healed the wound
of the man whose ear was cut off (by Peter, John says) at the arrest in
the garden. One of the first things the apostles did with their
miraculous power was to strike dead a wretched man and his wife who had
defrauded them by holding back some money from the common stock. They
struck people blind or dead without remorse, judging because they had
been judged. They healed the sick and raised the dead apparently in a
spirit of pure display and advertisement. Their doctrine did not
contain a ray of that light which reveals Jesus as one of the redeemers
of men from folly and error. They cancelled him, and went back straight
to John the Baptist and his formula of securing remission of sins by
repentance and the rite of baptism (being born again of water and the
spirit). Peter's first harangue softens us by the human touch of its
exordium, which was a quaint assurance to his hearers that they must
believe him to be sober because it was too early in the day to get
drunk; but of Jesus he had nothing to say except that he was the Christ
foretold by the prophets as coming from the seed of David, and that
they must believe this and be baptized. To this the other apostles
added incessant denunciations of the Jews for having crucified him, and
threats of the destruction that would overtake them if they did not
repent: that is, if they did not join the sect which the apostles were
now forming. A quite intolerable young speaker named Stephen delivered
an oration to the council, in which he first inflicted on them a
tedious sketch of the history of Israel, with which they were
presumably as well acquainted as he, and then reviled them in the most
insulting terms as "stiffnecked and uncircumcized." Finally, after
boring and annoying them to the utmost bearable extremity, he looked up
and declared that he saw the heavens open, and Christ standing on the
right hand of God. This was too much: they threw him out of the city
and stoned him to death. It was a severe way of suppressing a tactless
and conceited bore; but it was pardonable and human in comparison to
the slaughter of poor Ananias and Sapphira.



PAUL.

Suddenly a man of genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters on the
scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning Stephen. He
persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport which he combines
with the business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of Jesus,
whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom of that particular
sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims
under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the
terror of death, which may be called also the terror of sex and the
terror of life. Now Jesus, with his healthy conscience on his higher
plane, was free from these terrors. He consorted freely with sinners,
and was never concerned for a moment, as far as we know, about whether
his conduct was sinful or not; so that he has forced us to accept him
as the man without sin. Even if we reckon his last days as the days of
his delusion, he none the less gave a fairly convincing exhibition of
superiority to the fear of death. This must have both fascinated and
horrified Paul, or Saul, as he was first called. The horror accounts
for his fierce persecution of the Christians. The fascination accounts
for the strangest of his fancies: the fancy for attaching the name of
Jesus Christ to the great idea which flashed upon him on the road to
Damascus, the idea that he could not only make a religion of his two
terrors, but that the movement started by Jesus offered him the nucleus
for his new Church. It was a monstrous idea; and the shocks of it, as
he afterwards declared, struck him blind for days. He heard Jesus
calling to him from the clouds, "Why persecute me?" His natural hatred
of the teacher for whom Sin and Death had no terrors turned into a wild
personal worship of him which has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing
seen in a false light.

The chronicler of the Acts of the Apostles sees nothing of the
significance of this. The great danger of conversion in all ages has
been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower
mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it,
and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by
degrading it. Years ago I said that the conversion of a savage to
Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery. The
conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted
the religion that had raised one man above sin and death into a
religion that delivered millions of men so completely into their
dominion that their own common nature became a horror to them, and the
religious life became a denial of life. Paul had no intention of
surrendering either his Judaism or his Roman citizenship to the new
moral world (as Robert Owen called it) of Communism and Jesuism. Just
as in the XIX century Karl Marx, not content to take political economy
as he found it, insisted on rebuilding it from the bottom upwards in
his own way, and thereby gave a new lease of life to the errors it was
just outgrowing, so Paul reconstructed the old Salvationism from which
Jesus had vainly tried to redeem him, and produced a fantastic theology
which is still the most amazing thing of the kind known to us. Being
intellectually an inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding the
irrational real thing for the unreal but ratiocinable postulate, he
began by discarding Man as he is, and substituted a postulate which he
called Adam. And when he was asked, as he surely must have been in a
world not wholly mad, what had become of the natural man, he replied
"Adam IS the natural man." This was confusing to simpletons, because
according to tradition Adam was certainly the name of the natural man
as created in the garden of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own
time had described as typically British Frankenstein's monster, and
called him Smith, and somebody, on demanding what about the man in the
street, had been told "Smith is the man in the street." The thing
happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of these Adams and
Smiths and men in the street and average sensual men and economic men
and womanly women and what not, all of them imaginary Atlases carrying
imaginary worlds on their unsubstantial shoulders.

The Eden story provided Adam with a sin: the "original sin" for which
we are all damned. Baldly stated, this seems ridiculous; nevertheless
it corresponds to something actually existent not only in Paul's
consciousness but in our own. The original sin was not the eating of
the forbidden fruit, but the consciousness of sin which the fruit
produced. The moment Adam and Eve tasted the apple they found
themselves ashamed of their sexual relation, which until then had
seemed quite innocent to them; and there is no getting over the hard
fact that this shame, or state of sin, has persisted to this day, and
is one of the strongest of our instincts. Thus Paul's postulate of Adam
as the natural man was pragmatically true: it worked. But the weakness
of Pragmatism is that most theories will work if you put your back into
making them work, provided they have some point of contact with human
nature. Hedonism will pass the pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up
to a certain point every social principle that is not absolutely
idiotic works: Autocracy works in Russia and Democracy in America;
Atheism works in France, Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout
Islam, and Pragmatism, or No-ism, in England. Paul's fantastic
conception of the damned Adam, represented by Bunyan as a pilgrim with
a great burden of sins on his back, corresponded to the fundamental
condition of evolution, which is, that life, including human life, is
continually evolving, and must therefore be continually ashamed of
itself and its present and past. Bunyan's pilgrim wants to get rid of
his bundle of sins; but he also wants to reach "yonder shining light;"
and when at last his bundle falls off him into the sepulchre of Christ,
his pilgrimage is still unfinished and his hardest trials still ahead
of him. His conscience remains uneasy; "original sin" still torments
him; and his adventure with Giant Despair, who throws him into the
dungeon of Doubting Castle, from which he escapes by the use of a
skeleton key, is more terrible than any he met whilst the bundle was
still on his back. Thus Bunyan's allegory of human nature breaks
through the Pauline theology at a hundred points. His theological
allegory, The Holy War, with its troops of Election Doubters, and its
cavalry of "those that rode Reformadoes," is, as a whole, absurd,
impossible, and, except in passages where the artistic old Adam
momentarily got the better of the Salvationist theologian, hardly
readable.

Paul's theory of original sin was to some extent idiosyncratic. He
tells us definitely that he finds himself quite well able to avoid the
sinfulness of sex by practising celibacy; but he recognizes, rather
contemptuously, that in this respect he is not as other men are, and
says that they had better marry than burn, thus admitting that though
marriage may lead to placing the desire to please wife or husband
before the desire to please God, yet preoccupation with unsatisfied
desire may be even more ungodly than preoccupation with domestic
affection. This view of the case inevitably led him to insist that a
wife should be rather a slave than a partner, her real function being,
not to engage a man's love and loyalty, but on the contrary to release
them for God by relieving the man of all preoccupation with sex just as
in her capacity of a housekeeper and cook she relieves his
preoccupation with hunger by the simple expedient of satisfying his
appetite. This slavery also justifies itself pragmatically by working
effectively; but it has made Paul the eternal enemy of Woman.
Incidentally it has led to many foolish surmises about Paul's personal
character and circumstance, by people so enslaved by sex that a
celibate appears to them a sort of monster. They forget that not only
whole priesthoods, official and unofficial, from Paul to Carlyle and
Ruskin, have defied the tyranny of sex, but immense numbers of ordinary
citizens of both sexes have, either voluntarily or under pressure of
circumstances easily surmountable, saved their energies for less
primitive activities.

Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for
the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the
natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable
only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had
Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it
on its legs again in the name of Jesus.



THE CONFUSION OF CHRISTENDOM.

Now it is evident that two religions having such contrary effects on
mankind should not be confused as they are under a common name. There
is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the characteristic
utterances of Jesus. When Saul watched the clothes of the men who
stoned Stephen, he was not acting upon beliefs which Paul renounced.
There is no record of Christ's having ever said to any man: "Go and sin
as much as you like: you can put it all on me." He said "Sin no more,"
and insisted that he was putting up the standard of conduct, not
debasing it, and that the righteousness of the Christian must exceed
that of the Scribe and Pharisee. The notion that he was shedding his
blood in order that every petty cheat and adulterator and libertine
might wallow in it and come out whiter than snow, cannot be imputed to
him on his own authority. "I come as an infallible patent medicine for
bad consciences" is not one of the sayings in the gospels. If Jesus
could have been consulted on Bunyan's allegory as to that business of
the burden of sin dropping from the pilgrim's back when he caught sight
of the cross, we must infer from his teaching that he would have told
Bunyan in forcible terms that he had never made a greater mistake in
his life, and that the business of a Christ was to make self-satisfied
sinners feel the burden of their sins and stop committing them instead
of assuring them that they could not help it, as it was all Adam's
fault, but that it did not matter as long as they were credulous and
friendly about himself. Even when he believed himself to be a god, he
did not regard himself as a scapegoat. He was to take away the sins of
the world by good government, by justice and mercy, by setting the
welfare of little children above the pride of princes, by casting all
the quackeries and idolatries which now usurp and malversate the power
of God into what our local authorities quaintly call the dust
destructor, and by riding on the clouds of heaven in glory instead of
in a thousand-guinea motor car. That was delirious, if you like; but it
was the delirium of a free soul, not of a shamebound one like Paul's.
There has really never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated
than the imposition of the limitations of Paul's soul upon the soul of
Jesus.



THE SECRET OF PAUL'S SUCCESS.

Paul must soon have found that his followers had gained peace of mind
and victory over death and sin at the cost of all moral responsibility;
for he did his best to reintroduce it by making good conduct the test
of sincere belief, and insisting that sincere belief was necessary to
salvation. But as his system was rooted in the plain fact that as what
he called sin includes sex and is therefore an ineradicable part of
human nature (why else should Christ have had to atone for the sin of
all future generations?) it was impossible for him to declare that sin,
even in its wickedest extremity, could forfeit the sinner's salvation
if he repented and believed. And to this day Pauline Christianity is,
and owes its enormous vogue to being, a premium on sin. Its
consequences have had to be held in check by the worldlywise majority
through a violently anti-Christian system of criminal law and stern
morality. But of course the main restraint is human nature, which has
good impulses as well as bad ones, and refrains from theft and murder
and cruelty, even when it is taught that it can commit them all at the
expense of Christ and go happily to heaven afterwards, simply because
it does not always want to murder or rob or torture.

It is now easy to understand why the Christianity of Jesus failed
completely to establish itself politically and socially, and was easily
suppressed by the police and the Church, whilst Paulinism overran the
whole western civilized world, which was at that time the Roman Empire,
and was adopted by it as its official faith, the old avenging gods
falling helplessly before the new Redeemer. It still retains, as we may
see in Africa, its power of bringing to simple people a message of hope
and consolation that no other religion offers. But this enchantment is
produced by its spurious association with the personal charm of Jesus,
and exists only for untrained minds. In the hands of a logical
Frenchman like Calvin, pushing it to its utmost conclusions, and
devising "institutes" for hardheaded adult Scots and literal Swiss, it
becomes the most infernal of fatalisms; and the lives of civilized
children are blighted by its logic whilst negro piccaninnies are
rejoicing in its legends.



PAUL'S QUALITIES

Paul, however, did not get his great reputation by mere imposition and
reaction. It is only in comparison with Jesus (to whom many prefer him)
that he appears common and conceited. Though in The Acts he is only a
vulgar revivalist, he comes out in his own epistles as a genuine
poet,--though by flashes only. He is no more a Christian than Jesus was
a Baptist; he is a disciple of Jesus only as Jesus was a disciple of
John. He does nothing that Jesus would have done, and says nothing that
Jesus would have said, though much, like the famous ode to charity,
that he would have admired. He is more Jewish than the Jews, more Roman
than the Romans, proud both ways, full of startling confessions and
self-revelations that would not surprise us if they were slipped into
the pages of Nietzsche, tormented by an intellectual conscience that
demanded an argued case even at the cost of sophistry, with all sorts
of fine qualities and occasional illuminations, but always hopelessly
in the toils of Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power over Jesus.
As we have seen, it was by introducing this bondage and terror of his
into the Christian doctrine that he adapted it to the Church and State
systems which Jesus transcended, and made it practicable by destroying
the specifically Jesuist side of it. He would have been quite in his
place in any modern Protestant State; and he, not Jesus, is the true
head and founder of our Reformed Church, as Peter is of the Roman
Church. The followers of Paul and Peter made Christendom, whilst the
Nazarenes were wiped out.



THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.

Here we may return to the narrative called The Acts of the Apostles,
which we left at the point where the stoning of Stephen was followed by
the introduction of Paul. The author of The Acts, though a good
story-teller, like Luke, was (herein also like Luke) much weaker in
power of thought than in imaginative literary art. Hence we find Luke
credited with the authorship of The Acts by people who like stories and
have no aptitude for theology, whilst the book itself is denounced as
spurious by Pauline theologians because Paul, and indeed all the
apostles, are represented in it as very commonplace revivalists,
interesting us by their adventures more than by any qualities of mind
or character. Indeed, but for the epistles, we should have a very poor
opinion of the apostles. Paul in particular is described as setting a
fashion which has remained in continual use to this day. Whenever he
addresses an audience, he dwells with great zest on his misdeeds before
his pseudo conversion, with the effect of throwing into stronger relief
his present state of blessedness; and he tells the story of that
conversion over and over again, ending with exhortations to the hearers
to come and be saved, and threats of the wrath that will overtake them
if they refuse. At any revival meeting today the same thing may be
heard, followed by the same conversions. This is natural enough; but it
is totally unlike the preaching of Jesus, who never talked about his
personal history, and never "worked up" an audience to hysteria. It
aims at a purely nervous effect; it brings no enlightenment; the most
ignorant man has only to become intoxicated with his own vanity, and
mistake his self-satisfaction for the Holy Ghost, to become qualified
as an apostle; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the
characteristic doctrines of Jesus. The Holy Ghost may be at work all
round producing wonders of art and science, and strengthening men to
endure all sorts of martyrdoms for the enlargement of knowledge, and
the enrichment and intensification of life ("that ye may have life more
abundantly"); but the apostles, as described in The Acts, take no part
in the struggle except as persecutors and revilers. To this day, when
their successors get the upper hand, as in Geneva (Knox's "perfect city
of Christ") and in Scotland and Ulster, every spiritual activity but
moneymaking and churchgoing is stamped out; heretics are ruthlessly
persecuted; and such pleasures as money can purchase are suppressed so
that its possessors are compelled to go on making money because there
is nothing else to do. And the compensation for all this privation is
partly an insane conceit of being the elect of God, with a reserved
seat in heaven, and partly, since even the most infatuated idiot cannot
spend his life admiring himself, the less innocent excitement of
punishing other people for not admiring him, and the nosing out of the
sins of the people who, being intelligent enough to be incapable of
mere dull self-righteousness, and highly susceptible to the beauty and
interest of the real workings of the Holy Ghost, try to live more
rational and abundant lives. The abominable amusement of terrifying
children with threats of hell is another of these diversions, and
perhaps the vilest and most mischievous of them. The net result is that
the imitators of the apostles, whether they are called Holy Willies or
Stigginses in derision, or, in admiration, Puritans or saints, are,
outside their own congregations, and to a considerable extent inside
them, heartily detested. Now nobody detests Jesus, though many who have
been tormented in their childhood in his name include him in their
general loathing of everything connected with the word religion; whilst
others, who know him only by misrepresentation as a sentimental
pacifist and an ascetic, include him in their general dislike of that
type of character. In the same way a student who has had to "get up"
Shakespear as a college subject may hate Shakespear; and people who
dislike the theatre may include Moliere in that dislike without ever
having read a line of his or witnessed one of his plays; but nobody
with any knowledge of Shakespear or Moliere could possibly detest them,
or read without pity and horror a description of their being insulted,
tortured, and killed. And the same is true of Jesus. But it requires
the most strenuous effort of conscience to refrain from crying "Serve
him right" when we read of the stoning of Stephen; and nobody has ever
cared twopence about the martyrdom of Peter: many better men have died
worse deaths: for example, honest Hugh Latimer, who was burned by us,
was worth fifty Stephens and a dozen Peters. One feels at last that
when Jesus called Peter from his boat, he spoiled an honest fisherman,
and made nothing better out of the wreck than a salvation monger.



THE CONTROVERSIES ON BAPTISM AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

Meanwhile the inevitable effect of dropping the peculiar doctrines of
Jesus and going back to John the Baptist, was to make it much easier to
convert Gentiles than Jews; and it was by following the line of least
resistance that Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles. The Jews had
their own rite of initiation: the rite of circumcision; and they were
fiercely jealous for it, because it marked them as the chosen people of
God, and set them apart from the Gentiles, who were simply the
uncircumcized. When Paul, finding that baptism made way faster among
the Gentiles than among the Jews, as it enabled them to plead that they
too were sanctified by a rite of later and higher authority than the
Mosaic rite, he was compelled to admit that circumcision did not
matter; and this, to the Jews, was an intolerable blasphemy. To
Gentiles like ourselves, a good deal of the Epistle to the Romans is
now tedious to unreadableness because it consists of a hopeless attempt
by Paul to evade the conclusion that if a man were baptized it did not
matter a rap whether he was circumcized or not. Paul claims
circumcision as an excellent thing in its way for a Jew; but if it has
no efficacy towards salvation, and if salvation is the one thing
needful--and Paul was committed to both propositions--his pleas in
mitigation only made the Jews more determined to stone him.

Thus from the very beginning of apostolic Christianity, it was hampered
by a dispute as to whether salvation was to be attained by a surgical
operation or by a sprinkling of water: mere rites on which Jesus would
not have wasted twenty words. Later on, when the new sect conquered the
Gentile west, where the dispute had no practical application, the other
ceremony--that of eating the god--produced a still more disastrous
dispute, in which a difference of belief, not as to the obligation to
perform the ceremony, but as to whether it was a symbolic or a real
ingestion of divine substance, produced persecution, slaughter, hatred,
and everything that Jesus loathed, on a monstrous scale.

But long before that, the superstitions which had fastened on the new
faith made trouble. The parthenogenetic birth of Christ, simple enough
at first as a popular miracle, was not left so simple by the
theologians. They began to ask of what substance Christ was made in the
womb of the virgin. When the Trinity was added to the faith the
question arose, was the virgin the mother of God or only the mother of
Jesus? Arian schisms and Nestorian schisms arose on these questions;
and the leaders of the resultant agitations rancorously deposed one
another and excommunicated one another according to their luck in
enlisting the emperors on their side. In the IV century they began to
burn one another for differences of opinion in such matters. In the
VIII century Charlemagne made Christianity compulsory by killing those
who refused to embrace it; and though this made an end of the voluntary
character of conversion, Charlemagne may claim to be the first
Christian who put men to death for any point of doctrine that really
mattered. From his time onward the history of Christian controversy
reeks with blood and fire, torture and warfare. The Crusades, the
persecutions in Albi and elsewhere, the Inquisition, the "wars of
religion" which followed the Reformation, all presented themselves as
Christian phenomena; but who can doubt that they would have been
repudiated with horror by Jesus? Our own notion that the massacre of
St. Bartholomew's was an outrage on Christianity, whilst the campaigns
of Gustavus Adolphus, and even of Frederick the Great, were a defence
of it, is as absurd as the opposite notion that Frederick was
Antichrist and Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola men after the very heart
of Jesus. Neither they nor their exploits had anything to do with him.
It is probable that Archbishop Laud and John Wesley died equally
persuaded that he in whose name they had made themselves famous on
earth would receive them in Heaven with open arms. Poor Fox the Quaker
would have had ten times their chance; and yet Fox made rather a
miserable business of life.

Nevertheless all these perversions of the doctrine of Jesus derived
their moral force from his credit, and so had to keep his gospel alive.
When the Protestants translated the Bible into the vernacular and let
it loose among the people, they did an extremely dangerous thing, as
the mischief which followed proves; but they incidentally let loose the
sayings of Jesus in open competition with the sayings of Paul and
Koheleth and David and Solomon and the authors of Job and the
Pentateuch; and, as we have seen, Jesus seems to be the winning name.
The glaring contradiction between his teaching and the practice of all
the States and all the Churches is no longer hidden. And it may be that
though nineteen centuries have passed since Jesus was born (the date of
his birth is now quaintly given as 7 B.C., though some contend for 100
B.C.), and though his Church has not yet been founded nor his political
system tried, the bankruptcy of all the other systems when audited by
our vital statistics, which give us a final test for all political
systems, is driving us hard into accepting him, not as a scapegoat, but
as one who was much less of a fool in practical matters than we have
hitherto all thought him.



THE ALTERNATIVE CHRISTS.

Let us now clear up the situation a little. The New Testament tells two
stories for two different sorts of readers. One is the old story of the
achievement of our salvation by the sacrifice and atonement of a divine
personage who was barbarously slain and rose again on the third day:
the story as it was accepted by the apostles. And in this story the
political, economic, and moral views of the Christ have no importance:
the atonement is everything; and we are saved by our faith in it, and
not by works or opinions (other than that particular opinion) bearing
on practical affairs.

The other is the story of a prophet who, after expressing several very
interesting opinions as to practical conduct, both personal and
political, which are now of pressing importance, and instructing his
disciples to carry them out in their daily life, lost his head;
believed himself to be a crude legendary form of god; and under that
delusion courted and suffered a cruel execution in the belief that he
would rise from the dead and come in glory to reign over a regenerated
world. In this form, the political, economic and moral opinions of
Jesus, as guides to conduct, are interesting and important: the rest is
mere psychopathy and superstition. The accounts of the resurrection,
the parthenogenetic birth, and the more incredible miracles are
rejected as inventions; and such episodes as the conversation with the
devil are classed with similar conversations recorded of St. Dunstan,
Luther, Bunyan, Swedenborg, and Blake.



CREDULITY NO CRITERION.

This arbitrary acceptance and rejection of parts of the gospel is not
peculiar to the Secularist view. We have seen Luke and John reject
Matthew's story of the massacre of the innocents and the flight into
Egypt without ceremony. The notion that Matthew's manuscript is a
literal and infallible record of facts, not subject to the errors that
beset all earthly chroniclers, would have made John stare, being as it
is a comparatively modern fancy of intellectually untrained people who
keep the Bible on the same shelf, with Napoleon's Book of Fate, Old
Moore's Almanack, and handbooks of therapeutic herbalism. You may be a
fanatical Salvationist and reject more miracle stories than Huxley did;
and you may utterly repudiate Jesus as the Savior and yet cite him as a
historical witness to the possession by men of the most marvellous
thaumaturgical powers. "Christ Scientist" and Jesus the Mahatma are
preached by people whom Peter would have struck dead as worse infidels
than Simon Magus; and the Atonement; is preached by Baptist and
Congregationalist ministers whose views of the miracles are those of
Ingersoll and Bradlaugh. Luther, who made a clean sweep of all the
saints with their million miracles, and reduced the Blessed Virgin
herself to the status of an idol, concentrated Salvationism to a point
at which the most execrable murderer who believes in it when the rope
is round his neck, flies straight to the arms of Jesus, whilst Tom
Paine and Shelley fall into the bottomless pit to burn there to all
eternity. And sceptical physicists like Sir William Crookes demonstrate
by laboratory experiments that "mediums" like Douglas Home can make the
pointer of a spring-balance go round without touching the weight
suspended from it.



BELIEF IN PERSONAL IMMORTALITY NO CRITERION.

Nor is belief in individual immortality any criterion. Theosophists,
rejecting vicarious atonement so sternly that they insist that the
smallest of our sins brings its Karma, also insist on individual
immortality and metempsychosis in order to provide an unlimited field
for Karma to be worked out by the unredeemed sinner. The belief in the
prolongation of individual life beyond the grave is far more real and
vivid among table-rapping Spiritualists than among conventional
Christians. The notion that those who reject the Christian (or any
other) scheme of salvation by atonement must reject also belief in
personal immortality and in miracles is as baseless as the notion that
if a man is an atheist he will steal your watch.

I could multiply these instances to weariness. The main difference that
set Gladstone and Huxley by the ears is not one between belief in
supernatural persons or miraculous events and the sternest view of such
belief as a breach of intellectual integrity: it is the difference
between belief in the efficacy of the crucifixion as an infallible cure
for guilt, and a congenital incapacity for believing this, or (the same
thing) desiring to believe it.



THE SECULAR VIEW NATURAL, NOT RATIONAL, THEREFORE INEVITABLE.

It must therefore be taken as a flat fundamental modern fact, whether
we like it or not, that whilst many of us cannot believe that Jesus got
his curious grip of our souls by mere sentimentality, neither can we
believe that he was John Barleycorn. The more our reason and study lead
us to believe that Jesus was talking the most penetrating good sense
when he preached Communism; when he declared that the reality behind
the popular belief in God was a creative spirit in ourselves, called by
him the Heavenly Father and by us Evolution, Elan Vital, Life Force and
other names; when he protested against the claims of marriage and the
family to appropriate that high part of our energy that was meant for
the service of his Father, the more impossible it becomes for us to
believe that he was talking equally good sense when he so suddenly
announced that he was himself a visible concrete God; that his flesh
and blood were miraculous food for us; that he must be tortured and
slain in the traditional manner and would rise from the dead after
three days; and that at his second coming the stars would fall from
heaven and he become king of an earthly paradise. But it is easy and
reasonable to believe that an overwrought preacher at last went mad as
Swift and Ruskin and Nietzsche went mad. Every asylum has in it a
patient suffering from the delusion that he is a god, yet otherwise
sane enough. These patients do not nowadays declare that they will be
barbarously slain and will rise from the dead, because they have lost
that tradition of the destiny of godhead; but they claim everything
appertaining to divinity that is within their knowledge.

Thus the gospels as memoirs and suggestive statements of sociological
and biological doctrine, highly relevant to modern civilization, though
ending in the history of a psycopathic delusion, are quite credible,
intelligible, and interesting to modern thinkers. In any other light
they are neither credible, intelligible, nor interesting except to
people upon whom the delusion imposes.



"THE HIGHER CRITICISM."

Historical research and paleographic criticism will no doubt continue
their demonstrations that the New Testament, like the Old, seldom tells
a single story or expounds a single doctrine, and gives us often an
accretion and conglomeration of widely discrete and even unrelated
traditions and doctrines. But these disintegrations, though technically
interesting to scholars, and gratifying or exasperating, as the case
may be, to people who are merely defending or attacking the paper
fortifications of the infallibility of the Bible, have hardly anything
to do with the purpose of these pages. I have mentioned the fact that
most of the authorities are now agreed (for the moment) that the date
of the birth of Jesus may be placed at about 7 B.C.; but they do not
therefore date their letters 1923, nor, I presume, do they expect me to
do so. What I am engaged in is a criticism (in the Kantian sense) of an
established body of belief which has become an actual part of the
mental fabric of my readers; and I should be the most exasperating of
triflers and pedants if I were to digress into a criticism of some
other belief or no-belief which my readers might conceivably profess if
they were erudite Scriptural paleographers and historians, in which
case, by the way, they would have to change their views so frequently
that the gospel they received in their childhood would dominate them
after all by its superior persistency. The chaos of mere facts in which
the Sermon on the Mount and the Ode to Charity suggest nothing but
disputes as to whether they are interpolations or not, in which Jesus
becomes nothing but a name suspected of belonging to ten different
prophets or executed persons, in which Paul is only the man who could
not possibly have written the epistles attributed to him, in which
Chinese sages, Greek philosophers, Latin authors, and writers of
ancient anonymous inscriptions are thrown at our heads as the sources
of this or that scrap of the Bible, is neither a religion nor a
criticism of religion: one does not offer the fact that a good deal of
the medieval building in Peterborough Cathedral was found to be
flagrant jerry-building as a criticism of the Dean's sermons. For good
or evil, we have made a synthesis out of the literature we call the
Bible; and though the discovery that there is a good deal of
jerry-building in the Bible is interesting in its way, because
everything about the Bible is interesting, it does not alter the
synthesis very materially even for the paleographers, and does not
alter it at all for those who know no more about modern paleography
than Archbishop Ussher did. I have therefore indicated little more of
the discoveries than Archbishop Ussher might have guessed for himself
if he had read the Bible without prepossessions.

For the rest, I have taken the synthesis as it really lives and works
in men. After all, a synthesis is what you want: it is the case you
have to judge brought to an apprehensible issue for you. Even if you
have little more respect for synthetic biography than for synthetic
rubber, synthetic milk, and the still unachieved synthetic protoplasm
which is to enable us to make different sorts of men as a pastry cook
makes different sorts of tarts, the practical issue still lies as
plainly before you as before the most credulous votaries of what
pontificates as the Higher Criticism.



THE PERILS OF SALVATIONISM.

The secular view of Jesus is powerfully reinforced by the increase in
our day of the number of people who have had the means of educating and
training themselves to the point at which they are not afraid to look
facts in the face, even such terrifying facts as sin and death. The
result is greater sternness in modern thought. The conviction is
spreading that to encourage a man to believe that though his sins be as
scarlet he can be made whiter than snow by an easy exercise of
self-conceit, is to encourage him to be a rascal. It did not work so
badly when you could also conscientiously assure him that if he let
himself be caught napping in the matter of faith by death, a red-hot
hell would roast him alive to all eternity. In those days a sudden
death--the most enviable of all deaths--was regarded as the most
frightful calamity. It was classed with plague, pestilence, and famine,
battle and murder, in our prayers. But belief in that hell is fast
vanishing. All the leaders of thought have lost it; and even for the
rank and file it has fled to those parts of Ireland and Scotland which
are still in the XVII century. Even there, it is tacitly reserved for
the other fellow.



THE IMPORTANCE OF HELL IN THE SALVATION SCHEME.

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the
Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no
self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no
hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting
the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity
inside the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere
ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our
score, it still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely
uncomfortable. The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and
honor, seizes on such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low
in the scale as to be capable of them. The "saved" thief experiences an
ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is
tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the
atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that
he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his
shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but
that does not alter the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will
not be easy until he has conquered his will to steal and changed
himself into an honest man by developing that divine spark within him
which Jesus insisted on as the everyday reality of what the atheist
denies.

Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus be the
happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the point of view
of the community. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is
no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a
sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality
of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got
as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question;
but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a
nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the
evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in
the Wesleyan that our hope lies now.



THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ATONEMENT.

Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to
believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently
have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is offered has an
inalienable natural right to say "No, thank you: I prefer to retain my
full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a
scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them
if I knew they would cost me nothing." Then, too, there is the attitude
of Ibsen: that iron moralist to whom the whole scheme of salvation was
only an ignoble attempt to cheat God; to get into heaven without paying
the price. To be let off, to beg for and accept eternal life as a
present instead of earning it, would be mean enough even if we accepted
the contempt of the Power on whose pity we were trading; but to bargain
for a crown of glory as well! that was too much for Ibsen: it provoked
him to exclaim, "Your God is an old man whom you cheat," and to lash
the deadened conscience of the XIX century back to life with a whip of
scorpions.



THE TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY.

And there I must leave the matter to such choice as your nature allows
you. The honest teacher who has to make known to a novice the facts
about Christianity cannot in any essential regard, I think, put the
facts otherwise than as I have put them. If children are to be
delivered from the proselytizing atheist on the one hand, and the
proselytizing nun in the convent school on the other, with all the
other proselytizers that lie between them, they must not be burdened
with idle controversies as to whether there was ever such a person as
Jesus or not. When Hume said that Joshua's campaigns were impossible,
Whately did not wrangle about it: he proved, on the same lines, that
the campaigns of Napoleon were impossible. Only fictitious characters
will stand Hume's sort of examination: nothing will ever make Edward
the Confessor and St. Louis as real to us as Don Quixote and Mr.
Pickwick. We must cut the controversy short by declaring that there is
the same evidence for the existence of Jesus as for that of any other
person of his time; and the fact that you may not believe everything
Matthew tells you no more disproves the existence of Jesus than the
fact that you do not believe everything Macaulay tells you disproves
the existence of William III. The gospel narratives in the main give
you a biography which is quite credible and accountable on purely
secular grounds when you have trimmed off everything that Hume or Grimm
or Rousseau or Huxley or any modern bishop could reject as fanciful.
Without going further than this, you can become a follower of Jesus
just as you can become a follower of Confucius or Lao Tse, and may
therefore call yourself a Jesuist, or even a Christian, if you hold, as
the strictest Secularist quite legitimately may, that all prophets are
inspired, and all men with a mission, Christs.

The teacher of Christianity has then to make known to the child, first
the song of John Barleycorn, with the fields and seasons as witness to
its eternal truth. Then, as the child's mind matures, it can learn, as
historical and psychological phenomena, the tradition of the scapegoat,
the Redeemer, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and
how, in a world saturated with this tradition, Jesus has been largely
accepted as the long expected and often prophesied Redeemer, the
Messiah, the Christ. It is open to the child also to accept him. If the
child is built like Gladstone, he will accept Jesus as his Savior, and
Peter and John the Baptist as the Savior's revealer and forerunner
respectively. If he is built like Huxley, he will take the secular
view, in spite of all that a pious family can do to prevent him. The
important thing now is that the Gladstones and Huxleys should no longer
waste their time irrelevantly and ridiculously wrangling about the
Gadarene swine, and that they should make up their minds as to the
soundness of the secular doctrines of Jesus; for it is about these that
they may come to blows in our own time.



CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE.

Finally, let us ask why it is that the old superstitions have so
suddenly lost countenance that although, to the utter disgrace of the
nation's leaders and rulers, the laws by which persecutors can destroy
or gag all freedom of thought and speech in these matters are still
unrepealed and ready to the hand of our bigots and fanatics (quite
recently a respectable shopkeeper was convicted of "blasphemy" for
saying that if a modern girl accounted for an illicit pregnancy by
saying she had conceived of the Holy Ghost, we should know what to
think: a remark which would never have occurred to him had he been
properly taught how the story was grafted on the gospel), yet somehow
they are used only against poor men, and that only in a half-hearted
way. When we consider that from the time when the first scholar
ventured to whisper as a professional secret that the Pentateuch could
not possibly have been written by Moses to the time within my own
recollection when Bishop Colenso, for saying the same thing openly, was
inhibited from preaching and actually excommunicated, eight centuries
elapsed (the point at issue, though technically interesting to
paleographers and historians, having no more bearing on human welfare
than the controversy as to whether uncial or cursive is the older form
of writing); yet now, within fifty years of Colenso's heresy, there is
not a Churchman of any authority living, or an educated layman, who
could without ridicule declare that Moses wrote the Pentateuch as
Pascal wrote his Thoughts or D'Aubigny his History of the Reformation,
or that St. Jerome wrote the passage about the three witnesses in the
Vulgate, or that there are less than three different accounts of the
creation jumbled together in the book of Genesis. Now the maddest
Progressive will hardly contend that our growth in wisdom and
liberality has been greater in the last half century than in the
sixteen half centuries preceding: indeed it would be easier to sustain
the thesis that the last fifty years have witnessed a distinct reaction
from Victorian Liberalism to Collectivism which has perceptibly
strengthened the State Churches. Yet the fact remains that whereas
Byron's Cain, published a century ago, is a leading case on the point
that there is no copyright in a blasphemous book, the Salvation Army
might now include it among its publications without shocking anyone.

I suggest that the causes which have produced this sudden clearing of
the air include the transformation of many modern States, notably the
old self-contained French Republic and the tight little Island of
Britain, into empires which overflow the frontiers of all the Churches.
In India, for example, there are less than four million Christians out
of a population of three hundred and sixteen and a half millions. The
King of England is the defender of the faith; but what faith is now THE
faith? The inhabitants of this island would, within the memory of
persons still living, have claimed that their faith is surely the faith
of God, and that all others are heathen. But we islanders are only
forty-five millions; and if we count ourselves all as Christians, there
are still seventy-seven and a quarter million Mahometans in the Empire.
Add to these the Hindoos and Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, whom I was
taught in my childhood, by way of religious instruction, to regard as
gross idolators consigned to eternal perdition, but whose faith I can
now be punished for disparaging by a provocative word, and you have a
total of over three hundred and forty-two and a quarter million
heretics to swamp our forty-five million Britons, of whom, by the way,
only six thousand call themselves distinctively "disciples of Christ,"
the rest being members of the Church of England and other denominations
whose discipleship is less emphatically affirmed. In short, the
Englishman of today, instead of being, like the forefathers whose ideas
he clings to, a subject of a State practically wholly Christian, is now
crowded, and indeed considerably overcrowded, into a corner of an
Empire in which the Christians are a mere eleven per cent of the
population; so that the Nonconformist who allows his umbrella stand to
be sold up rather than pay rates towards the support of a Church of
England school, finds himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church
of Rome in Malta, but to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy of
offering Bibles for sale in the streets of Khartoum. Turn to France, a
country ten times more insular in its pre-occupation with its own
language, its own history, its own character, than we, who have always
been explorers and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred
nation is forty millions strong. The total population of the French
Republic is about one hundred and fourteen millions. The French are not
in our hopeless Christian minority of eleven per cent; but they are in
a minority of thirty-five per cent, which is fairly conclusive. And,
being a more logical people than we, they have officially abandoned
Christianity and declared that the French State has no specific
religion.

Neither has the British State, though it does not say so. No doubt
there are many innocent people in England who take Charlemagne's view,
and would, as a matter of course, offer our eighty-nine per cent of
"pagans, I regret to say" the alternative of death or Christianity but
for a vague impression that these lost ones are all being converted
gradually by the missionaries. But no statesman can entertain such
ludicrously parochial delusions. No English king or French president
can possibly govern on the assumption that the theology of Peter and
Paul, Luther and Calvin, has any objective validity, or that the Christ
is more than the Buddha, or Jehovah more than Krishna, or Jesus more or
less human than Mahomet or Zoroaster or Confucius. He is actually
compelled, in so far as he makes laws against blasphemy at all, to
treat all the religions, including Christianity, as blasphemous, when
paraded before people who are not accustomed to them and do not want
them. And even that is a concession to a mischievous intolerance which
an empire should use its control of education to eradicate.

On the other hand, Governments cannot really divest themselves of
religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should not only
live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist
sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain
from suicide in the words "Absent thee from felicity awhile," would say
dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many preachers and saints
declare, some of them in the name of Jesus himself, that this world is
a vale of tears, and that our lives had better be passed in sorrow and
even in torment, as a preparation for a better life to come. Make these
sad people comfortable; and they baffle you by putting on hair shirts.
None the less, governments must proceed on dogmatic assumptions,
whether they call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be
assumptions common enough to stamp those who reject them as eccentrics
or lunatics. And the greater and more heterogeneous the population the
commoner the assumptions must be. A Trappist monastery can be conducted
on assumptions which would in twenty-fours hours provoke the village at
its gates to insurrection. That is because the monastery selects its
people; and if a Trappist does not like it he can leave it. But a
subject of the British Empire or the French Republic is not selected;
and if he does not like it he must lump it; for emigration is
practicable only within narrow limits, and seldom provides an effective
remedy, all civilizations being now much alike. To anyone capable of
comprehending government at all it must be evident without argument
that the set of fundamental assumptions drawn up in the thirty-nine
articles or in the Westminster Confession are wildly impossible as
political constitutions for modern empires. A personal profession of
them by any person disposed to take such professions seriously would
practically disqualify him for high imperial office. A Calvinist
Viceroy of India and a Particular Baptist Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the
tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their
Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained very
plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for self-government,
which is contradicted by every chapter of their history, is really only
an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed for co-ordinated
thought in any direction, which makes them equally impatient of
systematic despotism and systematic good government: their history
being that of a badly governed and accidentally free people
(comparatively). Thus our success in colonizing, as far as it has not
been produced by exterminating the natives, has been due to our
indifference to the salvation of our subjects. Ireland is the exception
which proves the rule; for Ireland, the standing instance of the
inability of the English to colonize without extermination of natives,
is also the one country under British rule in which the conquerors and
colonizers proceeded on the assumption that their business was to
establish Protestantism as well as to make money and thereby secure at
least the lives of the unfortunate inhabitants out of whose labor it
could be made. At this moment Ulster is refusing to accept
fellowcitizenship with the other Irish provinces because the south
believes in St. Peter and Bossuet, and the north in St. Paul and
Calvin. Imagine the effect of trying to govern India or Egypt from
Belfast or from the Vatican!

The position is perhaps graver for France than for England, because the
sixty-five per cent of French subjects who are neither French nor
Christian nor Modernist includes some thirty millions of negroes who
are susceptible, and indeed highly susceptible, of conversion to those
salvationist forms of pseudo-Christianity which have produced all the
persecutions and religious wars of the last fifteen hundred years. When
the late explorer Sir Henry Stanley told me of the emotional grip which
Christianity had over the Baganda tribes, and read me their letters,
which were exactly like medieval letters in their literal faith and
everpresent piety, I said "Can these men handle a rifle?" To which
Stanley replied with some scorn "Of course they can, as well as any
white man." Now at this moment (1915) a vast European war is being
waged, in which the French are using Senegalese soldiers. I ask the
French Government, which, like our own Government, is deliberately
leaving the religious instruction of these negroes in the hands of
missions of Petrine Catholics and Pauline Calvinists, whether they have
considered the possibility of a new series of crusades, by ardent
African Salvationists, to rescue Paris from the grip of the modern
scientific "infidel," and to raise the cry of "Back to the Apostles:
back to Charlemagne!"

We are more fortunate in that an overwhelming majority of our subjects
are Hindoos, Mahometans and Buddhists: that is, they have, as a
prophylactic against salvationist Christianity, highly civilized
religions of their own. Mahometanism, which Napoleon at the end of his
career classed as perhaps the best popular religion for modern
political use, might in some respects have arisen as a reformed
Christianity if Mahomet had had to deal with a population of
seventeenth-century Christians instead of Arabs who worshipped stones.
As it is, men do not reject Mahomet for Calvin; and to offer a Hindoo
so crude a theology as ours in exchange for his own, or our Jewish
canonical literature as an improvement on Hindoo scripture, is to offer
old lamps for older ones in a market where the oldest lamps, like old
furniture in England, are the most highly valued.

Yet, I repeat, government is impossible without a religion: that is,
without a body of common assumptions. The open mind never acts: when we
have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still,
when we can reason and investigate no more, must close our minds for
the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions. The
man who waits to make an entirely reasonable will dies intestate. A man
so reasonable as to have an open mind about theft and murder, or about
the need for food and reproduction, might just as well be a fool and a
scoundrel for any use he could be as a legislator or a State official.
The modern pseudo-democratic statesman, who says that he is only in
power to carry out the will of the people, and moves only as the cat
jumps, is clearly a political and intellectual brigand. The rule of the
negative man who has no convictions means in practice the rule of the
positive mob. Freedom of conscience as Cromwell used the phrase is an
excellent thing; nevertheless if any man had proposed to give effect to
freedom of conscience as to cannibalism in England, Cromwell would have
laid him by the heels almost as promptly as he would have laid a Roman
Catholic, though in Fiji at the same moment he would have supported
heartily the freedom of conscience of a vegetarian who disparaged the
sacred diet of Long Pig.

Here then come in the importance of the repudiation by Jesus of
proselytism. His rule "Don't pull up the tares: sow the wheat: if you
try to pull up the tares you will pull up the wheat with it" is the
only possible rule for a statesman governing a modern empire, or a
voter supporting such a statesman. There is nothing in the teaching of
Jesus that cannot be assented to by a Brahman, a Mahometan, a Buddhist
or a Jew, without any question of their conversion to Christianity. In
some ways it is easier to reconcile a Mahometan to Jesus than a British
parson, because the idea of a professional priest is unfamiliar and
even monstrous to a Mahometan (the tourist who persists in asking who
is the dean of St. Sophia puzzles beyond words the sacristan who lends
him a huge pair of slippers); and Jesus never suggested that his
disciples should separate themselves from the laity: he picked them up
by the wayside, where any man or woman might follow him. For priests he
had not a civil word; and they showed their sense of his hostility by
getting him killed as soon as possible. He was, in short, a
thoroughgoing anti-Clerical. And though, as we have seen, it is only by
political means that his doctrine can be put into practice, he not only
never suggested a sectarian theocracy as a form of Government, and
would certainly have prophesied the downfall of the late President
Kruger if he had survived to his time, but, when challenged, he refused
to teach his disciples not to pay tribute to Caesar, admitting that
Caesar, who presumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as much as
any disciple, had his place in the scheme of things. Indeed the
apostles made this an excuse for carrying subservience to the State to
a pitch of idolatry that ended in the theory of the divine right of
kings, and provoked men to cut kings' heads off to restore some sense
of proportion in the matter. Jesus certainly did not consider the
overthrow of the Roman empire or the substitution of a new
ecclesiastical organization for the Jewish Church or for the priesthood
of the Roman gods as part of his program. He said that God was better
than Mammon; but he never said that Tweedledum was better than
Tweedledee; and that is why it is now possible for British citizens and
statesmen to follow Jesus, though they cannot possibly follow either
Tweedledum or Tweedledee without bringing the empire down with a crash
on their heads. And at that I must leave it.

LONDON, December 1915.









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