Produced by Eve Sobol

PREFACE TO ANDROCLES AND THE LION:

ON THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

By 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
   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 PROSLETYST

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 BARRABAS

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 is 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