CHAPTER VII

NIGHTFALL

The ground may now be considered to have been tolerably well prepared for the planting of the seeds of a new envisagement of the genesis and true character of the Christian movement. This new approach goes to the profoundest depths of the human psychological nature and its reaction to history. Its sources are to be located in the innermost recesses of the human psyche in its living struggle with its evolutionary problem. The terms and conditions of that problem, its relation to cosmology in the overall picture and to anthropology in the distinctly human sphere, were themselves largely swept out of general knowledge by the repudiation of previous Pagan learning, the closing of the esoteric Platonic academies, and the destruction of books and libraries. Christianity thus came close to obliterating the very keys to a more glorious understanding of its own highest message. But happily it failed; and now the supplementation of Egyptian wisdom upon the splendid rationalism of the Hellenic philosophies enables us to rebuild those basic archai and upon them erect the lovelier and stronger edifice of the systems of religious truth. Seen in the light of this restored wisdom, the situation that gave birth to the Christian development can be viewed with a clear discernment of its features, currents and motivations that has not been possible before.

Christianity was a growth resulting from one of the most thrilling episodes in the history of culture. It sprang to the fore as the outcome of a struggle between the forces of enlightenment and those of darkness. The universal tradition in all Christendom has had it that the new faith sprang into existence out of this conflict as the bearer of the banner of victory of the light over darkness. Alas and again alas, it was not so. It came out waving the banner of darkness as victor over the light. It all but put out the light of the world.

Light and darkness, as in the grand symbolizations of the Hermetic and Zoroastrian systems, are eternally in combat. Every human his-

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torical predicament is a phase of the battle. The rise of Christianity was an outstanding episode in the everlasting Battle of Armageddon; and it stands now clearly revealed as perhaps the most complete and smashing defeat of the powers of the light in the recorded period of the world's life. If this is doubted and flouted, it takes but one instant's consideration of a single feature of Christianity's motivation and character to silence dissent from the terrific indictment: its fiendish agencies of man's culture. Picture the anomaly presented by the spectacle of the Christian hosts emerging from the struggle allegedly carrying the victorious banner of the light, while with hot feet it stamped out the blackened ashes of the books of the Alexandrian library. Picture this bearer of the standard of new light that had never gleamed before, burning in 553 A.D. the books of its most truly exalted theologian, Origen, and invoking anathema on any one found owning or reading them. As Emerson said, one's actions shout so loud that one's protesting words can not be heard; and here the acts of Christian fanaticism resound abroad in such volume that its pious protestations avail not to refute the incontestable fact that its victory in the fourth century dimmed the brightest light of human culture ever to be kindled and plunged the West into the night of the Dark Ages.

Lothrop Stoddard has a book that should impress general thought more deeply than it has done. It is The Revolt Against Civilization. It unfolds the thesis that ignorance is ever resentful of the possession of knowledge and rebellious against the superior power which knowledge confers. Periodically it bursts out in violent upheaval to wrest the special advantages away from the intelligent groups that have used their skills to build up happier conditions of existence. It mobilizes in as nearly a concerted effort as possible that sullen disregard and covert resentment of the majority of "common people" against what an illiterate backwoodsman used to call "book larnin.'" Almost all movements of popular rebellion have been tinctured more or less heavily by this strain; but it was the Christian movement that most luridly manifested this feature in all the run of history.

The area of man's life is the battleground of this perennial conflict. The battle is that between the two antagonists, the soul and the flesh in the constitution of the individual, moved out into the collective body of the nation and the world. Says Goethe: "Two souls, alas, contend within my breast apart." As human society is the life of the individual multiplied and massed, the mighty battle between the car-

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nal instincts of the physical man and the slowly developing divine spirit within the body is the massive waging of the warfare between these two powers of consciousness. It is the carnal mind against the god-mind in man. In Egypt it was the duel between Horus and Sut.

For a long period of early human history the animal instincts and sensual impulses reigned with nearly unchallenged dominance, motivating every act with a selfish aim. Eventually the sleeping divinity within man's breast awakened, and began to interpose the protests of its developing reason against rampant brutality. Tamed by suffering, the animal self must pay heed more and more to the soul's voice and curb its violent propensities. Extended experience finally instructs the man that the principle of reason is his only constant and dependable guide and monitor, and he brings himself to the study of philosophy, in which a complete understanding of the whole field of knowledge by which he may attain the happiest life is presumably to be found.

In order to serve mankind with a systematic code of wisdom principles for the achievement of this lordly end, ancient sages of graduate human status took pains to formulate in ever memorable fashion the principia of such a soul-science. They designed it for the guidance and eventual self-illumination of all such as would rise from animality into an awareness of the need of genuine superior wisdom. These formulations constituted the first of all Bibles and the codes of the first religions. Ancient "churches" were associations of sufficiently evolved men to undertake, consciously and intelligently, the more direct and more rapid unfoldment of the genius of divinity latent in the human constitution. Heraclitus tells us that "man's genius is a divinity." As the substance of this highest of all cultures lay deep in the domain of the mystical consciousness, truly occult and mysterious until experienced, the associations were termed the "Mysteries." There conscientiously the "wisdom of God hidden in a mystery" was to be cultivated, under the instruction of hierophants, who presumably had attained mastership in the divine cultus.

Now the point of vital significance to the analysis is that inevitably in the world situation at any time in the main human epoch, the number of those who by karmic merit and excellent progression had emancipated themselves from the toils of the animal nature to which ignorance had kept them bound until the light of reason and philosophy had dawned upon their consciousness, is always a very limited few. The truly liberated and enlightened always have formed a very tiny minority amidst the great masses of those still sense-ridden. What a

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scant company are the philosophers in any community, in any age! How few are the light-bearers and the pioneers of any advance above the steady level or ordinary "average" mediocrity!

Thence arises the condition in human society that necessitates esotericism in cultural life. It hypostatizes an oligarchy or aristocracy of intellect and culture, as against a loose democracy of unintelligence and crudity. And the boorish "proletariat" that can not comprehend the just claims of a superior intelligence is ever resentful of the latter's posing in the seats of headship and power and is in revolt against its assumption of privilege and "nobility." Stoddard competently brings this out.

This state of affairs, ineluctably inherent in the status of human evolution, wherein souls of many variant grades of attainment in life science are traveling onward side by side, gives genesis to a series of facts, without a circumspect consideration of which no science of human history or sociology can be formulated to aid in the handling of world problems.

The first and most challenging of these concomitants of evolutionary inequality is the radical pronouncement that, as regards all questions concerned with lofty spiritual experience, intellectual discernment and the cultivation of mystical faculties necessary to apprehend the three elements of beauty, truth and goodness, it is a fearful thing to have to realize that only a limited minority of the cultured are right; the great majority are always wrong! This flouts the ordinary belief or conviction that the majority is always in the right--so dear to the presuppositions of a democratic hope. This deduction means that in such things the standards of the cultured few are more nearly en rapport with divine ideas and ideals and perfect norms than are those of the masses.

Hence there is always a clash between the practical ideals of the few cultured members of society and those of the mob. As the professionally cultured individual, learning a higher wisdom, attempts to align the practice of his life with its dictates, he finds himself differing from the common herd, who, if they take notice, begin to deride and denounce the "heretic." For sheer self-protection, then, and peace, the person fighting his way to clearer views from loftier peaks takes measures to conceal his "eccentric" and "peculiar" modes from the rabble, tends to draw away in semi-seclusion from its rude contacts and seeks the more inspiring association of those of his own caste. For the farther he advances in his individual emancipation through

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surer and wider knowledge, the more detestable become the slavish mannerisms and deadly conformities of the "average." The meaner banalities of the social and thought levels becomes ever more distasteful to him, until it is a crucifixion of his free-spirited soul to suffer the deadly impact of the crudities of common people. To meet a fellow philosopher is to come out of a dark prison and inhale draughts of fresh pure air.

And then comes a series of almost dismaying realizations. He finds himself in mortal danger from that mob of conventionalizers. It does not take kindly the tacit rebuke administered by the different attitude of the one who has gone beyond it to nobler things. It does not like to have its inferiority demonstrated in the open. It resents something that reveals its baseness. Or it is incompetent to see the nobility of anything that stands out in sharp contrariety to its norms, and casts at once the stigma of eccentric, queer at any one who has the moral hardihood to violate its laws. It dislikes any member of the clan who will assert his freedom from the fixed restraints and taboos and live a life of his own on liberal grounds.

And so the well-known cry of "Crucify him, crucify him!" all too readily rises. The rule of the mob is "Conform, conform. You dissent at your peril!" And since the mediocrity of general culture thus holds the whole body to only a mediocre level, missing depravity at the lower end through social fear, and nobility at the upper end through want of capacity for loftier reach, the common crowd is ever challenged by the moral and intellectual pioneer who feels in his breast the upsurge of more divine character. His independent aspiration shocks them. The war is on between him and the many.

The mass of average humanity is still under the sway of the primitive elemental instincts of the animal part of the human dual nature, the divine part not yet having been placed on the throne of the personal life. It is not yet above raging and tearing with the fury of brute savagery. It is therefore the Beast of the old allegories, indeed the Beast of the Book of Revelation. It is the beast in man, not yet domesticated and tamed to gentleness in the service of the coming Lord of Love. And this is the brute unfeeling force that reaches out and besmirches and defiles every creation of beauty, truth and goodness that the ardent pioneer and the philosopher struggle to embody in thought and act, in art and literature. This is the dull incapacity that takes every symbol that intimates to sensitive appreciation a sublime import and tears its mystical halo from it, to leave it a dead and empty

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husk. This is the stupidity that takes the fertile images of truth conceived by the genius of seers and prophets and reduces them to the bare and unlovely aspect of their literal status. This is the ignorance that in the end transmogrifies every sublime ikon of verity into an idol. For only the ignorant can become an idolator. And this is the crude power that in the final failure to discern the uplifting purport of the images, breaks into the churches and in fell fury vents its iconoclastic rage against what it believes to be the instruments of pious sham and vainglory.

And this is the dumb incomprehension that ever since history began has taken hold of every splendid construction of high spiritual genius, designed for the guidance of all aspiring souls at their level of developing intelligence, and presenting the basic principles for true understanding of man's unfolding divinity, and inexorably transformed it into something so completely divergent from its pristine sense as to render it wholly an instrument of crass stultification instead of a means of edification. There is not a religion on earth today, however high and pure in its original conceptuality, that has not been traduced from its first grandeur into a base and banal exteriorization. Not one has escaped the slimy claws of the Beast. It has dragged all alike down into the grossness of flat misconception, in a fearful metamorphosis of exalted sense over to a degrading crudity of meaning that has thwarted the true intent of all noble religions and held the masses of mankind to a low level of culture in all ages.

There comes to hand a passage from one of the ancient world's honored thinkers that puts the truth of this delineation in strikingly forceful manner. It is the philosopher Epicurus, who says:

"The Gods exist, but they are not what the hoi polloi [the many] suppose them to be. He is not an infidel or atheist who denies the existence of the Gods whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on the Gods the opinions of the multitude."

So true is this astute discernment of the philosopher that indeed it can probably be truly affirmed that religions harbor more real infidels and atheists in their folds than are to be found outside them. Only the few enlightened and emancipated minds could be accounted free from idolatry and atheism. Certainly to build up in an ignorant mind a conception of deity that must fall far short of the truth of the divine nature is to institute the worship of false gods. It confronts man boldly

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with the question whether to worship a Being or Beings whose real nature is admittedly past all grasp of the finite human mind is not a gross mistake from the very outset. For the worship, and eventually the worshipper, will become molded to the likeness of the conception of the Object worshipped, and a life will be misshaped over a false pattern. Philosophers have in fact declared that for man to attempt to formulate any concrete idea of Divinity is at once to demean, defame and degrade it. Times without number Christianity has denounced the ancient Pagans for want of worship of the One True God. But this, if true, may but prove that the Pagans were more astute than the Christians, knowing the certainty of committing gross idolatry in so doing. The truth is that most lofty Pagan philosophy advised and practised a discreet silence in regard to the One. We read that they venerated the Unknowable with a befitting silence. Christianity strove in its blindness to make God a familiar Personage to all men, and in the process objectified him to as idolatrous a form of anthropomorphism as had ever been done. Intelligent Paganism revolted from such practice with a sense of violated reverence. Paganism did not essay to drag the Deity down to man's level, but in wiser fashion tried to hold man in more discreet anthropological relation to those inherent aspects and powers of divinity that are manifest and active both in nature and in man's constitution alike. It was in this spirit, mistaken for a lack of worshipful adoration of Supreme Deity, that the Buddha enjoined, "Seek not safety in any one else whomsoever outside yourselves." If religion is the expression of man's relation to God, then ancient Paganism made it, not the relation of man to a God in cosmic heavens, but to the presence of God within man's own nature and his own reach.

In its laudable, but impracticable blundering motive of giving high religion to the multitude, Christianity entrusted its destinies to this Beast. It is intended in all symbolic religion that the bestial segment of man's nature is to be made the sacrificial oblation on the altar of man's life. The numberless sheep, bullocks, heifers and pigs slain with priestly knife and burned--not too badly for convivial banqueting--upon holy altars to make a sweet savor unto the nostrils of a sensual God (if Scriptures are to be taken literally) have betokened this dramatization of the great sacrificial burning out of the animal propensities of the human constitution in the fires of suffering on the alter of the fleshly life. But in the case of Christianity the divinest elements in man's makeup were sacrificed to make the religion appealing and ac-

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ceptable to man almost at his beastly level. The consecrated genius of perfected minds risen to near divinity was thrown recklessly out to the wolves, the dogs and the swine, and it was but a few years until those hordes had trodden it into the mire of low mortal meanings and motives, or degraded it with base misunderstanding. It consigned its future into the same hands that stone the prophets, crucify the saviors and starve the genius of the poet, the artist and the creator of sheer beauty, and that regard as offensive every fully righteous, loving and holy soul struggling amid its restless surgings. It raises the howl of scorn and hatred against every prophet who essays to correct its sordid mores or elevate the tone of its culture. It prostitutes the glory of every gleaming revelation of new truth into tawdry commonplace or distorts it into caricature.

The thinkers in the philosophical quest have always drawn a sharp distinction between "naive thinking" and what is termed philosophical reflection or "speculation." Any intelligent student in this field becomes startlingly aware, sooner or later, of the astounding fact that naive thinking is, as regards essential truth, always in error. Truth is to be found generally as a correction of naive thought, and reflection always ends by correcting common assumption. Common belief is always wrong! Education is largely a process of correcting the erroneous character of naive popular ideas.

Particularly is this true in the realm of religion. And a vital point is that priestcraft has found it on the whole profitable to refrain from emancipating the laity from the errors of the naive viewpoint. They remain more pliable in that state. And deeper reflection tends to lift the thinker out of the ranks of the docile and faithful, and to breed independence and non-conformity.

Need we ask for more valid testimony to the fixity of the general level of indurated belief of the naive mind in human society than this statement from Gibbon in his famous work? (p. 418): "But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitudes that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision." The common mind shrinks from the ordeal of the birth-pangs of new and larger view.

The history of religions has been the invariable story of the degradation of a pristine lofty teaching in the course of time at the hands of later incompetence. No religion has remained the same or carried the same message that its dynamic founder embodied in it. There is a succinct delineation of the inevitable process of deterioration, once

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the generative power is withdrawn, in Joseph Klausner's valuable work on Jesus of Nazareth, reflecting the Jewish viewpoint (p. 213):

"It never happened that there were parties and teachings or systems, where in course of time they did not deteriorate, and their teachings become corrupted by certain of their adherents who had no higher motive than honors, power and gain. In every system, as time goes on, the secondary comes to be regarded as primary and the primary as secondary; the most exalted idea has associated with it disciples who distort it and transform it. . . . This happened to the Law of Moses in the time of Jeremiah, to Christianity not long after Jesus, and to the teaching of the Buddha two hundred years after its propagation."

And Thomas Taylor, the luminous genius who saw and registered the profundities of the great Platonic and Neoplatonic wisdom as no other scholar has ever done, illustrates this process of degradation in a phase of historical development that vitally concerns this study. From the Introduction to his great work on The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, one or two of the three greatest books in all the world, Taylor shows how that mighty system of enlightenment was rendered mute while a world went down into darkness (p. x):

"No objections of any weight, no arguments but such as are sophistical, can be urged against this most sublime theory which is so congenial to the unperverted conceptions of the human mind, that it can only be treated with ridicule and contempt in degraded, barren and barbarous ages. Ignorance and priestcraft, however, have hitherto conspired to defame those inestimable works [of the Neoplatonists] in which this and many other grand and important dogmas can alone be found; and the theology of the Greeks has been attacked with all the insane fury of ecclesiastical zeal and all the imbecile flashes of mistaken wit, by men whose conceptions on the subject, like those of men between sleeping and waking, have been turbid and wild, fantastic and confused, preposterous and vain."

One could readily transfer this indignant voice of Taylor's disappointment and disgust over what orthodox religion had done to mutilate the noble body of Orphic Wisdom and apply it with undiminished force to the similar situation in Christian theology. Indeed the statement covers practically the same deterioration in the same general movement.

But nothing could be more specifically corroborative of this argument than the excerpt from the pen of a modern historian of philosophy. It clinches the point to be driven home at this stage of the development of our theme. It is from the History of Philosophy, by B. A. G. Fuller (p. 95):

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"The untutored mind is naive and soft-headed. In its operation it scarcely distinguishes fact from fancy, dreaming from waking. It swallows everything it is told. Hence it is forever shying at shadows, growling at reflections, pursuing will-o'-the-wisps and clinging to phantoms. Now and then it may happen to lay hold of a truth, but it does so at random, on irrational grounds and with no sense of the difference between the real and the illusory."

And from D. F. Strauss' well-known and much-debated Life of Jesus (Vol. II, p. 49) we take this notable statement:

"Simple people, says Origen in their simplicity, think it is a light matter for the universe to be put in motion or for the heavens to be rent asunder; but those who think more profoundly on these matters see in these superior revelations how it is that chosen people believe in their watchings, and more particularly in their dreams, that they have had evidence by their corporeal senses, while it has simply been a movement in their minds."

At first sight this might seem to be out of reference to naive thinking. But in the religious field the tendency of the "simple-minded" people to reify the substance of their visions and dreams and to entify the symbolic personages of dramatic allegory has made an immense contribution to the vague mass of crude "belief" that helps to solidify these ruinous fixations of naive thought in the world at any age. The disposition of hosts of people to mistake their inner dreamings and haphazard guessings for objective reality in the outer world has been a foremost cause of popular corruption of true religion. True beyond cavil is Plutarch's analysis of the stultifying influences of "popular religion." Fuller (op. cit., p. 265) puts it as follows:

"But a godly life can flow only from a right knowledge of the divine nature and from immediate communion with it."

Words like these are worthy to be framed in gold and hung on all walls, for they hold the correction of aberrations in true religion and philosophy.

"Atheism is therefore the worst thing that can befall a human being."

"Equally bad is superstition, which is exemplified by the unworthy stories and ideas about the gods current in the popular theology, and by the fear, the cringing before their power and the distrust of their will, engendered by the traditional religion. Indeed the orthodox notions are bound to sow and foster atheism."

This will sound like atheism itself to most pious religionists in the orthodox parties of today, yet it is indubitably a true statement. For

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the weird and turbid melange of ideas that arise in the masses in their efforts to make sense out of an unintelligible theology breaks down assurance in the end and breeds infidelity. Most of those who desert religion do so when they take one step above the naive stage and begin to reason.

It might be appropriate to insert here with at least general endorsement John Dewey's strong assertion (Quest for Certainty, p. 308) that

"the pride of the zealously devout is the most dangerous form of pride. The pride of those who feel themselves learned in the express and implicit will of God is the most exclusive."

It is fair to say that such pride is not a peculiarity alone of naive thinkers and the unintelligent orthodox. It surely is characteristic of those groups, however, in large measure. It takes pretty competent philosophical education to break it down into a wider humility.

Hodges, in his The Early Church (p. 68), speaking of Celsus, learned Jewish critic of Christianity, writes that "he disliked them for their poverty and ignorance. They seemed to be presumptuous and impertinent people who undertook to be teachers, having never learned."

Guignebert, one of the greatest of Christian historians, speaks of the "superstitions which vex the shallow minds of men." And this French historian gives us a passage which is most pertinent to our discussion (Christianity Past and Present, p. 207):

"Simple folk are doubtless accessible to all forms of suggestion. . . . Their religious sensibility is more quickly stirred and reacts more profoundly when it is under the will of group contagion, and then they usually show themselves so incapable of regulating it that they very often put the theologians to embarrassment . . . they constitute, therefore, a disturbing element in the Church . . . in ferment and always unstable, nevertheless, nothing frightens them worse than the prospect of change in their belief. . . . For a man to accord to any creed whatever his reasoned and well-considered assent, he must experience an ordinary need for reason and reflection; he must also be accustomed to reasoning. Experience proves that this habit is not common, but presupposes an educated man and a daily schedule which from time immemorial has been the precious privilege of a minority; even smaller in the fifth century than it is today. The majority of men may indeed find that they possess within themselves a religious life in principle, but it ferments in their consciousness as a vague yearning; they prove incapable of organizing it, just as they remain impotent to organize their minds. Of themselves they do not succeed in unifying either their intellect or their moral ego. The necessary light and direction come to them from without, usually in the form of statements of a metaphysical

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kind which can not be verified. It matters little that they are neither very coherent in themselves nor easy of justification, provided they be clear and decisive. But if they are to be classified with the Truth they must not vary by a hair and issue from one authority worthy of confidence--or at any rate deemed so--in which they shall find unwavering support. . . . For this reason simple-minded faithful souls in Augustine's day, and he along with them, willingly believed that the Church represented a divine institution established to teach unerringly and to preserve intact the eternal truths revealed by Christ and by the Holy Spirit. . . . The reality of the religious thought and life enclosed in that setting varies infinitely from age to age and milieu to milieu, for the passage of time modifies the reason of educated men as it does the impressionableness of the ignorant."

All of which, coming to us from out the long-considered lucubration of a deep-thinking, fair-minded scholar, intimates to us very concretely that the general mass of untutored people at any time will always follow the trend of the most conspicuous religious influences brought to the fore and embodied in the ministrations of religion that most largely confront their attention. When inner reflection and more studied and balanced reason does not offer resistance, the commonalty of men will follow the most popular trend, or the psychologically strategic seductions of a sly and deft propaganda.

And how the true inner sense of spiritual doctrines went into complete eclipse under the general ignorance early in the history of Christianity is brought out curtly by Guignebert (op. cit., p. 212):

"The general intellectual apprehension of Christianity falls rapidly away into obscurity. The formulas which churchmen go on repeating without really understanding them themselves, only serve as a mask for an unbridled immorality and a faith really uncouth and incoherent; a gross syncretism in which Teutonic superstitions mingled with those native to the soil, really count for more than the Christian dogmas."

And the low potential of general intelligence exerts a strong pull also to drag the clergy down to its mark. For, says Guignebert (p. 215), speaking of the period of about 500 A.D.:

"In those days, too, the large majority of the clergy are miserably ignorant and share in the profligacy of the age. . . . Scarcely anywhere save in the heart of the monasteries . . . in the sixth and seventh centuries does the light of intellectual culture and theology even flicker."

Indeed early in its history Christianity had already sunk so low under the downward pull of mass ignorance of its lowly and uncultured addicts that the Greeks called the new religion "atheism." (Sir Gilbert Murray, The Five Stages of the Greek Religion, p. 19.) And

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so quickly had the popular ignorance committed to oblivion the real meaning of doctrines and rites that Murray asserts that whatever of reality there ever had been in the ceremonies had "apparently by classical times faded away." This fatal depravity shows the quick and devastating work of the Beast.

Never should be missed the plain reminder of Herodotus, the father of objective history, to the effect that it is always intelligence that elevates one people, age or epoch above another. Says he (op. cit, I, 60): "The Hellenic race was marked off from the barbarians as more intelligent and more emancipated from silly nonsense." And nothing in the end but intelligence will avoid silly nonsense.

And it would be a pity to omit another keen and trenchant thrust of Guignebert, when he tells of the ignorance of the laity at a later epoch (pp. 222-3):

"Unfortunately their credulity also was unbounded and they became attached by preference to the most indifferent rites and practices, because those best agree with ignorance and thoughtlessness."

And so it resulted that the Christian dogmas, which, says Guignebert, had been formulated by keen Eastern minds, had by the tenth century--certainly long before, as the light went out as early as the third--"proved incapable of penetrating tenth-century minds." If, then, he argues, the veritable core of Christianity inhered within those dogmas, the contemporaries of Otto the Great or of Hugh Capet had to content themselves with a mere semblance of Christianity.

Anent our earlier asseveration that nearly all the facts of religious history are caricatured into untruth in the mass mind, Guignebert, in refuting popular ideas regarding the growth of the authority of the Popes in Rome, says (p. 227): "The truth of history is widely different from this decidedly biased theory." This statement could be applied with generally similar aptitude to nearly every major theory about the Christian religion and its history. Popular ignorance has misconceived almost every single item of theology and history alike.

At several places Guignebert openly affirms that Christianity was adapted for the lower orders, and thus enthroned the tyranny of ignorance in the Western world. He makes it clear that it spells woe to any religion to entrust its destinies into the hands of the simple folk. Such people never merit the prerogative of setting the higher guiding light before a civilization. Their proper and beneficent function is to abide as steadily as may be by a general norm of decent mores and maintain

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them as pure as possible. However they are to be hailed as sovereign lords in a democracy, it is they who wreck every noble culture and demean it to a vulgar level. It is they who wrecked Christianity and doused the ancient gleam.

The ignoble work of mass mentality in world history is seen when one studies the tribal religions of the backward nations of the earth. Scholastic sense has grown all awry in estimating these crude forms and practices as primitive outgrowths of child-minded conception. What they are in truth is the unintelligible wrack and debris of very ancient constructions of sage allegorical skill. As Massey affirms, all the insanity in them is in our assumption that these long-descended forms represent real beliefs originally. They stand as vivid markers to our intelligence of what stupid handling of sacred emblems and rituals in total ignorance of their symbolic meaning can do to traduce an initially fine representation of verity into a mummery of nonsense.

It could be a matter of at least casual and incidental interest to introduce here the amazingly frank confession of the eminent English Egyptologist, Budge, as to our paucity of sound knowledge about ancient culture. In The Gods of the Egyptians (Vol. I) he asks:

"Is it true that the more the subjects of Egyptian religion and mythology are studied the less we know about them? The question is, however, thoroughly justified, and every honest worker will admit that there are at the present time scores of passages even in such a comparatively well-known religious compilation as the Book of the Dead which are inexplicable, and scores of allusions to a fundamentally important mythological character of which the meanings are still unknown."

This confessed ignorance of what are now known to be the immediate sources of all that Christianity holds is the price centuries have had to pay for the Christian repudiation of "Origen's allegories." Had Origen expounded the mystic and cosmic significance of the Egyptian myths of Osiris, Isis and Horus, of Hathor, Atum, Kepher and Shu, and had succeeding theologians retained the insight to follow, perpetuate and uphold such elucidation, Western history would have taken a far happier journey than it did. But already in Origen's day the mighty scrolls of the hieroglyphics had lain in oblivion, uninterpretable, for some eight hundred years. Origen can hardly be blamed for his inability to measure up to adeptship in the deep art of a luminous grasp of the cryptic reading of the myths and allegories inherited from Egypt, for he lacked the true keys which only that ancient system of code principles could supply. Thirteen centuries later the same im-

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portant keys were still lacking to the Reformers. For those ancient runes still defy the best intelligence of Western minds to fathom their mysteries of meaning, and will do so as long as the secret clues that only Egypt could furnish are missing. Now at last those keys and clues are available, and the near future is waiting to be glorified by the completion of the unfinished Protestant Reformation by the release of a flood tide of illumination radiant beyond all possible calculation. The true Period of Enlightenment for Christianity and the end of the Dark Ages are at hand.

If this sounds like the ebullition of extravagant fancy, let the reader contemplate another amazing admission from this same renowned Egyptologist, and speculate on the possibility that what is here advanced supplies a hidden clue to the explication of a fact that has perplexed Christian minds and undermined Christian pride over all the centuries. Says Budge in the same passage:

"And at last when his [Osiris'] cult disappeared before the religion of the man Christ, the Egyptians who embraced Christianity found that the moral system of the old cult and that of the new religion were so similar, and the promises of resurrection and immortality in each so much alike that they transferred their allegiance from Osiris to Jesus of Nazareth without difficulty; moreover Isis and the child Horus were straightway identified with Mary the Virgin and her Son, and in the apocryphal literature of the first few centuries which followed the evangelization of Egypt, several of the legends about Isis and her sorrowful wandering were made to center around the Mother of Christ. Certain of the attributes of the sister goddesses of Isis were also ascribed to her, and like the goddess Neith of Sais, she was declared to possess perpetual virginity. Certain of the Egyptian Christian Fathers gave to the Virgin the title 'Theotokos,' or 'Mother of God,' forgetting apparently that it was an old translation of nefer mut, a very old and common title of Isis."

Here is the background for an understanding of our assertion that the lost literature of Egypt holds the explicatory or exegetical secret keys to Christianity and its Scriptures. For in the full blunt truth the latter are only a prolongation and revamped republication of the same old Nilotic system, with the keys lost. The early Christian Fathers, in their unintelligence, presumed that their misshapen keys would unlock the doors of mystic mystery. Their incredible mistake committed their world to chaos and ineradicable bigotry. The Rosetta Stone offers the lost key to the lost world; but after translation must come competent interpretation, and even on top of that must be regained what Symonds called a new mental sensibility to catch what interpretation

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has completely missed till now. This accomplishment promises the coming dawn of a new revelation, which is of course nothing but the recovery of a lost old revelation. Happily it is near at hand.

The Catholic Encyclopedia more than once admits that the history of Catholic ceremonials "affords numerous parallels for this Christianizing of Pagan rites." But its sponsors and editors have never had the discernment to recognize that one would therefore have to go back and investigate the genesis and meaning of those antecedent Pagan rites if the Christian usage of them was to be rationally apprehended. The inevitable claim is that the Christians took hold of old heathen practices which the Pagans followed, but never themselves understood, and at last placed the true and rational interpretation upon them. But this presupposes the preposterous and impossible assumption that the Pagans, steeped in densest mental and spiritual darkness, had in all their rites hit upon formulations and procedures that were later by the Christians found to express true, sublime and authoritative significance. In total ignorance of such significance and by blind chance the Pagans had developed the forms and types of the most exalted verities, which the Christians could adopt and find expressive of the divinest realities. On such baseless and fantastic foundations do most Christian "explanations" of many challenging facts rest.

We can well see the impossibility of upbuilding a religion of truth to benefit all ranks of mankind--as Christianity claims to be--on the naive thinking and poor intelligence of the lower orders--as Christianity claims to have done--if we listen to what that prodigious thinker of the later European period, Immanuel Kant, wrote in his Die Religion:

"It ought not to be made a condition of Salvation to believe that there was once a Man who by his holiness and merit gave satisfaction for himself and for all others; for this the reason tells us nought; but it is the duty of men universally to elevate themselves to the Ideal of moral perfection deposited in the Reason, and to obtain moral strength by the contemplation of this Ideal. Such moral faith alone is man bound to exercise and not historic faith."

Truer words than these were never spoken, and no one in this case could allege that they do not embody the conclusions of the most prolonged and conscientious thinking of one of the greatest human minds. Shallow thinking can not be charged against this declaration. Kant finds that the Gospel narrative of the Jesus life can not be accepted on a basis that makes it in any way a substitute for the need of man's salvation through his own reason. Not a few other notable

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scholars have reached the same conclusion. Now the Egyptian literature discloses that Kant is right; the Gospels are not histories, but rescripts of old allegorical and dramatic mystery representations--falsely turned into "history." And the Christian Fathers, Clement, Origen, Eusebius, Augustine and others corroborate this dictum by statements that drop from their pens when the truth escapes them at unguarded moments.

Kant further stresses the query whether one must not fully make allowance, as one reads the Gospels

"for the desire on the part of Jesus' biographers to conform these incidents to texts of the Hebrew Scriptures; and hence each reader must judge for himself whether he is being treated to facts or to this process of conformity."

And this observation of the great German philosopher epitomizes a view which has been forced upon the attention of most Christian historians and exegetists open-minded enough to face what is unescapable in a study of Scriptures. There will be occasion to revert to this view and its weighty involvement in a later chapter.

Kant also enlarges upon the odd fact that Jesus so woefully lacked defenders at his trial and death, when he had personally benefited so many.

As showing the gullibility of the populace in religious matters, we have Gerald Massey's opinion, founded on a life-time of devoted study in Egypt, that

"The ancient wisdom in the Hebrew books has been converted into a spurious specie and passed off on the ignorant and unsuspecting as a brand new issue from the mint of God."

Humiliating and repugnant to swollen pride as such an assertion proves to be, it has now to be accepted as positive truth. No redemption of a decadent religionism can be achieved until this is known.

We may agree or disagree with the pronouncements of two ancient historians, but both ascribe the vogue of deliberately cultivated religion to motives that are far from holy and spiritual. Says Polybius (VI, 56):

"Religion would perhaps be unnecessary in a commonwealth of wise men. But since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, it is right to restrain it by the fear of the invisible world and such tragic terrors. Whence our ancestors appear to have introduced the notions concerning the gods and opinions about the

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infernal regions, not rashly or without consideration. Those rather act rashly and inconsiderately who would expel them."

And Strabo is even more direct (Lib. I, p. 19):

"It is impossible to govern a mob of women, or the whole mixed multitude, by philosophical reason and to exhort them to piety, holiness and faith; we must also employ superstition with its fables and prodigies. For the thunder, the abyss, the trident, the torches, the serpents, the thyrsi of the gods, are fables, as is all ancient theology; but the legislature introduces these things as bugbears to those who are children in understanding."

Here with brutal frankness is laid bare the shrewd politic design behind what has often been declared by astute students to be the world's oldest and greatest "racket." If we demur to its correctness, we still must admit that what was doubtless intended to be something immeasurably higher and nobler in its origin and conception has almost generally sunk to this status in its motivation. High purposiveness has been lost along with high understanding, and a grand culture vouchsafed by the gods to men has been dragged down into the mire in which the Beast wallows. But Polybius and Strabo remind us forcibly what may be and has been done with the symbols and rites and Scriptures of a lost sublime religion, when knowledge of their meaning has long been extinct, and when the open gullibility of the crude masses offers tempting opportunities to crafty and none too conscientious priestcraft. If there is greater general indifference to religion in the modern age and Western world, it is doubtless due to the fact that broader education of the masses has awakened them to this insincerity of the motivation behind established religions. They are catching on to the "game" and are beginning to resent being played upon in the role of gullible dupes. But in their reaction they will sweep out the cultural good of religion along with the evil of it. The problem is to eradicate the evils due to ignorance and preserve for a redemptive culture the intrinsic good, the high intellectual and enlightening content that was swept away with the tide of fanatical pietism that brought in the Christian movement. This work will point the way to that achievement.

Von Mosheim says (Vol. I, 21) that the Egyptian priests had a sacred code of their own

"founded on very different principles from those which characterized the popular religion, and it was studiously concealed from the curiosity of the public by wrapping it up in characters the meaning and power of which were only known to themselves."

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This system, so sedulously kept from the multitude, he suspects put nature as causative principle in the place of the Deity, while the multitude was allowed to ascribe all things to Deity. Children can readily be led to accept a Deity as the universal creator; philosophers come around to the view that the creative power is Nature, which they may accept as the arm or instrument of Deity.

Again the susceptibility of the "vulgar" is seen to have tempted the duplicity of the priesthood when one takes as its real, if hidden, worth such a statement as that made by Farrar (op. cit., Vol. II, 367), when he says:

"In the practice of the vulgar Christianity became an idolatry enriched by myths."

To this should be added, of course, the reflection that if Christianity had not impoverished itself by discarding and flouting the myths in the first place, it need never have fallen to the mean status of becoming an idolatry, and then regaining some of the lost wealth by recovering the myths later. This exactly matches the situation in the processing of modern wheat flour: the millers sifted out the bran, the germ and some vital mineral elements from the grain till it was a lifeless product. Now they have had to put back into it the elements they had left out.

George Hodges, in a sensible work on The Early Church, speaking of the Mystery religions, writes (p. 22):

"They led their disciples on from grade to grade till they were taught at last a doctrine too sacred to be told to the common world."

And this simple true statement from a scholar out of the ranks of the modern theological milieu is expressly contradicted, denied, smudged, vilified by ecclesiastics and spokesmen of the Church, even by such a renowned investigator as Renouf, who declares that the Mystery groups had no inner secret teaching worthy of being considered either secret or mysterious.

We have then perpetually in the world a condition which in the end exerts a greater determining influence in the practice and conduct of religion than any other single factor. On the one hand we have the general run of average and subnormal humanity, deprived of opportunity to become enlightened, or by virtue of their low stage in the scale of evolution incapable of it; and on the other the very limited number of the mentally elite and truly illumined, or potentially fitted for the finest culture. How to preserve and to use the body of the

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highest and deepest wisdom garnered by previous mastership has been the perennial problem confronting the cognoscenti and illuminati down the ages. Various motives can be seen to have dictated the policies pursued at different times in history. True humanitarian wisdom prescribed the segregation of the profoundest elements of knowledge among a tried and proven few, not from motives of selfish enjoyment or unwillingness to admit the many into the arcana, but strictly because it was considered a risk of debasement of noble truth to cast it out to the undisciplined multitude, a very great danger to society itself. A thing so intrinsically precious was not to be cheapened by common spoliation. This motive resulted in the institution of esotericism both in the substance and the content of oral and written knowledge, and in the method of impartation or instruction. The instruments used were myth, allegory, symbol, drama, number, letter and star picture, in a wide variety of combination and cryptic reference. Says G. R. S. Mead in his Orpheus (p. 60):

"These myths were not only set forth in verse and prose, but were also represented pictorially and in scripture in the Adyta of the Temples."

The danger is suggested in his next sentence:

"And though it can be argued that in a pure state of society, in which the nature and interaction of divine powers could be taught, such myths could be understood without damage to morals, nevertheless in a degenerate age, when the meaning of these symbols was forgotten, grave dangers arose, and the insanity of phallicism inculcated its virus into the community."

"Myriads on myriads of enigmatical utterances by both poets and philosophers are to be found, and there are also whole books which present the mind of the writer veiled, as that of Heraclitus On Nature, which on this very account is called 'Obscure.' Similar to this book is the Theology of Pherecydes of Samos. And so also the work of Euphorion, the Causae of Callimachus and the Alexandra of Lycophron."

Clement of Alexandria cites the various styles of writing practiced among the learned Egyptians: (1) the Epistolographic; (2) the Hieratic, which the sacred scribes practice; and finally (3) the Hieroglyphic, divided into two modes: (a) literal and (b) symbolic; which is further described as being of two kinds. "One speaks literally by imitation, and another writes as it were figuratively, and another is called allegorical, using certain enigmas."

Clement leaves no doubt as to the rule of the esoteric method in ancient literature:

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"All then, in a word who have spoken of divine things, both barbarians and Greeks, have veiled the first principles of things and delivered the truth in enigmas and symbols and allegories and metaphors and such like tropes."

And he concludes with a fine statement which should clear up all lingering intransigence on the part of moderns as to the importance of myth and allegory:

"Now Wisdom, hard to hunt, is the treasures of God's unfailing riches. But those, taught in theology by those prophets, the poets, philosophize much by way of a hidden sense. I mean Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, Homer and Hesiod and those in this fashion wise. The persuasive style of poetry is for them a veil for the many."

The survey of this field, so important in the knowing, so fatal in the ignorance of it, should not omit a citation from the Zohar of the Hebrews (iii, fol. 1526):

"Each word of the Torah contains an elevated meaning and a sublime mystery." "The recitals of the Torah are the vestments of the Torah. Woe to him who takes this garment for the Torah itself. The simple take notice only of the garments or recitals of the Torah. They know no other thing. They see not that which is concealed under the vestment, but to the body which it envelops."

Echoing these destiny-fraught words of the Hebrews one might cry now: "Woe to the age that takes the testaments of ancient wisdom for literal history!" For woe has come to every age since esotericism was dragged down into desuetude in those fatal third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, and precisely because the intelligence that would have read the wondrous truths hidden in the mysteries of spiritual exaltation and a symbolic language that alone can impound the substance of those exaltations, was crushed out or hounded with murder.

But the condition that led wisdom to resort to the subtleties of esoteric method led to exactly what the scribes of Christendom have been eager to cry against as the bane and the weakness, the failure and the evil of esoteric Paganism. It brought into existence the very evil that Christianity prides itself upon so lavishly for having expunged: the aristocracy of intellect, the snobbery of exclusive knowledge. Christianity preens its feathers on having taken into its bosom the masses of the downtrodden under-elements of the population of the Roman

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Empire and ministered to their religious needs, masses whom the exclusive cults of the Mystery Brotherhoods allegedly deemed beneath their notice.

And so the essay must deal with the involvements of this outcome of esoteric polity. If there is ample ground for the unassailability of esotericism, then there must be equally unassailable bases for the validity of an aristocratic grouping of parties, a limited minority of those who are versed in knowledge, as over against the great body of the untutored, whom the writers on ancient history like to term the "vulgar."

As it was the claim of glory for Christianity that it gave the true religion to the poor and downcast, so of course it was the kindred effort of the religion to cry up the futility and failure of the Pagan groups composing the elite and the intelligentsia. Having cast its lot with the humble and the ignorant, the new religious ferment ineluctably came to espouse the cause of ignorance and to take arms against the interests of learning and intelligence.

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CHAPTER VIII

HATRED OF PHILOSOPHY

In his The Beginnings of Christianity (p. 180) Fisher rants against "the aristocracy of philosophical thought; the notion of an oligarchy of philosophers." Learning held exclusively in the ranks of those who have by righteousness and virtue earned it from life, savors too readily of what the Gospels have held up to scorn as "Phariseeism," which the Christian mind has been conditioned to hold in contempt and load with contumely. And of course the plea of the great Plato that was still ringing in the ears of the intelligent of society in those early centuries, that the states should be presided over by philosophers, finds little acclaim in Christian thought. For the Church had turned in bitterness and implacable hostility against all philosophy, and perhaps still looked for a returning Jesus to set up the millennial kingdom on the throne of theocratic universalism in Jerusalem.

We'll have none of philosophy or philosophers in our glorious religion of the spirit, was Tertullian's irate outburst. Our religion is not for the few haughty scholars; it is for all of God's simple children. And it seems as if his idea must have included the thought: the simpler the better. The Church should be reminded of his words today:

"What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? . . . Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic and dialectic composition!"

The truth is that Christianity went on to become just about the most "mottled" and variegated religion in history, since it had to make endless compromises and adaptations to every variety of religious system that it encountered in overrunning Europe. Indeed it began as a most motley aggregation of widely differing cults, and, as will be shown, very shortly introduced elements from surrounding religions.

Fisher enlarges on the assertion he makes that in Christianity God in all his love and compassion for sinful man is brought near "to the

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apprehension, not of a coterie of philosophers merely, but to the humble and ignorant." As hundreds of other apologists make exactly the same assertion, we have here the text for a discussion which does not seem ever to have been undertaken in a completely dispassionate and critical spirit, and which, therefore, stands in need of just that sort of treatment. For to handle it in the simple and naive fashion of the Christian defenders is at a glance seen to be dangerously fatuous. No one writing in this mood--which is too easily seen to be the result of sheer bias--has had the perspicacity to catch the patent asininity that is only thinly hidden beneath the surface of this thought situation. For the very presumption in the thesis that represents God as being more devoted to the welfare of the economically and mentally lowly masses than to his more intellectually grown children, by that very token argues that he is more lovingly interested in ignorance than in intelligence. It shows him favoring the former and rewarding their failings more than his more capable offspring. It tacitly but logically presupposes that God will love you more if you are poor and stupid than he will if you are intelligent. To win his best blessing you should forego all deeper study, remain in childlike nescience and receive that outpouring of divine benignancy and beatitude which the All-Father prefers to bestow on babes, while the wise of the earth philosophize in vain. It does not impugn the genuine rationality of this point to realize that within modest limits book-study and mental gymnastics may end in befuddlement of mind and a certain stultification of vision, and that an attitude of simple expectancy on the part of untrained minds may invite some of the clearer perceptions that fall to naive thinking. It is true enough that the endless disputations of philosophers have too generally yielded little of sound or practical value and failed to decide momentous issues for human understanding and assurance. But if this much-labored opinion of Christian writers is in any remotest sense held to as real truth and fact, why, then, has the movement in actual performance declared it to be baseless? If deep and life-long study of its theology really yields less than the instinctive intuitions of child-like faith, why, one asks, has the institution of Christianism seen it to be desirable to establish thousands of theological seminaries and academies? If faculties of school-bred philosophers are a treacherous source of useless maundering over abstrusities that only befuddle the simple mind, why have them? They are highly expensive. Why not let the babes in wisdom reach the simple faith of Christ from their cradles and play-boxes? Evidently the Christian movement itself distrusted

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the maxim of simplicity, except to use it as appealing sentimentality when that approach could gain a point with the masses, because it itself reverted to the despised Pagan habit of study of philosophy and the discipline of the intellect. And not only that, but it took up the very systems of Pagan philosophy that were as a stench in the nostrils of Tertullian and other Fathers, and built its later edifice of rational theology upon them!

We hear again and again that Christianity was a "religion of the heart," in sharp contrast to Pagan philosophy, which was all mind and no heart. Hear Fisher dissertate on this (p. 541):

"The contrast between Christianity as a religion of the heart, accessible to all, and regarding with special compassion the poor man and the outcast, and the creeds of philosophy, which gave precedence to the 'wise and prudent' and creating an intellectual oligarchy, provoked a contemptuous estimate of the new faith on the part of those of whom Celsus is a representative. It is scarcely a matter of surprise that Christian societies, made up, as at first they were, almost exclusively from the humbler class, should be suspected of meeting for purposes of conviviality and debauchery, and that even rumors of hideous crimes such as were often imputed to the Jews in the Middle Ages, should be propagated concerning them."

If we recall the simple fact that the Christians of the early days were at about the level of present-day Salvation Army intelligence, we shall have no difficulty in understanding the low estimate put upon the Church by Celsus, Pliny, Seneca, Suetonius and other cultured minds of the day. But here, as always, the emphasis is on the contrast between the poor, who have heart feelings, and the few who have cultivated intellectual interests in religion and philosophy.

That this was a tremendously impelling motive for the inception and growth of Christianity should not for a moment be overlooked. It is one of the truest keys to the comprehension of the influences that combined to give Christianity its initial impulse.

And it is of more than common significance because it is a question that still agitates controversy in religious circles. To the ubiquitous question, which is the true or the surer guide for religious faith, the intellect or the heart, in what B. A. G. Fuller, in his History of Philosophy, calls the "soft-headed" sentimentalism that so largely makes up conventional religionism, the religion of the heart gets the affirmative vote. But in the opinion of "hard-headed" thinkers, emancipated from the traps of naiveté, the intellect would win the decision. It will do to say here that a greater judge than any people's opinions

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has already pronounced an irrefutable and unassailable verdict: which is, that religion of the heart, feelings, emotions, dispositions, devotions, when not regulated and guided by sound intellectual judgments, has proved itself to be the most frightfully devastating scourge known to history. The debate is closed; the jury, written history, has spoken: the heart is never safe to trust until it is directed by something more securely anchored to verity than feeling. That something is studied intelligence.

And again the hollowness of the Christian glorification of its interest in the poor and humble is glaringly exposed by the implication, as in the case of God's imputed favoritism for ignorance as against learning, that God has once more shown himself partial, this time to man's emotional nature as against his intellectual endowment. It is an around-the-bush way of intimating that God has rated feeling in rank and value above intellection, with the sly side hint that he would deprecate the mind of his creatures, while giving greater glory to their emotions. As a matter of fact the verdict of the greatest thinkers has never failed to place the intellect above the feelings. As far as the best human perception goes, Christianity thus finds itself on the losing side of a centuries-old controversy. It lost everything but the fanatical idolatry of emotion-ridden zealots by choosing to follow the glorified hegemony of the heart,--and that uncorrected by the intellect--instead of that of mind and heart combined in philosophical stability.

Speaking of the constituency and personnel of the first church congregations, Fisher says (pp. 576-7):

"They were made up mostly of the poor and obscure, who were drawn to embrace the Gospel by an inward need, and whose low position in the social scale was a standing ground of reproach against the new religion from the side of its adversaries. Moved thus by spiritual hunger, and by no motive of self-interest, they laid hold of the priceless boon offered them in the Gospel with all sincerity and earnestness."

This is, as far as it goes, a complete and comprehensive description of the genesis of Christianity. It is the true statement of what took place. Yet it is too simple and too partial to cover the whole case. It leaves the matter standing somewhat in false light, because it needs further qualification and interlining. It glorifies or sanctifies "inward need" and "sincerity and earnestness" when these are manifested by people who sought refuge in the cult of Christianity. These qualities are not so lauded when they are similarly the expression of people who did not resort to Christianity for satisfactions.

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One must live long and study closely if one is to learn that "sincerity and earnestness" are by no means a sure badge of rectitude or even good intent. Certainly they have never in history been a sure badge of intelligence. People do very little without generally sincere and earnest motives. These qualities do not present guarantees of the good of what they motivate. The Inquisitors, now looked upon as worse than ferocious beasts of cruelty, no doubt were sincere and certainly were earnest. Most inhuman savagery can claim the activation of the two generally laudable qualities. Nearly all bigots are sincere and earnest, to the point of repulsiveness. What this volume is aiming to substantiate is precisely the human fact that a body of normal people of humble station and low intelligence, hungry, as all humans intrinsically are, for a saving religion, laid hold of a body of high ethical and spiritual wisdom and, incapable of interpreting it in its esoteric sense, corrupted it through ignorance into a corpus of belief, the obvious literal preposterousness of which has wrecked a world.

Even Fisher has to pause a moment, pulled up short by his sudden remembrance of how deficient were these early devotees of the new popular faith (p. 580):

"If they disclosed dark features of human imperfection, they at the same time give one a glimpse of the mighty power of that new religion [which we now know was not new in a single feature] which was laying hold of the poor and untutored, and was beginning its work as a leaven in the midst of a corrupt and decaying world."

What our intent here is to present for the first time is that the very movement that Fisher takes to have been a beginning of the rise of true light out of surrounding darkness was itself basically the clearest evidence and manifestation of the darkness, and indeed a movement downward to greater darkness, or at least further blind groping in the murks. Surely it was no beginning of a tide surging back to the light. As it moved on it sank ever deeper into darkness and crystallized the works of darkness into a hard mold that held the fluid spirit of mankind bound in unbreakable incrustations for two millennia. A movement that can be truthfully so described is no movement toward the higher star of truth.

Says Guignebert in his work previously cited (p. 150) in speaking of the Creed:

"In the first place it was the work of ignorant folk who obviously can scarcely take in anything above ordinary inventions and inflations."

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But he adds, these simple folk can make nothing of their venerable formulas and rolling phrases of ancient cosmogony without some help from the Greek schools.

"Accordingly they apply them [the principles of Greek philosophy] to the premises of the faith and to the suggestions which they draw from the religious sentiments of the ignorant."

Guignebert says (p. 165) that not only the learned despised the ignorant Christians; they were disliked by the bulk of the common people as well. If this is in any measure the strict truth, it would seem to place the Christians as the lowest of the lowly, even below "the common people." This face should forsooth open the eyes of good Christian people today who go on under the bland assumption that those early Christians were the misguided, vilified and persecuted embodiments of the highest godly virtue and holy courage. It is clear, that, as writer after writer admits, they were the very dregs of society. Like Chrysostom, many spokesmen for the faith have abstracted glory from this very lowliness, counting it the prime evidence of divine ordination that wisdom came not through the learned, but through the spiritual ferment amid the lowliest. What this hallucinated infatuation has cost the world is beyond calculation.

And how narrow and self-hallowing this arrogance of ignorance, this pride of mental poverty, as Dewey calls it, can become is shown by Guignebert's statement a few pages farther on (p. 170) that the early Church,

"as depository of divine truth, she saw in every pagan an agent of the Evil One, and the mere idea of equality of treatment with Paganism for herself was like an outrage which necessity alone could force her to tolerate."

The dictionary definition of this attitude is "bigotry."

Celsus doubtless spoke with a jeering sharpness in his famous description of the personnel of the early Church, or the Church at his time, the third century:

"It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and children--whom they wish to persuade to join their congregations or can persuade . . . wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, most uneducated and vulgar persons . . . whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent, or a fool, in a word, whoever is god-forsaken (kakodaimon), him the Kingdom of God will receive." (See Glover's Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire.)

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Says Edward Carpenter in his Pagan and Christian Creeds:

"The rude and menial masses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture, flocked in" and became "a source of weakness to the Church and a cause of dissension and superstition."

Von Mosheim says that

"By far the greater part of those who embraced the Christian religion in this its infancy being men of mean extraction and wholly illiterate, it could not otherwise happen but that a great scarcity should be experienced in the churches of persons possessing the qualifications requisite for initiating the ignorance and communicating instruction to them with a due degree of readiness and skill."

Guignebert says that side by side with the aristocracy of birth, the aristocracy of intellect for a long time refused its adhesion to the Christian faith, and often indeed it pretended to treat it as beneath its notice. The intellectuals are not drawn toward the rabble's emotional religion; they preserve a superstitious reverence for Hellenism. Why he should let an unfounded slur slip into his sentence here in calling a deep reverence for Hellenism "superstitious" is hard to fathom. It presents once more attestation of the palsy to which the virus of an indurated Christian bias will reduce the best of orthodox minds. Thousands of scholars and truth-seekers have found the Greek philosophy most highly elevating and most brilliantly illuminating to their minds, and they would justly resent having their admiration for it called "superstition." In it they have found themselves farther from superstition and closer to divine light than in any other field of truth they have searched through. It has become the fixed habit of Christians to snarl and snap at all things found in Paganism that would obviously have to be deemed worthy of praise.

Concomitant with the praise of ignorance in Christian apologetics must of course come the calumniation of the exclusiveness of Platonic philosophy. We find Hodges saying in The Early Church (p. 88):

"But the essential weakness of Neo-Platonism was in the narrow range of its appeal. It addressed itself to cultivated people and among them to such as had the temperament of the mystic. It was right in its insistence upon a supreme good beyond sense, beyond reason, beyond reality; but when it endeavored to explain what that supreme good is, the plain man could not understand it."

Tedious as is this citation of examples of stupid misconception, it is a work that must be done if we are ever to make our way out of the

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brambles and thickets of asinine misjudgment in which the accumulated nescience of generations has entangled the minds of the commonalty of men in Christian lands. Statements like this of Hodges are still accepted as conveying the truth, and consequently still hold minds in perverted ideas. It is certainly a most reprehensible error on the part of a man posing as a scholar to ascribe weakness to the Neoplatonic system because its appeal was to such height of intellectual capability that only a limited minority could provide the credentials to appreciate it. Neo-Platonism is not a weak system, but perhaps the strongest for light and truth ever held by mankind. It is noble beyond anything coming out since its day. Its revival is a crying need today if civilization and culture are to be saved. It still exists and illuminates the finest minds beyond what Christianity has been able to do. This churchman argues that the limited range of its appeal proves the weakness of the system. This is a blind stab at an argument and it misses truth and hits a great untruth. In this case at any rate the limited range of appeal is not the weakness of the system, but sadly proves the weakness of the human masses. When has the highest culture ever had a wide appeal? As sensibly should he rail against fine music or fine art, because their appeal is only to connoisseurs. Good music is forsooth to blame because the vulgar disdain it and will have their "popular" songs instead! Just so surely did early Christianity disdain high Platonic philosophy and swing away in abandon of lower excitability to the "jazz" philosophy of weird apocalyptic fervor and the cult of a personal divine Savior that swept it down to the level where only the meanest could find an elemental instigation in its message.

Then in Hodges' next words we read the solemn dirge of true Christianity (p. 88):

"The Emperor Justinian closed the doors of the Academy at Athens and the seven philosophers, who alone represented the Neoplatonic faith, took their books and sought the hospitality of the East."

It is a legitimate question whether this was not the saddest, most rueful day in world history. It was the last flicker and final out of the Lamp of Ancient Wisdom.

Hodges himself helps us to see how the darkness thickened when the light was withdrawn. He says (p. 89):

"Origen was a fellow-student of Plotinus in the school of Ammonius Saccas. The perception of God in all honest thought was, indeed, confined

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mainly to the Greek Fathers. The Latins were of another mind. Tertullian, contemporary of Clement and Origen, hated all philosophy and poetry. This was in part by reason of his temperament, but also in equal part by reason of his ignorance."

This is further corroboration of the claim that Christianity, as developed in the Roman West, bore little of kinship in spirit and rationale with the higher Christianity that was enwombed in the Hellenistic East. It is by no means only geographical and historical differences and external influences that caused a Greek Christian ecclesiastical system to arise and take its course in independence of a Roman Christian system. The two were not really born of the same stock and parentage. Or if the Western stemmed from the primitive Eastern, it did not long maintain its parental heritage and characteristics. It soon became a wayward and degenerate offshoot, abandoning philosophy and rationalism for an arrant emotional pietism that could only save itself from frenzied excesses by being held to the restraints of disciplined reason. These failing it, it plunged down into that abyss of irrational faith that swept it on to its long career of unparalleled inhumanity.

An odd reference to the ills arising from "intellectual aristocracy," this time not as between Pagan philosophical oligarchy and Christian simplicity of faith, but between a class of intellectual nobility in the Church itself and the common unschooled laity, is found in Guignebert's comment on the amazing effort of the Church philosopher Scotus Erigena to reintroduce into Christianity those esoteric elements drawn from Platonism and Pythagoreanism, or from Neoplatonism, which the Church had by the fifth century so completely cast out. Says the historian (p. 220):

"Scotus Erigena indeed took good care to emphasize the difference between his theology, which was, he said, vera theologia, as well as vera philosophia, and the popular beliefs. As a matter of fact, the doctors who join with Gottschalk, Rabanus Maurus and Hincmar in the dispute over predestination or the effects of the consecration of the Eucharist, take no interest in the ordinary believers, nor do these ordinary believers take any interest in them. And although this aristocratic isolation of Christian thinkers with regard to the mass of Christians is nothing new, it is none the less disturbing. Not only will it favor the theological virtuosity which plays with empty words and juggles with abstract ideas so remote from all religious experience and concrete reality, that it is so much lost time, but it will also turn the 'intellectuals' of the Church aside from their real

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duty, which is to instruct and enlighten the ignorant, to safeguard them from themselves and the suggestions of their milieu, and to make them better people."

Some items here need to be noticed. Erigena's conception that true theology is identical with true philosophy is precisely what this essay proclaims and endeavors to validate. Religion fell into debasement when it divorced itself from philosophy, as will be argued presently. Again, Erigena took care to let no one labor under the delusion that high spirito-mystic and rational theology was the message the Church held for the unteachable masses. He stood true to the esoteric tradition. Next, it can be admitted, with Guignebert, that the aristocratic isolation of the intellectuals can become a priggish and snobbish thing, distracting the learned from their duty to the common people in the way of real instruction, for the mental delights of true philosophy can become absorbing and enthralling to a competent mind. But as to this danger, a bit of practical wisdom could dictate a safe handling of the situation. After all somebody must devote their entire time to the business of loving truth and seeking to formulate it organically. Woe to that society that will pull its intellectual aristocracy away from its consecrated effort to keep the vision of truth glowing brightly and put them to teaching the semi-capable and the idiots. True esotericism contemplates the existence and function of liaison grades standing between the glowing light at the top, able to catch its clarifying gleam and qualified to transmit it on to the lower ranks. The Lesser Mysteries are to be formulated in the image of the Greater, but come forth as reflections in a medium of lower intelligence, which will be able to comprehend nothing falsely, but all as truly as its lower capacity will permit. Ancient esoteric competence knew that "learned doctors" can not impart their profound intellectual sensings directly to the multitude. The best they can do is to pass it on to a select group of proven competence, who may in turn impart it as successfully as may be to the grade below them. True understanding of recondite learning must proceed from the few on the summit of the mount down grade by grade until its light will at last reach the lowest. But it is inevitable that it should lose some of its luster at each step of descent. The very sons of God lost a degree of their divine soul-light as they descended plane by plane from the empyrean into mortal flesh. The great Greek-Egyptian wisdom gave this out as one of the noble truths. Christianity has lost it or violently contorted it into a bizarre doctrine of the "fall" of the angels, with little left in it of its basic anthropological signifi-

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cance. Thus high knowledge loses its clarity and brilliance at every step of descent from its gleam in a philosopher's mind to its murky obfuscation in the dull minds of the unthinking. The multitude sees through a glass darkly, or in a mirror blurred by ignorance; the thinker has a more polished glass. If it is not so then all academic learning is an impertinence--as indeed the early Christians fatuously considered it!

Another worthy historian of the religion notices this intellectual oligarchy, which held the skirts of its deeper learning above the dust of the lower mental ground. Dean Milman says (op. cit., p. 36) that

"The unity of the Deity becomes, not the high and mysterious creed of a privileged sacerdotal or intellectual oligarchy, but the common property of all whose minds are fitted to receive it; all religious distinctions are annihilated; the jurisdictions of all local deities abolished. . . ."

Many writers simply say that Christianity made the higher truth the common property of all, and place the period there. But Milman was not off his guard, to be caught in so errant a statement. He saves himself by adding, "whose minds are fitted to receive it." If Milman supposes this to have been the merit of Christianity, then it was still more meritorious in Paganism. For the Pagans built instruction solidly upon the condition of fitness to receive it, and the Christians shortly abandoned all such care and tossed the pearls with utter profligacy to the mangy dogs.

Milman remarks upon the "remarkable union between the highest reason and the most abject superstition which characterizes the age of Imperial Rome," noting that "every foreign religion found proselytes in the capital of the world."

Overlooking the fact, which might have surprised Milman had he known it, that many of these cults, as the Mithraic, the Orphic, the Isiac, the Dionysian, the Bacchic, the Manichaean and others, instead of inculcating, as he supposes, arrant "superstition," were in fact teaching in general those same high and esoteric truths which the best Christianity had essayed to incorporate into its system, but soon had to abandon because of the ignorance of their people, there is nothing to be wondered at in the fact that great Rome harbored groups perpetuating the secret wisdom that Christianity was soon to dishonor and to murder by turning it loose upon the ribald multitude. New York City, no doubt London and Paris, present a similar situation today. The pertinent comment is that the "remarkable union" between

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highest reason and the most abject superstition does not exist. The two are incompatible. High reason abolishes superstition. The gloomy fact is that there is so much superstition and so little sound reason in the many cults flourishing now as then. The gap between true intellectual aristocracy and wild fancies of the "vulgar" is no less yawning now than it always has been. But there can readily be found learned esoteric societies and ignorant cults side by side in any city at any time.

One can not let go unchallenged another excerpt from Milman's History. He is commenting on Cicero's statement about the imperial Roman state religion of Paganism and writes:

"The education itself, by which, according to these generally judicious writers, the youthful mind was to be impregnated with reverential feelings for the objects of national worship, must have been coldly conducted by teachers conscious that they were practicing a pious fraud upon their disciples, and perpetually embarrassed by the necessity of maintaining gravity befitting such solemn subjects, and of suppressing the involuntary smile which might betray the secret of their own impiety."

This could be the theme of an extended rebuttal that could wax vehement in ironical sallies. Already we have noted Celsus' vigorous allegation that the early pious Christians flooded their catechumens with such concocted stories of holy miracle as any nurse-maid would be ashamed to tell to children. Now we have the modern historian charging the Pagan teachers of youth with imparting such baseless fables that they had difficulty in keeping sober countenance. But surely it is invidious for any Christian to accuse another religion of perpetrating "pious fraud" upon its youth, when every Christian chronicler has sadly to narrate the glaring fact of the commission of the same or far worse "pious fraud" by centuries of Christian teaching without a parallel in any other religion. Indeed pious fraud is a perennial characteristic of Christian history, a motive found active in every period of its existence. One has but to peruse such a careful and documented work as Joseph Wheless' Forgery in Christianity, for a mountain of proof. One can not read Gerald Massey's life-long studies without being depressed with the prevalence of insincerity and chicanery at every turn. A hundred sources add to the conviction.

No brief, of course, is made here for Pagan failings. The teachers may themselves already have lost the esoteric sense of the mystery allegories and myths; the representation of these things had no doubt already in Paganism become caricatured. It probably has to be con-

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sidered a sad fact that hardly at any time has the high and luminous conception of the great science of esoteric truth and allegorical adumbration of it held true and clear for an extended period. The vision of truth and its figures is caught once and again by a perspicacious mind or a group; it flashes for a time and is gone again. It has to be recaptured over and over again, and can not be made a permanent possession simply by being published broadcast. If the efforts of Pagan teachers to impart some degree of clear comprehension of ancient rites and symbols is any more ludicrously pathetic than the attempts of the average teacher of a Sunday School class in the ordinary Christian Church to explain to her protégés such a doctrine as the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, Vicarious Atonement, the Immaculate Conception and the other items of theology that young minds conjure up questions about, they must have been ribald indeed.

And after all there is a wide gap between the effort to give to children the venerable constructions of sage wisdom, which hold the promise of a priceless emancipation of the mind when finally comprehended, and the conscious attempt to put over on gullible children a code of what must be known to be symbols and nothing more, with the fell assertion that they are historical realities and the allegories are actual historical events. One is a necessary stage on the road to final instruction; the other is unpardonable and heinous. If anything could excel in the criminality of pious fraud the entire cycle of stories and fabrications, including whole "Gospels" and "Epistles" that have had to be styled Pseudepigrapha, that have been invented and foisted on gullible generations to uphold the transmogrification of spiritual allegories into alleged history, it would be a nefarious perpetration indeed. The Pagan teachers of youth need only have experienced difficulty in keeping a straight face of sober gravity, if they were knowingly passing off the myths and fables of their religion as historical events. Whether guilty of that procedure or not we have not the data to pass judgment. It is quite more than likely that they left that comic performance to the Christians.

There is a decided hint as to the incapacity of the masses for response to more cultured presentations in Fisher's remark that "tragedy interested only a minority of cultivated persons." The Greek comedy and the Roman plays of the same order had a large measure of popular favor. The subjects of the comedy were borrowed largely from the licentious stories of Greek mythology. But the pantomime gradually usurped the place of almost everything else in the dramatic line.

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The art of expression through movement and gesture was carried to a marvelous perfection. The dances were beheld with an enthusiasm which knew no bounds, and the mimes were commonly of an unchaste and even obscene character. The "vulgar" then as now, and now as then, will flock to their amusements; divine philosophy, then as now, was wooed by the few. Is it a criterion of judgment on Christianity's historical influence that after twenty centuries this phenomenon of social and cultural life in Christian countries manifests to about the same degree?

There is a significance also in Fisher's stating that "human rights and human equality were the vague theories of a few philosophers." If it is the philosophers who have stood for human rights, implying their recognition of the "dignity of the individual," Plato was unquestionably right in saying our kings should be philosophers. But Christianity threw out the philosophers; is it possible as a logical inference then that Christianity is largely responsible for the denial over so many centuries of individual human rights, and that such rights are dangerously jeopardized again today?

According to Fisher (p. 219) the depravity of the population was so great in the first century that "the noblest men took refuge in Stoicism," if they did not try suicide. At all times thoughtful and observant men, in later life, despair of achieving human betterment dreamed of hopefully in youth's more ardent idealisms, and adopt a stoical attitude of mind. The low predilections of the "multitude" are perhaps more painful to cultured people today than even in the time of Rome's decadence.

Fisher uses this datum to prepare the way for his assertion that Christianity was about to flash into this gloom with its superior radiance, and he draws the picture of the disparity between the two. This disparity between heathen and Christian society, which he says can not be denied, is mainly due to the fact that under the heathen regime the objects of worship were the imperfect creatures of human fancy--meaning the gods--and worship was itself largely sensuous, while under Christianity the objects of religious faith correspond to the true ideal of perfection, and worship rises to an unseen world.

Things exactly like this have been written all through Christian history, and no one in all that time has dared to say they are not true. Now positive refutation can be made. It is not true to say that the gods worshipped by Paganism were the imperfect creations of human fancy. The truth that at last, after centuries of Christian suppression,

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comes to an awakened intelligence is that the Pagan gods were the creations of near-divine sagacity to embody in personified form the attributes of the divine nature for the everlasting enlightenment of mortal men. If untutored and unimaginative folk could not see through the figurism to the cosmic reality prefigured by the personification, they would entify the characters, but would still be moved in salutary ways by their conception of them as deities. The last degradation of the typism came when the Christians turned the divine figures entirely into the status of humans, making actual human beings out of them, as in the case of the Christ, the Logos and the twelve facets of Christly divinity. Not too far did Christianity fall clear of actually turning God himself into a benevolent venerable human Patriarch. Indeed to the general run of more ignorant Christian people the conception of him stands not more than a step or two above an actual anthropomorphization. If less intelligent Pagan mentality accepted the gods as personal entities instead of abstract, though actual, creative forces, they at least kept them in the superior worlds. It remained for Christian ignorance to sink them to the abject level of living humans. Far more truly did the Pagan gods picture the "true ideal of perfection" for man than the character and career of the Galilean has done, seeing what an eccentric picture comes to form when the Christ-allegories of old Scriptures have been transmogrified into the supposed biography of a living man. Ancient peoples never lacked the true picture of ideal perfection, for it was presented in every nation from the earliest times. From the picturization every grade of intelligence would draw that level of understanding which would best minister to its cultural needs. It could miscarry to ruinous consequences only if its representations should be completely reduced to human character. This last stage of the degeneration was achieved in Christianity.

Kershner in Pioneers of Christian Thought (p. 105) says of Plotinus that his philosophy was intended for intellectual highbrows only and he cared nothing about the common people. The very form of such a statement savors badly of disingenuousness. It intimates the philosopher's scorn and contempt of the common people. But this is in truth an unfair assumption. No one believes that a man so wise as Plotinus, one of the world's three greatest thinkers, despised the common people. In fact he surely knew they were as much and as truly the sons of God as was a philosopher. But he also was wise enough to know, as any philosopher knows, that the system of dialectical rationalism by which he was able to discern and to represent for the human mind the

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principles of deific wisdom could hardly be comprehended by the masses. He wrote for them no more directly than does any university doctor in philosophy now. The art and genius of the philosopher can not be exerted upon the common people directly. They must affect the grade at his own level first, and then percolate down to the underlings in mentality. A Pagan philosopher must be slandered at all costs, and so Plotinus has to be gratuitously slandered with the charge that he cared nothing for the common people. No sincere philosopher but hopes that his high work may touch and eventually liberate the common people from some of their burden of victimization by false conceptions. But inasmuch as they would probably stone him if he labored with them to change their errant popularized misconceptions at first hand, he keeps to his ivory tower while they work in the fields.

But Farrar (Lives of the Fathers, Vol. I, 384) comes forward with the assertion that this attempt to draw any distinction between the religion of the vulgar and that of the initiated, as though an ordinary amount of knowledge sufficed for the latter, is "an error and a dangerous evil." He says that so far as Clement (and he should have added, Origen, too) used language which seems to lend any sanction to such an hypothesis, "so far he lent countenance to a tenet which became a fatal source of spiritual pride and usurping tyranny." The answer to this must be a direct denial of its truth. The "spiritual pride" which naturally accrues to any person developing lofty and elevating mystic and intellectual insight and understanding can be entirely justified and honest, for it is a pride that walks with its sister humility. It takes due countenance of its own splendid reality, but leads to no disdain of those who as yet lack it. With complete charity in its view of the humble and unenlightened, with even intense pity of their darkened state, it yet knows no way on the mental side to bridge the gap between its position and that of the multitude. It will do what can be done to instruct unwisdom; but what it will not do is to prostitute its vision of reality, its dynamic and emancipating realizations, to a form of untruth to beguile the benighted commonalty. No more would it do this, to win popular applause, than would a Beethoven produce modern "jazz." It was Christianity that followed the fatuous dream of obliterating the difference between religion for the vulgar and philosophy for the initiated, and with disastrous consequences this work essays to delineate.

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Christian exponents do not hesitate at any time to institute comparisons between their principles, practices or dogmas and those of the Pagans, and always to the disparagement of the Pagans. If this matter of "spiritual pride" is thus submitted for comparison, it is obvious that superiority lies with the Pagans. For always has Christianity flaunted to the world an egregious pride in its spiritual attainments. Its pride, however, was in its sanctified devoutness and pietism, rather than in its rational insights. And we can be reminded here of what the modern thinker John Dewey has told us on this score: "that the pride of the zealously devout is the most dangerous form of pride." The pride of those who feel themselves learned in the express and explicit will of God is the most exclusive, he expounds. This hits Christianity more directly than it does Paganism, surely.

Farrar, discussing Augustine's high tributes to Platonic philosophy--he having been a pupil of the Neoplatonist Plotinus--says it is surprising that he should express such rapturous admiration of the truths that had been long commonplace with Plato and the Stoics, with Cicero and Seneca. But what seemed so admirable to him was his observation that the loftiest morality of the greatest heathen thinkers had become the ordinary heritage of the most uninstructed Christians. "What had been a rare heroism had become an everyday belief, so that

Each little voice in turn

Some glorious truth proclaims;

What Sages would have died to learn,

Now taught to cottage dames."

One can take a kindlier view of such a presentment, or a stricter view. The Christians were wrought up to a high pitch of fanatical frenzy; the unrelenting driving motivation was pietistic zealotry. Under its goad and lash the human spirit may manifest in unintellectual people extraordinary heroisms and insights. One does not deny these things. What we assert to be the point of sanity in all this is the full recognition of the fact that fanatical zeal in ignorant people does not discredit the sage reflections and insights of philosophical study. The Christian argument almost contends that pious frenzy is far superior to intellectual contemplation. We contend that history sides with our argument in disproof of this. Several personal or national crises always bring out latent heroism in common people. Novelists write up these things. And no deep-thinking person will quite accept

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the dictum that all the common proselytes to the new faith suddenly put into daily manifestation the highest virtues of the philosophers. This claim is itself an offspring of a similarly overweening pious presumption. Guignebert says that it was to the Gentiles of the lower orders that the Christian preachers addressed themselves. It was among this class that the consoling and all-leveling doctrine of the humble brethren had the best chance to be well received. The historian says that until the time of the Antonines the more enlightened never formed more than an infinitesimal minority in the Church: "slaves and day laborers constituted her main force. . . . Christianity continued to find its recruits especially among the humiliores." After that period the new faith came in contact with philosophy, and the results were incalculable.

To controvert the endless catalogue of major and minor aspersions and slurs which Christian writers have flung at Pagan institutions would take volumes. Lecky, in his History of European Morals (Vol. II, p. 15), makes a statement which can serve as a pretty generally comprehensive conclusion on the whole discussion. He gives the Christians credit for advancing beyond the Pagans to a higher humanitarianism in several respects; then he says:

"On the other hand they rank immeasurably below the best Pagan civilizations in civic and patriotic virtue, in the love of liberty, in the number and splendour of the great characters they produced, in the dignity and beauty of the type of character they formed. They had their full share of tumult, anarchy, injustice and war, and they should probably be placed, in all intellectual virtues, lower than any other period in the history of mankind. A boundless intolerance of all divergence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud that could favor received opinions. Credulity being taught as a virtue and all conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only effectually broken by the scrutinizing, innovating and free-thinking habits that accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy. Few men that are not either priests or monks would not have preferred to live in the best days of the Athenians or of the Roman Republics, in the age of Augustus or in the age of the Antonines, rather than in any period that elapsed between the triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century."

The main point sought to be established here is that in what Lecky calls "intellectual virtue" the Christian movement was the expression of a deterioration that carried to the lowest mark in all history. Lecky's well-deliberated statement asserts nothing less than that the Christian

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ferment palsied the human mind with the deadliest blight it has suffered in the civilized historical period. Albeit it is still contended that it was the glory and praise of Christianity that it ministered to the humble, it must be realized that there was something intrinsically wrong with a mental ministration to lowly minds that would set them in bristling enmity to that which proves to be an even more dynamic ministration to minds of vaster capability. This study is largely directed to the investigation of the forces and influences that converted the Christian populace, as the ferment spread, into haters of philosophy and learning. Logically and naturally the antagonists of pious zealotry would be assumed to be irreligion, apostasy, atheism, moral evil in general. But here we face the odd situation that the enemy that Christian fervor bore down upon was a thing ranking at the very summit of human estimation--rational philosophy and intellectual transcendence. Christianity set itself from the start in bitter hostility against the highest rated cultural influence in the world! The religion claming to be the purest, best and noblest in history attacked the purest, best and noblest in human culture. This adduces a damaging refutation of practically all Christian claims. It is at the very least a startling anomaly. Christian protestations fall smitten with a fatal nullification under the blows of the logic of this historical item. That system will approve itself best and noblest which upholds the best and noblest and antagonizes the worst and meanest. History often turns anomalous and paradoxical, it works out in quirks that are often quixotic and chimerical. The only escape from the devastating logic of this situation is for Christianity to claim that the intellectual philosophy against which it bred hatred was itself degenerate and below the best. And to that claim there would be advanced by no means a complete denial. The allegation is unquestionably true in partial degree at least. A fatal dry-rot had by the first century spread through the ranks of esoteric philosophical culturists. It had prepared the ground for an outburst of popular superstition such as Christianity manifested. There had been steady degeneration in and under the sway of Pagan systems. Vision had failed, understanding had flickered to low ebb, the noble grip of "divine philosophy" on leading minds had relaxed, and superstition crowded in as true comprehension of mystical realities faded out. Once more had human insight, sharpened to extraordinary keenness in one of history's great periods of enlightenment and uplift, dimmed away to dullness and obtuseness in

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the ebb of a great cycle. The magnificent Greek philosophy came as the expression of human genius when its light and power flared out at their highest; Christianity came as the expression of that human genius when its light and power had burned down to their dullest embers.