CHAPTER XI

THE GREAT EBB-TIDE

At last, then, the long-buried truth emerges to view. Christianity was not a movement generated by a wholly new revelation of light--much less of the first light--kindled out of heaven to end previous earthly darkness. On the contrary it was a popular sweep of violent reaction that dragged truly sacred esoteric wisdom out of its adyta and inner sancta and purveyed it wholesale to the people at large. However heroic in its motive to disclose the secret knowledge to the poor, it was historically fatal in its consequences. For it contravened, ignored and violated the inexorable ordinance of life, that man can appropriate only what he has won and can utilize beneficently only what he can handle with the sure precision of intelligence. Christianity's much-lauded gift of religion to the submerged groups ended by perpetuating and deepening that submergence for seventeen centuries.

The ignorantly manufactured tradition that Christianity arose from a sudden outburst of new light in the heathen gloom is one of the most outlandish fabrications in the course of all human errancy. The claim of such an origin for this religion flies in direct contradiction of all the implacable laws that govern the evolution of movements in human society. The notion universally purveyed by Christian writers is that the religion sprang from no roots grounded in the past and owed nothing to the past. This is asserted to be true in spite of the fact that many books, as shall be noticed, do admit the adoption of much Pagan or antecedent material into the Christian constitution. For even when such appropriation is admitted, the position is still always maintained that the Christians converted what it borrowed into its first relevant meaning and utility, and thus redeemed it from a senseless vogue among the heathen to a high usage and import. The dogmatic plea is that Christians took up some of the old forms and doctrines of Pagan usage and for the first time invested them with the dignity of a true meaning and a dynamic good force. Assertions to this effect abound.

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This is another of those many canards invented by the Christians that are as baseless as they are disingenuous. It is sadly enough true that the light of inner significance of most of the ancient Mystery practices and formulae had gone out or dimmed low before Christianity had its inception. But that the new religion, which soon agitated the popular mind, took up features whose esoteric sense had vanished and restored to them that lost deeper significance, is as bald a falsehood as ever insinuated itself into the most depraved minds.

The astonishing truth is almost the direct contrary of this. For the most part it was the Christians who, inheriting past forms and liturgies, pushed out of focus or lost utterly every last vestige of a nobler esoteric interpretation and substituted for that truer understanding their own gross literal or historical rendering. At any rate, when the body of ancient mythic and ritualistic presentments had passed through the wringer, so to say, of the process of revamping at Christian hands, it emerged stripped bare of any remaining esoteric significance. The charge that the Pagans had enacted rites and mouthed doctrines in entire ignorance of a noble sense behind them, and that the Christians elevated all this material to lofty sublimity and saving intelligence, is quite the opposite of the truth. It has been shown that the very effort made by Origen, Clement and to some degree Augustine, to do something in this direction, was violently repudiated by the Church; and similar effects have been summarily smothered ever since. The most determined search is unable to find any authentic evidence that Christianity at any point instituted any improvement over Pagan things. Rather at every turn it registered a movement from intelligence to ignorance, from better to worse, from lofty conception to degradation.

The attempt to set forth in clear light the generating causes of Christianity--more properly of course, Christianism--requires the making of a preliminary survey of the status of affairs in religion and culture prevailing before its birth. For this movement took its rise immediately out of the play of forces operative at the time and was not the product of a revelation from spiritual heavens. It is the assumption that it was a new effulgence of celestial light that has prevented the attempt to explain it on the usual grounds of historical influences at work in background and environment. It was as definitely an earth-born surge of religious feeling as any in history. Indeed it was less heaven-born than most, in the sense that a stir engendered among the ignorant is less "divine" than one generated in the upper ranges of intelligence.

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Assuredly Christianity grew out of the religious situation of its day and its past. That situation must be scrutinized with a regard to its actualities and a scrupulosity of truth-telling apparently not accorded to it before.

The background screen against which it is all to be thrown is, of course, the rule of the esoteric spirit, the true custodianship of culture, as outlined here. Intelligence and a passionate love of truth for its own sake, or "divine philosophy," as the Greeks denominated it, exercised its rightful hegemony over the field of thought, sending its benignant rays as far down from the apex of eagle-eyed apperception as it was able to penetrate into the area of the general mind. Veiled in myth, allegory and symbol and other arcane forms, and kept in pretty strict secrecy, it reached only a select group of the best qualified. Nevertheless the inveterate bent of the masses to ape or respect the aristocracy of wealth, position or intelligence provided a bridge, narrow enough, no doubt, by which some of the aura and the benison of culture could pass down to the masses. In the face of Christian statements to the contrary, it must be affirmed that the cultivation of esoteric wisdom by the intellectual aristocracy in the Pagan world did not leave the masses in such destitution of sane and balanced views of religion as has always been alleged. General standards of thought and understanding were high, much higher in such a land as Greece, than they were when philosophical interests got out of hand, slipped from the control of the few and ran their rampant course among the people. At least it is evident from history itself that while the Hellenic philosophical culture dominated the scene, there is not to be found anything comparable to the emotional extravagances of religious pietism and violence of religious fanaticism that came with the Christian upsurge. If, as is recorded, as many as thirty thousand people assembled to witness certain of the dramatic representations produced in celebration of the festivals of the Eleusinian Mysteries, it is an evidence that the influence of the "few intellectuals" was both powerful and edifying generally. All, of course, depended upon the mental development of the people themselves, as to how far and how beneficially the arcane wisdom propagated by the secret brotherhoods could penetrate and leaven the mass mind. It is legitimate to contend that if the so-called upper class of society is highly enlightened with a true and elevating philosophy, the people beneath cannot utterly fail to be benefited. A society which can produce Platos and Aristotles must itself be perme-

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able by their light. When vision does not fail, the people will not perish. Christianity, this work claims, was produced by a force and a spirit that found expression and character under the influences that prevailed when vision had failed. That failure of vision, its causes and consequences, must now be canvassed.

Christianity surged forth when a lamentable and tragic recession of a high tide--perhaps the very highest tide in the period of known history--of a philosophical culture that is still the brightest glory of human civilization, had reached the nadir of its cycle. Among the most informing of all studies should be the effort to account for the failure of high development after touching the apex of its advance. In the dearth of exact knowledge of this phenomenon, resort must be had to the broad principle that human culture, like everything else in the life movement, advances cyclically, rhythmically, or in waves. It rises high and sinks back. Its crests form and break at a given point. They do not run steadily in the same form. Like the surf on the beach, they gather their forces, take their form, spend their energy in one climactic surge and die away. Rhythmically another follows. The streets of Athens are devoid of groups listening to Socrates now. The studios of Florence harbor no mighty artists or humanists now. The inns of London toast no Shakespeares, Dr. Johnsons, Boswells, Goldsmiths. Wordsworth laments England's need of a Milton. Even Concord is silent without the oracular voices of Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. Cultures surge to heights, then recede. Brilliance does not reproduce itself. Culture is not static. What is to be adduced here for its weighty import is that Greek philosophy came at and as the culminating point of perhaps the highest tide of uplift in human culture, and Christianity came at and as the lowest point of the recession of that wave.

If it is possible to ascertain and delineate the particular features that conduced to the lofty development in the Age of Pericles, as well as those that were in manifestation when the Hellenic light declined, it should be done. What lighted that lamp, and why did it not burn longer, or continuously? Here indeed is the crux of the matter. The world is condemned because it did not receive the light when it came. Equally it is worthy of blame for not having kept the lamp trimmed and burning, once the flame was kindled. The world is always clamoring for new light. This is silly, seeing that it has not held the great light it so abundantly received of old. The glory beamed once and again. But the blind and fatal stupor of the human mind has dimmed

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it, lost it. There is no surety that if a Christ comes to give light to the world, the world will either accept it or retain it. It has been given and renewed again and again, only to die out as often. A significant saying of the Lord in the Hindu books is: "As often as piety and religion decay among men, I send my messenger to revive them."

The great age of crowning glory in philosophical culture came with Pythagoras and Plato, flared in the sky of human thought and died out in the succeeding age. Six hundred years later, when the darkness had settled again over the Hellenic world, the spiritual custodians made a supreme effort to rekindle the Platonic flame. Forth again flared the gleam in brilliance even perhaps surpassing its original glow, in the school of Ammonius Saccas, in the writings of Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus, in the esoteric successors of Philo. Neo-Platonism gave the world its light again. If there is a hierarchy of spiritual counsellors that exercise some supervision over the periodic cultural revivification of the world, it can be reasonably assumed that this outburst of Platonic esotericism in the third century of the Christian era was the deliberate engineering of an effort to stop the horrendous blighting of all deep wisdom by the Christian uprising, which was with sickening speed closing all minds to the impact of the spiritual mystery teaching, as it descended from the lofty apprehension of myth and allegory to blunt dead literalism of the Scriptural word. But too late it came, and the horrid debacle crashed to its full ruin. The ignorant masses had begun their march, and the voice of esoteric sanity could not make itself heard to halt them. Down into the Dark Ages plunged the Western world. The story of this chapter must be the descent of human culture from Platonic heights to Medieval depths. This great world cataclysm has hardly ever been made the subject of intensive, or at any rate, enlightened study. Gibbon's great history is a sidelong approach to it. Christianity of course has resented his truthful exposition of its own low character, its disingenuous motivations and its fanatical violence.

But the dismal rescension of culture after Plato has not gone unnoticed. It is descanted upon by numerous investigators, if in far from exhaustive and discerning treatment. But one of the most astute of modern scholars has immortalized a phrase that was hit upon by him to express the salient idea that describes the fatal decline. Readers in this field are well acquainted with Sir Gilbert Murray's famous descriptive term for it: the failure of (Greek) nerve.

In its broad connotations it well characterizes what is set forth here.

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But its breadth of meaning needs delineation to more specific particularity. What is it that Sir Gilbert wishes us to understand in his word "nerve"?

It is indeed a well-chosen term. It connotes such qualities as courage and self-reliance to fight out the issues of life's battles. Its most central concept, however, is that it embraces this resolute facing of life's struggle in reliance upon the resources within the scope of man's own nature and constitution, without falling back upon extraneous aids or depending upon what might be called a subsidy from a Power entirely outside man's prerogative. To keep this stout "nerve," philosophically speaking, was to fight the good fight in the might of his human wisdom, guided and enlightened by the diviner wisdom germinally resident and potentially perfectible within his own sphere of consciousness and direction. This "nerve" held men fast to the high and true philosophical ideal of waging the Armageddon battle of their evolution on the terms set as conditions by life and Deity themselves, demanding the exercise that would bring the unfoldment of those inner potentialities of insight and knowledge that must govern the growth of the whole man in the end. Not to use them, but to let them lie untried and unproven, while looking helplessly outside for help, when God had placed that sword of the spirit immediately within man's own constitution, was to fail both man and God at the only point at which God's supernal power stands within man's actual reach and influence. To abandon, or to fail in, this resolution to stand and battle with the weapons God had provided for this express contingency, and to surrender the battle-front and retreat in admission of helplessness, and then in servile mood to call upon external powers to save oneself, is what the scholar meant by the loss of nerve on the part of the Greek world. It is a notable and only-too-true analysis of the rueful epoch. It was this demoralization of the human courage and élan inspired by Greek philosophy that prepared the ground for the upspringing of the fantastically degenerate Christianism.

This failure of nerve, not only in Greece but everywhere, should be the subject of the keenest research by all students of human currents. For it draws the rough sketch of the nature of every deterioration or backsliding of religious culture. It announced the prime criterion of all culture, since it defines culture to be the exercise, growth and perfected beneficent use of the divine powers potential in man. The moment, then, that the central intelligence in the human being falls so short of competent knowledge as to give over the resolution to employ and

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deploy the resources providentially made available within his reach, and to run to sources of help allegedly available outside his sphere of initiative, there is the failure of nerve and the end of self-culture. Man in such deplorable state resigns the lordship of the only god who can save him, and sinks in abject surrender to the mercies of elementary powers and the forces of nature. Indeed Paul tells us that before we had risen in evolution to the point of consciousness of our own mastery of the forces drawing the chariot of our advance to deity, "we were in bondage to the elementals of the earth" and of the air, or the "elements of the world." The divine gift of a spiritual soul linked in with our mortal components was to lift us above this subservience and helplessness under nature's laws, to give us conscious command of our own growth through the awakening powers of the free spirit of truth which should lead us into all truth. Once developed and set to its task of rulership, this Holy Spirit, or Paraclete, man's eternal Comforter, dare not be surrendered. For man to do so is for him to surrender his divine to the power of the elemental nature in him. For it is the cosmic prerogative of the divine to rule the natural.

In the realm of such mental cultures as religion and philosophy, it is to surrender understanding and knowledge to emotion, the possibility of wisdom and sure guidance to faith. And this surrender is what crept like a palsy over the area of the Hellenic world after Plato. With philosophy in decadence, there was nowhere available the sufficient knowledge to fortify men with the courage to stand in the might of their divine donative and front life with yeoman heroism of the spirit. Man surrendered his divine sword and ran in fear and rout to God--the God not in his own selfhood, but the God in remote "heavens." In conformity with the usual outcome of unintelligent religionism, the devotees abandon earth as the place where vital values and salvation can be won, and look and flee to heaven. The flight of religion from earth to heaven for the realization of supreme values has with never an exception marked the divorcement of religion from philosophy, of faith from knowledge. And perhaps no short description can so well delineate the decline and fall of true religion as this shifting of the locale or point of focus of true values in the spiritual life of man. Not to wage life's engagement but to flee it for the happier land beyond the tomb, becomes man's objective. This of course paralyses further initiative and wilts the budding flower of the soul's life.

The prime objective of originally sound religion was to focus the battle for values here in the world and inside the conscious human

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sphere. A religion of decadence, made violent with undisciplined emotion and bereft of philosophical knowledge, always distracts man's vision from its true objective here. Thus all such arrant religious upheavals sidetrack man from the proper road of his evolution, leave him to wallow in the mire of his own wild propensities and stagnate his upward drive to divinity.

It is true that Murray does not paint the same picture of the failure of nerve as is here done. He sees it as a failure of hope and confidence in Greek people to achieve the better earthly life through national governments and mundane institutions. He sees it as the disillusionment of the philosophers in their dream of such realizations and their consequent retirement from the collective outward effort into the solitary seeking of spiritual comfort and contact with God in the depths of their own retreats and their own souls. It represented to Murray an abandonment of communal effort in society to institute the perfect state--such as Plato's Republic--and to elevate man as a whole and outwardly, and a withdrawal in despair from this enterprise to the seclusion of the life of contemplation. It was a dereliction from all social brotherhood to the single chance of saving oneself.

But all this is only a further extension of what our thesis presents. It was still a shift of the heft of aim and endeavor from earth to heaven, the heaven in this case of man's own mystical nature. Our delineation took the shift to the heaven of expectation beyond the earthly scene. For Christianity did later transfer the locus of divine realization from earth entirely, teaching its devotees to abandon hope of it here and court it assiduously for the life to come. The failure of nerve was real enough both in Murray's analysis and in ours.

The downfall of Christianity came in the form and features of a surrender of philosophy to religion. It is a parallel phenomenon in the life of a nation, race or an age to a similar manifestation in the life of an individual. Indeed it is the reduplication on a collective scale of a change of attitude that nearly every person goes through in his intellectual growth in a life-time. In youth the mind looks forward to the dreams and possibilities of actual worldly achievement. Plans are made to accomplish many things. Ideal goals are set as attainable. It seems to youth that ideal programs of reform and advance can be carried through to success if only people will unite to effect them. A philosophy points the way and charts the principles of right action. The mind stakes all on such a philosophy and loyalty and sincerity commit the individual to action for it.

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But age changes the tune. Hope, confidence wane as time goes on and the exhibitions of the stolidity, the weakness and treachery of humans in the mass weigh down the sanguine spirit. At last courage is shattered by doubt, fear, disappointment; the stout heart quails, the "nerve" fails. The individual surrenders the fight and falls back on God, his private refuge.

We are witnesses of this turn back to religion of one after another notable person, not to mention thousands of lesser ones. It is quite accurately and scientifically described as an aspect of a real "second childhood." Middle manhood makes a valiant effort to achieve success under its own power, on its own resources. The effort being generally thought a failure, and personal strength waning, the individual reverts back into the mental trust in a higher power that was the native instinct of childhood. Then it was unconscious, now it is not only conscious but rationalized. If the child leaves his Father's house on migrating to earth and forgets his paternal home after childhood, he just as naturally turns back to it as he nears the end of his journey abroad. It is the homing instinct, a divine nostalgia.

In the Periclean Age the soul of Greece ventured heroically to achieve the good life by means of its own great genius and insight. It had picked up the true keys from Egypt; it strove with courage and clear vision to chart the course of action that would achieve the good life among humans generally. No historical effort to this end was ever better grounded.

But it was like the high moment of inspiration of the artist, the poet, the diviner of beauty. It could not be sustained at high pitch overlong. The delicate poise and harmony of the elements of body, mind and soul requisite to channel smoothly and powerfully the forces of such an exaltation can not be held indefinitely. New souls enter who change the rhythm and precipitate discords. The glow of genius, the flame of the divine, dies away, to be replaced by a lower and less beautiful expression. The tension is too high to hold long. The soul takes refuge again, for a time, in mediocrity.

So the great age of philosophy, of divine illumination, faded out after Plato. The mid-East world, the Hellenic peoples, saw the light grow dim. The divine child of Christly genius was again to be threatened with being devoured by the Apap reptile of brutish ignorance and dull human inertia. Sut was to win another victory over Horus. Satan was to grin mockingly at the Christos, on earth's mount of temptation.

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And what might the dragon of darkness breed in the time of his triumph? What monstrous prodigy of diabolic frenzy might it now generate? What hybrid offspring of the incestuous mating of faith and folly might it not bring forth like the horrid minotaur, fathered by animal passion and mothered by natural instinct?

The decline of erudite philosophy took the divine principle out of the human compound and left man to wallow in his own bootless groping, or to throw himself abjectly on the mercies of an external Deity. Man threw up his hands, abandoned his job of self-evolution, ignored the god within his own being, and ran helplessly like a child back to the heavenly Father. Vision had again failed and the people were destined to perish in an age of darkness. For the monstrous product of the union of faith and ignorance was to come forth in the form of a misshapen creature, whose brutal power over the Western millions for twenty centuries was destined to derationalize the human mind with morbid hallucinations beyond belief.

In a notable passage in The Natural Genesis (Vol. II, p. 497) Massey asks how it was that the religion of the ignorant overturned and superseded that of the learned. He attributed it chiefly to the secrecy and exclusive guardianship of the arcane wisdom.

"The religion of mystery was doomed to die of the secrecy in which it had been self-enshrouded. It was buried alive with its own seal on its own mouth. It was an unpublished religion."

This factor played some part, no doubt; it deprived the people of an assumed good and irritated them. Still, secrecy has not killed the Masonic Order, and the Christian ecclesiastical system has maintained its place and influence largely by keeping its Scriptures and its history and its most esoteric policy a secret from its own members. Secrecy is only a facet of a more adequate answer. The fuller analysis reveals that finally the intelligence failed that might have kept arcane knowledge alive in the philosophical schools and academies. There is required almost as much genius to perpetuate a flashing message as to originate it. The Platonic, the Orphic, the Hermetic wisdom is shining in the pages of books in dusty shelves at this moment. Alas, the vision to discern it and evaluate it is wanting even now. Philosophia, the love of wisdom, is grievously lacking. The Bible itself, a tome rich in cosmic and anthropological truth, is in unbounded circulation at this day; again alas, it is still a book sealed up by the ignorance of even the theologians who pose as its expounders. The mere existence of great

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truth in print does not by any means guarantee its assimilation by the world, its circulation in the veins of the body of world consciousness.

Massey's reason is convicted of inadequacy by what he himself says in the next sentence--that

"the new sect put forth the same dogmas, doctrines, tenets under the same types, accompanied by the same rites and ceremonies . . ." and thus "became the first publishers of the ancient religion with a new interpretation of the Christ made flesh. The Gnostics did try to say, with the suppressing hand on their mouths, 'You are only publishing our secrets with a lying gloss put on them'; but this slight protest was unheard amidst the loud clamor of the fanatically ignorant."

He has said that the arcane wisdom of the Gnosis died, or killed itself, from the self-imposed lack of publication and dissemination. Then he tells us that the new sect of Christians came along and published it; and that, he claims, killed it. It is a weird logic that holds that a system died both from publication and non-publication. The thesis proffered here is that its publication with a false interpretation attached killed it. What Massey rightly has in mind, no doubt, is that the failure to publish it with the true esoteric interpretation, by which alone its continued beneficent influence could be prolonged, led to its falling into desuetude for want of supporters and propagandists among those qualified; whereas, on the other hand, its publication "with a lying gloss put upon it" by the ignorant literalizers of spiritual representations beyond their comprehension, did kill it, by reducing it to inane nonsense.

This republication or broadcasting to the world for the first time of the literature of the wisdom hitherto held in secrecy was the generating cause of Christianity. This is almost certainly the first time since Massey's books that this item of history has been advanced in any work essaying to print the truth of Christian origins. But it is a declaration that needs an immense and elaborate assemblage of precise authentic data to substantiate it and vindicate it against the denials that will assail it. Even before the ink of the statement has dried, it must be added, as a necessary qualification, that it was the republication of the arcane or secret wisdom, not by any means in its true form of either presentation or comprehension, but pitiably caricatured and mutilated by incompetent interpretation--with a lying gloss put upon it--that generated the sweep of erratic religionism that became Christianity.

We have indeed the sharpest and most instructive contrast here be-

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fore us between two movements pushing forward at nearly the same time, the one proceeding with a start of about two centuries over the other, but then overlapping it; the first, Christianism, the second, Neo-Platonism. Both published essentially the same doctrinal system. This will be vociferously denied, to be sure; yet it is the truth, and has been seen, hinted at or openly admitted by many religious historians. The reason it has not been clearly evident to all is that the one--Christianism--presented it in grossly garbled and misshapen form, as it had already been corrupted by vulgar unintelligence. As given out by the Christians, its resemblance to its pristine form as Neo-Platonism is almost completely obliterated. In fact its mutilation and disfigurement had already progressed so far that the general historian is hardly to be censured for not knowing that the one was the hybrid child of the other. This work will add accumulated data to prove this contention, namely that Christianity was a reissuance or resurgence of Platonic systematism, but so frightfully mangled by misconception of its interior message and its cryptic language as to be unrecognizable in its lineage.

The two systems really dealt with essentially the same body of ancient wisdom. The one gave out a marvelous elaboration of the loftiest conceptualism possible to the human brain; it could be received in its high truth only by the best-disciplined minds among the people. The other gave out the mere husk or shell of the mighty philosophy and the dynamic ritual that dramatized its impelling truths; and it became, as we shall see, the inciting motivation of the most rabid religious fanaticism. The massive instruction or moral of this datum or episode in history has not been caught at any time. Its sensationally enlightening lesson should be grasped now and never lost again.

But it will still be pointed out and jibed at, how abjectly the publication of Neo-Platonism failed the world, and how triumphantly Christianity swept in to reach the masses whom Neo-Platonism could not help. The jibe and the boast are precisely the two things which this work is designed to reveal in their bald falsity. It is the aim here to show just what the apparent failure of Neo-Platonism, and the apparent rampant triumph of Christianity actually meant to the later course of history in calamity and woe. The matter is simply one of point of view as to the value or the significance of this failure and this triumph.

It is the wholly unique view here advanced with challenging data as proof, that this "failure" of Neo-Platonism and its resultant outcome

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in the upsurge of naive Christianism--in spite of much incidental good attributable to the latter in its history--constituted the direst catastrophe in the historical period. It can be readily shown that the same default of high mentality that led to the desuetude of Neo-Platonism, or its failure to lead the succeeding ages in culture, was the source-spring of nescience that produced the monstrosity of misguided zealotry known as Christianity. The absolutely intimate, even indissoluble interrelation between the failure of Platonic revival and the outburst of pious but unphilosophical religiosity in the third century, is the prime text of this book, and needs infinite recognition and attention. For it determined the whole texture of succeeding history and has cast its gloomy shadow even down upon the events of today. No one can comprehend the meaning of events in the world today--and religion is the open or hidden (usually hidden) cause of most events--who does not know the truth of what occurred back in those first centuries, when not even the more open republication of the sanctifying truths of the sublimest wisdom known to man availed to stop the swift rush of human thought from noblest balance and vision down into the veriest idiocy, turning its cryptic myths and dramas and a symbolic language into the fantastic parade of alleged history. This is the unspeakable tragedy we would depict.

Even when later the arrant absurdities of literal interpretation drove the defenders to Hellenic philosophy for saner elucidations of its Scriptures and creeds, it remains that the touch of popular religionism on the body of the esoteric arcana transformed it into a terrible caricature and travesty of its real self.

The anomaly of all history is that Christian writers have harped interminably upon the fortunate escape of Christianity from the threat of being dominated by this same Hellenic esoteric philosophy, and so losing its power to sweep the masses into hysteria and dementia. Likewise they have with equal unanimity pictured the dire fate of Western civilization if the Greek wisdom systems--later made the basis of Christian doctrinism itself, and now prized by high-bred academic thinkers as the summa itself of human sagacity, and even exalted by such churchmen as Dean Inge--had come to dominate the thought-life of Europe, instead of the faith-cult of a deadly regimen of ecclesiastical power. Nobody can say what history would have been under changed influences. One can only surmise with some flourish of logic. But at that it would be hard to find a system, still determining the psychological destinies of millions, so tied in the knots and tangles of

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contradictory claims, logical inconsistencies and impossible historical averments as is this one called Christianity.

What external causes in Greek history combined to diminish interest in the lofty sallies of the Hellenic mind must be left to the investigator of such things. It will always be a question whether the causes of decay inhered in the wisdom systems themselves, in the impact of outer events, or in the deterioration of human quality after Plato. The great tide that lifted the Greek intellect to a mountain peak of lucid vision swept on by, and left the world to sink back in a sorry state of deflation and jejune philosophical interest. The Dark Ages had begun in the twilight following the bright day of Plato's reign. But it was five hundred years before the dusk darkened into the night that gave birth to the dementia that then fastened itself like an obsessing mania upon the West for another direful two thousand years.

If this pronouncement seems too strong, it is enough in the main to justify it with the simple irrefutable historical fact that the ecclesiastical power that this darkened outlook generated absolutely clamped a chain upon the free use of the rational mind of the Western world for at least a millennium and a half. This is a statement of historical fact freely made by many a professor in great universities in Europe and America today. An additional proof of its correctness is the single fact that in the brief period since the Occidental mind has liberated itself from that strangling tyranny, it has made advances in science and general knowledge incomparably vast in comparison with all the gain made during the sixteen hundred years of the ecclesiastical despotism. Indeed that despotism had completely stagnated the course of European thinking. The free mind was stifled by the enforced rule of uncritical belief in imposed dogma. For that monstrous tyranny stood with club in hand ready to beat down every reappearance of independent thought action or any publication of solid scientific fact that would give the lie to its rigid dogmas based weirdly upon a literal interpretation of the Scripture.

The investigation requires us to look now at a world carried far down, by the time of the first century A.D., in the deep trough of the receding wave of Platonic uplift. There we must seek to locate the immediate productive causes of the Christian faith. It demands careful scrutiny, and much of the data has been obliterated.

When the great light of esoteric understanding had been almost completely extinguished the Hellenic world lay in a state of defenselessness, easily to be seduced by any religious appeal that might be made

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to it. A keen rationalistic philosophy is the only, or the final, guardian power able to save people from falling a prey to irrational religious inculcations, and this steadying gyroscope was now in nearly total abeyance. The whole population lay fatally vulnerable to the influence of whatever cult fever might seize them at any moment.

This situation, however, is by no means unique in world history. A replica of it is extant at this present epoch. The complexion of things in this field of human interest differs little from one age to another. In any age there is found a vast and weird diversity of all sorts of religious cults, each expressing some phase of doctrinal or mystical or ceremonial infatuation. This is as true of New York, Los Angeles and London today as it was in Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus of the first century A.D. Christianity itself started out not as a movement of a single group, but as a ferment among a large number of different cults. There was a wide variety of divisions among them, including several diversifications of the Gnostics, who are accredited to the Christian movement, even if heretically classified. Plotinus in his Enneads expends his scathing reprobation upon cults or cultists of a number of semi-philosophical, semi-mystical groups that remind one of such organizations of today as Christian Science, New Thought, Unity, Divine Science, Spiritual Science and the like. Each had doubtless caught some prominent aspect of philosophy and emphasized it to the exclusion of other necessary elements. This tendency to magnify one facet of truth into a whole philosophy led to that limitation of view which breeds bigotry and intolerance. Here has always lain the danger of religious ideologies and convictions. A half-vision of truth entails almost certain bias, disproportion, error and wreckage. In the systems of the great seers like Plato and Aristotle the principle of disproportion was indeed the fatal factor, the wrecker of all true happiness and justice. Socrates came to define the good life as that in which all the elements of consciousness, indeed all things, were held related to each other in a certain exact measure and proportion. The golden mean between the two extremes was the path of wisdom leading to virtue and to happiness. Every doctrine must be balanced in that poise between under- and over-emphasis that alone guarantees its rightness. Perhaps this is what--at last--the crucifixion of the Christ between two thieves can mean in its profoundly abstract sense. The force pulling on each side of any true view or position always steals something away from the truth. It robs the truth of its just measure and balance. This may mean little to the unreflective mind, but it is something that

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every deep-thinking philosopher comes to realize, as Socrates did, namely that the truth always stands balanced on that narrow ridge between too much and too little. As courage is the golden mean between recklessness, as excess, and cowardice, as deficiency, so true religion is the golden mean or exact balance between fanatical devotion, as excess, and spiritual deadness, as deficiency. Virtue is devotion to good determined by intelligence and restrained from both extremes by the exercise of the utmost delicacy of understanding. All decisions fall at the mid-point between pro and con. People are unconscious of the operation of this principle in daily life, yet it is the nub of all decision, all action as between right and wrong, prudent or reckless.

The shrewd student comes at last to evaluate all historical movements in the light of this basic law. Nearly all historical events can be appraised as the result of the reaction of masses or individuals from excess in one direction to excess in its opposite. History is mostly a record of the swing of the pendulum first too far toward excessive zeal, then too far over to its curbing. Life, so to say, gathers too much steam, then reduces it too sharply. The philosopher is he who strives to hold the balance even between the two pulls. This is why Plato dramatizes the chariot of life, driven by the noetic principle of higher intelligence, as being drawn by two horses. To keep the two at exactly even pace was the condition of "happy motoring," failure to do so the menace of wreckage or the penalty of no advance. Weak people, undeveloped souls, do little but swing helplessly back and forth from violent action to equally violent reaction. The philosopher essays to disregard the strong pulls in either direction and to hold the balance between them. He calls upon reason, or his diviner faculty, to stem and curb the rabid throes of his emotional nature. This epitomizes the moral side of the great Greek philosophy, which, asserting that in man there are the two natures, the animal-human and the divine-human, exhorted the wise man to exalt the divine to rulership over the human, so as to hold all elements in balance.

Transferred to the area of religion this high philosophy would dictate the control of emotionalism by divine reason. Lacking its presence and operation, religious movements have been just the procession of one emotional flare after another. The virulence of the infatuation or hypnotization runs in exact proportion to the deficiency of philosophical knowledge. The less philosophical a movement is, the more religious it is.

The world after Plato's day was filled with a melange of religions

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that closely parallel those endless divisions of cults and sects found today. One springs from another in reaction or sharper differentiation. Each had sprung from the independent leadership of some one vigorous thinker. People become the sheep that follow some likely shepherd. But the leader--where did he pick up a system that would attract a following?

Answer to this leads into the field of our proper searching. The truth is that each formulator of a system had made some contact, deep or shallow, with antecedent preachment. He had found brilliant light shining in some ancient document, and saw that it would revitalize current low thinking. The real sources, then, trace back and back. Always research brings one face to face with the existence of a primeval revelation or initial wisdom. Tradition postulates its having been vouchsafed in remote times from demi-gods to men. The Scriptures speak of it as having been an original dictation of God to "holy men of old." This comports perfectly with the occult tradition, if it is envisaged properly; meaning that "holy men of old" could embrace such exalted figures as Pythagoras and Plato, Hermes, Orpheus, Zoroaster, Krishna and the Buddha. The question whether the dictating God was deity in some anthropomorphic shape or just the evolved divinity within the minds of such men, is not too important. The presupposition that "holy men of old" were humans evolved to near-divine status far better satisfied the human zeal for concrete understanding and provides a way viable to reason. Any other elaboration falls beyond human conception as to modus and agency.

It is predicable then that all the various schools stemmed by one line of successive propagation or another from a revered system of high truth delated to early humanity. This, it can surely be assumed, is that "true religion which already existed" from farthest antiquity, that Augustine averred came to be called Christianity in his day. These clarifications are vital elements in the long-lost story of the true origin of Christianity. It exemplifies how a unity of organic thought in the minds of demi-gods can and will be broken up into an endless diversity of segmentation as it passes through multiple minds of less and less keen vision. The gods see truth whole; limited human mentality sees it only in parts. Religions are thus the facets of one primeval religion, some so badly distorted out of relation to the structural entirety as to be hardly phases of truth at all. It takes profound and luminous focus of intellectual sight to integrate all rays into the full original brilliance. The merging of all colors back into the white light demands the most

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rapid movement of thought sustained at high frequencies. The average human never possesses this heightened power. His religion, therefore, will always represent a partial view. He does not see life truly because he does not see it whole. It is the work of philosophers to see things not separately, but as elements related harmoniously in a transcendent unity of structure, as Kant so firmly insisted.

What, then, was Christianity at its start? True history can now be written. It was a conglomerate loose grouping of a number of various cults out of the total number of such in existence in the first century. The chief binding or unifying force subsisting between them was their tendency to emphasize a popularization of the varied tenets in the interests of mass edification as distinct from Mystery cult exclusiveness. It was a movement inspired largely by resentment and revolt against the "intellectual aristocracy," as before noted. It was a trend, in itself laudable when rightly envisaged, to extend more widely the participation of the common people in the deeper spiritual wisdom held in custody by the intelligentsia who handled the Mysteries.

It can be granted without too much dispute that by this time the Mysteries had fallen to a low state of knowledge, refinement and purity. Naturally the receding wave of the grand Platonic uplift had brought deterioration into the personnel and intelligence of the Mysteries. They were bound to suffer some of the impact of the general depravity setting in upon the Hellenic world. Degradation may have crept in to reduce to revolting status some of the mystic rites of symbolic and dramatic character. Phallic symbolism and ritualism dramatizing creative process, such as formed part of Buddhistic ceremonialism in the Orient, can all too easily lose its elevating influence and slip into actual sensuality. Positive evidence on this score is none too conclusive, though the Christians leveled charges of the sort against the Mysteries. At any rate a popular revulsion set in against them and popular leaders denounced them. Then a movement began to take form to drag the arcana of the Mysteries out to common knowledge and to make the emblems and rites "understandable" to the people. Here is where catastrophe was invited. The terms on which alone Mystery doctrine and ritual could be made "comprehensible" to simple minds, or the forms in which it would become understood, would be fabricated through the process of a conversion of all its allegory and drama into ostensible objective fact and the taking of Scriptural literature as history. This in the course of time was done, and no one has seen it, studied it and traced its processes and its calamitous effects

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more clearly than Gerald Massey. Nothing less than epochal in importance are these words of his which describe this tragic miscarriage of human intelligence. He is expatiating upon the consternation which struck the early Christians when the evidences began to come to view that the religion they had believed was a wholly new revelation from God was already in the books and practices of the ancient Pagans. The excerpt is taken from a brochure of his entitled The Logia of the Lord, or Pre-historic Sayings Ascribed to Jesus the Christ (p. 4):

"Never were mortals more perplexed, bewildered and taken back than the Christians of the second, third and fourth centuries, who had started from their own new beginning, warranted to be solely historical, when they found that an apparition of their faith was following them one way and confronting them in another--a faith not founded on their alleged facts claiming to be the original religion and ages on ages earlier in the world--a shadow that threatened to steal away their substance, mocking them with its aerial unreality--a hollow ghost of that body of truth which they had embraced as a solid and eternal possession! It was horrible! It was devilish! It was the devil, they said, and so they sought to account for Gnosticism and fight down their fears of the phantom terrifying them in front and rear; the Gnostic ante-Christ, who had now become their Anti-Christ. The only primitive Christians then apart from or preceding the Christianized pagan Church of Rome, were the various sects of Gnostics, not one of which was founded on an historical Christ. One and all were based on the mythical Christ of the Gnosis, and the mythical Messiah--Him who shall come because he was the Ever-Coming One, as a type of the Eternal manifesting figuratively in time. Historic Christianity can furnish no sufficient reason why the biography of this personal founder should have been held back; why the facts of its origin should have been kept dark; and why there should have been no authorized record made known earlier. The conversion of the myths and of the Docetic doctrines of the Gnosis into human history alone will account for the fact. The truth is, the earliest Gospels are the farthest removed from the supposed human history. That came last and only when the spiritual Christ of the Gnosis had been rendered concrete in the density of Christian ignorance! Christianity began as Gnosticism, continued by means of a conversion and perversion, that were opposed in vain by Paul. The mysteries of the Gnostics were continued, with a difference, as Christian. . . . The first Christians built on secret doctrines that were only explained to initiates during a long course of years. These mysteries were never to be divulged or promulgated [and were not] until the belief in historic Christianity had taken permanent root. We are told how it was held by some that the Apocrypha might only be read by those who were perfected, and that these writings were reserved exclusively for the Christian adepts. It must be obvious that the doctrine or knowledge that was forced to be kept so sacredly secret as that, could have had no relation to the human history, personality or teachings of an

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inspired founder of that primitive Christianity supposed to have had so simple an origin. . . .

"Now there is plenty of evidence to show that these sayings which are the admitted foundations of the canonical Gospels, were not first uttered by a personal Founder of Christianity, nor invented afterwards by any of his followers. Many of them were pre-extant, pre-historical and pre-Christian."

(It is going to be difficult to overthrow the logic and implications of this forthright passage when we recall Eusebius' admission that the Gospels were old books of the Essenes.)

Need there be excuse for citing this long passage? It came in because it testifies on factual ground to the conversion of sublime mystical figurism into impossible history. But it presents such a lucid pictograph of the situation and development that is to be re-pictured here, that it should be welcomed by those who believe that truth is worth having. This life-long student of the Christian Scriptures in relation to their unquestioned Egyptian sources pours out the incontestably established convictions of his knowledge to emancipate a world from baseless hallucinations. It is small wonder that his prodigious works have been permitted to go out of print, and that every copy that finds its way to old bookshops is bought up as soon as discovered, some by eager and sincere students, others by persons who will see to it that it never reaches the public again.

It is well to hear, then, his summary analysis of what this conversion produced for human society (Luniolatry, p. 2):

"There is nothing insane, nothing irrational in it, when considered in the light of evolution, and when its mode of expression by sign language is thoroughly understood. The insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine Revelation. Mythology is the depository of man's most ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this--when truly interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth."

Massey himself carried that process of reinterpretation, which simply required the reconversion of alleged history back to allegory and then the elucidation of its mystical connotation, far toward its completion; and others are now consummating his noble effort. It is the most important work being done in religion today.

The primitive Christians, of the group that fathered so-called Apostolic and evangelical Christianity and declared all other groups heretics, thought in their ignorance that they were putting forth a new religion

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of transcendent light. Massey well pictures their unbounded dismay when they found the evidences pouring forth that they were only revamping old Egyptian religion. Their consternation at this discovery was the incentive that drove them on to destroy all the books of ancient arcane science that would betray the tell-tale similarity and the true source. They could not well scorn and scoff at Paganism when they found they had its own substance and paraphernalia in their hands. They could not condemn it when it was that which they themselves were exalting.

What actually happened, the thing that to Massey himself as to all others had seemed incredible and impossible when first suggested for consideration, but which his evidences left him no alternative but to accept--the complete metamorphosis of figurative depiction of esoteric truth into alleged history--is well described by Higgins (Anacalypsis, p. 33):

"These doctrines have been, like all the other doctrines of antiquity, gradually corrupted--incarnated--if I may be permitted to compose a word for the occasion.

"Sublime philosophical truths or attributes have become clothed with bodies and converted into living characters. Perhaps this might take its origin from a wish in those professing them to conceal them from the vulgar eye; but the cause being forgotten, all ranks of society at last came to understand them in the literal sense, their real character being lost; or perhaps this incarnation might arise from a gradual pulling away of mankind from a high state of civilization, at which it must have arrived when those doctrines were discovered, into a state of ignorance,--the produce of revolutions, or perhaps merely of the great law of change which in all nature seems to be eternally in operation."

How completely this expresses the form and content of the analysis here presented!

And can one refrain from printing Higgins' frank and fateful conclusions from this phenomenon (Anac., p. 50)?

"That the rabble were the victims of a degrading superstition I have no doubt. This was produced by the knavery of the ancient priests, and it is in order to reproduce this effect that the modern priests have misinterpreted the doctrines of their predecessors. By vilifying and running down the religion of the ancients they have thought they could persuade their votaries that their new religion was necessary for the good of mankind; a religion which in consequence of their corruptions has been found to be in practice much worse and more injurious to the interests of society than the older one."

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Few even of those who have been forced by their studies to this devastating and disheartening conviction, have had the openness to state it and front the storm of vilification that it would evoke. Yet it has been the conclusion, the unmistakable discernment of nearly every scholar who has covered the ground of the proper investigation of the ancient field. Massey and Higgins, like Renan, Strauss, Robertson, Smith, Drews, Dupuis, Brandes, Mead and others have been charged with narrow prejudice. If the body of convictions to which one is forced by the overwhelming and harrowing record of violence, fanaticism, bigotry, slaughter, imposture and forgery is to be termed prejudice, then prejudice must for once be held both warranted and eminently desirable. None of the alleged traducers and critics of Christianity, any more than the present writer, began the study of Christian history with any other feeling than that of good will, if not even of high approval, of the Christian religion. If the study has generated a prejudice, it is because a shocking history has had to be weighed justly in the student's scale of judgments.

We have cited Allan Upward's forthright assertion that the Christian religion is the only one that has been completely founded on falsity. If intelligent men of sterling character have come to hold prejudices against Christianity, it is because they would confess to a "prejudice" against a record of fiction, fancy, fatuity, insincerity and knavery unmatched in human annals. "Prejudice" of this stamp might be essential to the salvation of humanity. If open-minded scholars come out of their study of Christianity with a decided bias, or frank hostility, they must have encountered facts in their researches that superinduced such an attitude. These scholars have been "prejudiced" because they have first been horrified, disillusioned and frightened by what they have seen. It may spell calamity now and in the future that there is too little of this "prejudice."

Christianity started out with what uninstructed zealots thought, or were led to think by designing priests, was a wholly new religion of celestial truth passed straight down from heaven itself, but which soon proved to be a conglomerate mass, one might say mess, of pre-existent Pagan material, contorted out of all recognition as esoteric wisdom and presented in the light of "history." It was composed of scraps and crumbs of that one "true religion" proclaimed by Augustine as an already existing Christianity since Adam. But alas, the want of ability on the part of any Christians, since even Origen failed, to perform with these scraps and fragments a reconstitution of the original structure

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of meaning, such as Cuvier could do in reconstructing the form of a mammoth from a tooth, a jaw or a leg-bone, doomed the new movement that went forth to save mankind with inadequate tools, to condign failure. The net result was to enmire the human reason in a melange of piety, zeal, weird belief, doubt and expectation of the speedy end of the world that made the immediate and succeeding history of the West a nightmare of tragic ineptitude.

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CHAPTER XII

CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF THE GODS

In the life of culture the conversion of figurative speech and ritualistic allegorism over into veridical history is the incredible fact of mightiest import for the world in two thousand years. It strikes one as a thing past all belief. It is impossible to credit as a factual occurrence unless one has given years of study to detect its subtle evidences. As Higgins has so well said, it took place in a long and gradual process. Yet the evidences are neither subtle nor vague after all; they are open, glaring, breath-taking. In the end, instead of being difficult to discover, they are ubiquitous; there is nothing else to be seen. There is no other way to explain what happened, what has come to pass. It provides the only formula that enables one to fit together the facts as they stand into consistent rationalization. It must have occurred, since no other eventuality can explain the situation as it exists. To prove it finally it is only necessary to take the ostensible "history" that was precipitated and molded out of the mythologies and dramas, turn it back to its original mythico-allegorical relevance, and one has reconstituted the structure of primeval thought out of which all religions and philosophies took their rise. Then turn it all again back to "history" and one is immediately foundered in the mires of events that can only be admitted to the pale of history by being accepted as miracles. They become such unlikely happenings that it is impossible to include them in the common category of real history as man knows it. They get into history only by the doorway of miracle. And that is precisely what the mind could assume as likely to be the case when the extraordinary mechanism and strategies of allegory must be made to fit into the Procrustean bed of believable event. Allegory becomes a fantastic personage when dressed up and paraded in the garb of history. This has been the origin of the supernatural in Scriptural literature, the force of dementia that lifted the Book from a manual of righteousness to a fetish of prodigies before which reason bowed in abrogation of its prerogative.

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So the great Scriptures became intriguing records of God's arbitrary decisions and unpredictable performances, and lost their power as dramatizations of poetic structures portraying the realities and the scheme of man's life and the modes of his evolution from animal through human to divine status. They became wonder-books of God's greatness and his whimsical capricious dealings, not with man as a whole, but with an alleged "chosen people" whom he had selected to be the special objects of his favor and his interest. And this interpretation has wrought the unspeakably costly demolition of man's complete confidence in law both natural and moral, as the fixed axis of the universe, and substituted for it his belief that his safety is to be won by cajoling a capricious Deity who transcends--and flouts--his own laws.

All the various cults and systems of religious character bore, it can be assumed, a more or less clear, precise and authentic segment of inheritance from Augustine's primeval "true religion." It can be presumed that the more esoteric ones carried a closer and more complete approach to the original integral representation of it, the exoteric and popular ones a more partial and diffuse copy. Such unquestionably was the case, for it has ever been so. A popularized religion must necessarily be less an integer of meaning than an esoteric one.

The item next in sequence to be noted--and stamped indelibly forever henceforth upon the minds of Christian people--is that Christianity was not in the remotest sense a move of more knowing people away from or in opposition to any form of Pagan religion, but on the contrary was just a slightly new, if new at all, alignment, combination or expression of Pagan culture itself! It was in no sense--even when it had conquered all rival interests--the end of Paganism, as is universally believed. It was composed of nothing that Paganism had not already furnished,--except an infinitely more impossible miscomprehension of Paganism's material, which it appropriated and built up on. It was nothing but more Paganism, but a reformulation of it on principles never hitherto brought forward to rationalize--rather to derationalize--its tenets. It was Paganism refurbished with a "lying gloss." It was Pagan philosophy, misappropriated, misconceived, misapplied. It was a legitimate enough offshoot of Pagan culture, but an offshoot malformed and disfigured. So far from being anti-Pagan, it was entirely Pagan, but not good Paganism. It was Paganism run out into foul corruption and inane nonsense by the disfiguring power of ignorance. It was Paganism purloined from the sancta of the Mysteries and

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thrown out to the multitude to be mauled and pilloried in the most atrocious despoliation of high truth ever seen.

The item that would have given scholars the adequate basis for a correct answer to the inevitable question as to how the religion could have arisen and spread so quickly had there been no new Messenger, is now to be dealt with. Failure of scholars to grasp this answer has permitted the old assumptions to stand unchallenged and to control all belief. Scholars have failed to discern it because the presence of the "history" obviated the need to trace any other origin of Christianity. The destruction of documents added to the difficulty. Nevertheless the data in evidence are open and plain and--overwhelming.

The millions who have lived and died in the Christian faith have never doubted that the religion had its beginnings as a result of the divine man who came in the flesh to give it its initial impetus and fix its supernal character. How, they have asked when faced with a contrary view, could the mighty sweep of Christian piety have gathered conquering force if there had been no figure of outstanding personal power to start it? Surely Christianity had its Founder and also its nuclear inception from the little band of consecrated and transfigured men who had gathered about him and seen the many demonstrations of his divine messengership. Movements do not originate out of the air; they must be implemented and empowered by some leader. Ideas do not propagate themselves; they are advanced by men whom they have inspired to heroic action. Surely the great Christian upsurge could not have taken form and developed power except from the driving force of a dynamic preachment by a dynamic personality.

Viewed superficially and without a knowledge of the detail of actual history appertaining to the event, this is the belief that stands fixed in the general mind of Christendom. That it is a completely false belief, wholly unsupported by the data of history, is the claim of this work.

It did not need the presence or the preachment of any man to generate it. It took form naturally and spontaneously out of the elements existent at the time and place of its birth. It did not spring from the introduction of anything new from without or above; it was the inevitable product--perhaps better to say by-product--of what was already extant to precipitate it. It came not as the release of new unction from on high, for it required the presence and operation of but one element in the situation to produce it. The world today may well recoil aghast at the pronouncement of that one word; for it is--igno-

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rance! Given what was on the ground in the form of venerable ancient schools of secret wisdom on the one side, and the untutored populace on the other, the one thing that alone could leaven the masses with a ferment of religious enthusiasm of the form that did come to manifestation was ignorance. With every necessary prerequisite for such a development provided by the features of the situation, it is the simple truth, as Lecky has stated it, that "Christianity floated into the Roman Empire on the wave of credulity that brought with it this long train of Oriental superstitions and legends." But this is but a preliminary hint of what is to come in the way of more specific corroboration. That the Christian faith was launched by "men whose ardor was fierce in proportion to their ignorance," as Massey put it, is as clear as any historical fact can well be.

But one of the most nicely accurate views of what happened in those fateful early years, that fixed the character of history from then to this very moment, is given in words of momentous gravity by G. R. S. Mead in his Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, where, speaking of the "rape" of the Mystery schools and their esoteric doctrines by the new upheaval, he writes (p. 113):

"The new method was to force out into the open for all men a portion of the sacred Mysteries and secret teachings of the few. The adherents of the new religion itself professed to throw open 'everything'; and many believed that it had revealed all that was revealable. This was because they were as yet children. So bright was the light to them that they perforce believed it came directly from the God of all Gods--or rather from God Above, for they would have no more of gods; the gods were straightway transmuted into devils. The 'many' had begun to play with psychic and spiritual forces let loose from the Mysteries; and the 'many' went mad for a time and have not yet regained their sanity."

If the story of Christianity's rise had to be condensed in a dozen lines, this passage would tell the story better than any other that could readily be found. Indeed the last sentence alone carries the gist of it all. It is the direful account. If it is denied to be the true story of the rise of Christianity, it is at any rate a true account of what occurred in immediate connection with that upheaval. And it is the record of the popular ferment that brought in Christianity.

If the modern student needs either confirmation of Mead's analysis or an instructive parallel of the same set of circumstances, he has but to look at what he finds before him in his world now. The situation is paralleled unbelievably. Beginning openly--after centuries of hidden

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existence--some sixty or seventy years ago, there were launched a number of movements, notably modern Theosophy, with a concomitant revival of Rosicrucianism and kindred forms of occult and esoteric systematism, all tracing far descent from the same ancient body of teachings that the rampant early Christians pilfered from the Mysteries of old. And again we are called upon to witness the scramble of the "many" for these pearls of truth, and the exhibition of the various degrees of "madness" by many of these cults is one of the marked features of the modern scene. So Mead's following sentence must be noted (p. 115):

". . . in things religious there is no middle ground among the uninstructed. They fly to the opposite pole. Therefore when the new impulse seizes upon people, we are to have a breaking down of old barriers and a striving after a new order of things, but at the same time a wild intolerance, a glorification of ignorance, a wholesale condemnation; a social upheaval, followed by a political triumph. One thing, however, is acquired definitely, a new lease of life for faith."

Here we have before us accurately analyzed the "makings" of such a religio-socio-political upheaval as that on the wings of which Christianity floated in upon the early Roman Empire. (In the case under consideration, it must be noted that while the final political denouement was fondly envisaged as the earthly consummation of the whole program of faith, it signally failed to come to realization, the whole hyper-fervid frenzy collapsing at its very height with the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in A.D. 70.)

Mead's analysis states our case with great clarity. He notes expressly that fatal "glorification of ignorance" and hatred of philosophical rationalism which we have asserted as prevailing and sweeping the movement on like a torrent into violence and boundless fanaticism. Also he marks in it the same surrender of intellect to faith.

Fuller (History of Philosophy, p. 256) adds strength to Mead's point of view:

"The revival of the Orphic-Pythagorean religious cult was incidental to a rising tide of religious interest and fervor that was creeping into the Roman world from the near East as early as the second century B.C., and that four hundred years later had completely engulfed the Empire."

This is a key statement in the wake of the one from Lecky given above. A hundred other authors would fall in line with similar testimony. The facts are indisputable. Christianity came up from the

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masses almost, it might be said, as the backwash of the great surge of a lofty philosophical movement that about that age of the world had crept in from the ever-mystical East. It can be described as a backwash because it was the repercussion, the secondary impact, following the first impingement of the inrush of Oriental psycho-spiritual philosophies. The first impact of mystical religious preachments falls upon the more intelligent classes, who can supply a fair measure of the acumen necessary to distinguish the higher values of the religious experience. These classes can hold it in a fair degree of balance and sanity. It can among them give rise to the cults of profound philosophical interest, such as those that flourished so markedly in the great cosmopolitan center of Alexandria. But when in the course of a little time the profounder contents filter down to the nether strata of society, they become inevitably the source-spring of such irrational agitation as Mead has described. This is the backwash that sets in following every pronounced religious stirring; and our work is to show conclusively that Christianity was the product of that great popular repercussion from an extraordinary migration of Oriental religions of spiritual and mystical dynamism into the West.

To some extent Christianity was the product of the most profound of esoteric teachings; yet at the same time it is the least esoteric of religions. The true description of it is that it sprang from esoteric sources, but emerged as the most exoteric of all. It was built on and from the material of religious systems that proclaim as their core of truth the existence and saving activity of a divine principle, a veritable Son of God, in the heart of every human; yet it was the system that supplanted the predication and central importance of this divine principle with a historical Jesus. Schools teaching the essential divinity of a portion of man himself existed prolifically when Christianity arose. If not directly out of one or another of them, or from an eclectic or synthetic amalgamation of a number of them, Christianity stemmed forth into existence. Nearly all the early contributors to the cult's more enlightened tenets at first were themselves members of the several Hellenic or Egyptian Mystery Schools. As many writers do actually assert, internal evidence points to the fact that Paul himself had been a member of the Eleusinian, Dionysiac or Bacchic Mystery schools. Augustine had been a Manichaean before embracing the "faith of Christ"; Tertullian joined in with the Montanists, who rather felt that Montanus was the Messiah-Avatar rather than Jesus of Nazareth. Justin Martyr was not averse to parading the identity of Old Testa-

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ment "prophecy" with the oracles of the Sibyls. Ammonius Saccas is said to have been "converted" to Christianity after launching the great Neo-Platonic release of hidden truth. It was Plotinus who gave Augustine the true significance of the Trinity doctrine. Such instances can be multiplied. Christianity was beginning to take form out of the elements that were extant and in ferment in those early days.

Important as evidence at this point is the statement found in the famous letter of the Emperor Hadrian to Servianus. It puts beyond question the intimate connection of some of the most intelligent early Christians with the Pagan Mysteries. Says Hadrian:

"Those who worship Serapis are likewise Christians; even those who style themselves the Bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis."

Even this one bit of authentic testimony puts to rout the universal Christian belief that Christianity arose in entire independence of, or in revolt from, antecedent Pagan systems. It stemmed from religious soil enriched with the accumulated deposit of age-old growth.

Indeed when the movement first began it had little or nothing to distinguish it from other sporadic outbursts of religious expression among Pagan groups. It bore few of the characteristics which marked it later as distinctively the Christian religion. Its minor divergences were in no sense anti-Pagan; they were simply divagations from basic principles, just as all schismatic movements in any religion are. But within an all-too-brief period of time there was to come a nearly complete reversal of position, a wholesale turn-about that was to lift the new cult out of the family of Pagan religions altogether and bring it under a classification that has ever since been sharply set over against them. For the bright hall-marks of Pagan religionism were esoteric secrecy, symbolic representation of mystical truth and the spiritual nature of the gods. The new rabid movement was soon to fly completely off the solid ground of every one of these basic fundamenta. From esoteric secrecy it flew to the letter of the myth or the allegory or the symbol; and from the spiritual nature of the gods or the Christos it leaped clear down to a God in the form of a man of flesh! In so doing it quickly ceased to be Pagan and became strictly anti-Pagan, carrying unfortunately the revered name of Christian with its apostasy.

As the more capable minds which early in the movement had grasped and adhered to the esoteric nature of their doctrines passed off the scene and their place was taken by men of cruder intelligence, de-

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generation rapidly set in. The allegoric-mystic meaning of Scripture, dimly as it may have been caught by the first leaders in their attempt to popularize the cryptic message of the Gospels, was soon reduced to the wholly litero-historical rendering, and the mental havoc was in full cry. The fogs and mists that were to deepen into the dismal murks of the Dark Ages were gathering their gloom.

The first, or more intelligent reaction to the invasion of Eastern spiritual ideas, soon gave place to the second. With the latter, Christianity was metamorphosed from itself into something else,--Christianism.

Much of our thesis is upheld by what Fisher says in his work already cited (p. 374):

"The Church, including the Apostles themselves, was to be enlightened gradually as to the real import of the Master's teaching by the influence of the Spirit, and by the gradual course of Divine Providence. Especially is this true of His prophetic utterances, which offered glimpses of particular ends and under symbolic forms of the future of his kingdom, the full meaning of which time alone could unveil."

If this says anything important it is that the simple-minded second-century agitators of a popular ebullition of religious feeling, handling esoteric material they had not the acumen to understand any more than a fifth-grader comprehends the propositions of Einstein or the quantum theory, were at the beginning wholly ignorant of the inner significance of the treasures they were bandying about, and would have to wait the slow education of time and its lessons to write out for their crass faculties the hidden purport of their own documents of creed and dogma, rite and symbol. That even two millennia of developing history since then have not brought the expected enlightenment to the deluded followers of the simple fisherman of Galilee prints large, very large, the doleful ineptitude of the early expectations and of such apologetic reasoning as Fisher's.

Could anything, now, be more corroborative of the exegetical position here defended, as well as more devastating to the opposing orthodox views, than this surprisingly frank and revealing statement from Fisher (op. cit., p. 458):

"The full blaze of truth would not have enlightened, but have dazzled and misled, those who were not prepared, by previous training, to recognize it. . . . The minds of men, even of the Apostles, must by degrees be educated up to the apprehension of truth, which clashed in many of its features with their traditional ideas."

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Chrysostom declared that these simple fishermen "outshone all the world"; but Fisher thinks they were far behind, and had to be gradually educated up to, what intelligent men then already knew. It is well to note these disagreements, discrepancies and inconsistencies.

It is not acrimony, but simple truth, worthy, however, of notice, to say that had our pen put down in our own words the gist of this paragraph of Fisher's, it would have been received with ill grace, sullen resentment and positive denial. But a Christian partisan proponent has written these lines. At that it paints the same picture that we have just exhibited from Mead's brush. Light had come into the hands of people who were no more than children in intellect and, as it first dazzled and blinded them with its effulgence, so it later afflicted them with madness and frenzy, as its uncomprehended mysteries and unbalanced philosophies drove them into wild excesses of passionate zeal.

At first, no doubt, a few of the more enlightened, in all likelihood out of the more charitable motive of guiding the ignorant proselytes gradually into a deeper glimpse of the inner esoteric purport of it all, kept in with the movement. But for this intelligent minority fringe it would have quickly gone the way of a thousand minor emotional surges and revivals among the "many" in all history. Through these learned esotericists, however, as Guignebert says, it made a link with Hellenic philosophy, that same philosophy that men like Tertullian were to revile and berate as having nothing to do with the faith of the man Jesus--as ironically enough it most certainly did not, except by errant misconception and confusion of the two by stupid presumption of knowledge; the same philosophy that in spite of its scorn by the dumb leaders was to come to the salvation of the rabid faith that sneered at it, and thus provide its only link of appeal to the interests or intelligence of thinking men ever since. There is potency enough in the statement that without the introduction by the Gnostics and others like Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Clement, Origen and even in part by Augustine, of the rational elements of the great Hellenic philosophies, as Christian writers themselves assert, the new religion could not have kept its hold on the world's attention for more than a generation or two.

Guignebert traces with what can be considered general accuracy the gradual development and progressive amalgamation of the currents running in the whirling maelstrom of early Christian agitation. He says (op. cit., p. 118):

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"Naturally, however, open as the Christianity of the post-apostolic age would be to influences of such a nature through the fluidness of its dogmatics, and flexible as it would have been rendered by the Pauline and Johannine speculative thought, it had not foreseen these developments nor did it possess any means of sifting and more sharply defining them. For this reason their first efforts to work them over were marked as much by disorder as by intenseness. Some time necessarily elapsed before the main body of the membership, always tardy in arriving at a clear consciousness of the real situation, sensed the fact that they were driving the faith in two very different directions. . . . The one movement tended to borrow from Hellenistic culture all of its ideas that were capable of rendering the early Christian doctrine at once more profound and more beautiful. [Let it be noted that Christianity had to borrow from Greek philosophy to become both more profound and more beautiful!] It is evident that this process of assimilation cared little about scrupulous exactitude, and neither did it always find itself in complete accord with logic or reality. The same was true of its documents. . . . It only sought to establish a working agreement between the elements of its fundamental postulates and the most important principles of Greek thought."

It will not be time ill spent to pause for a brief examination of what lies before us in this exhibit. The world has been asked to believe that the Christian movement was the dissemination of a body of divine revelation first and uniquely proclaimed at a given time almost from the skies by a divine Avatar or Messiah-Christ, persisting intact amid other and opposing religions, and finally winning the world. Is there anything remotely suggestive of all this in the historian's true picture? Instead, we find this divinely promulgated faith "borrowing," "assimilating" and with almost reckless disregard of "scrupulous exactitude" and out of all accord with "logic and reality" accommodating itself to Hellenic philosophy. Indeed it had to go a-begging to this Hellenic learning even to come upon the deeper import of its own "postulates," and only by the aid of Platonic wisdom did it come to find its own material of dogma and doctrine, both more profound and more beautiful than its own offering. Here is the disclosure of error in a tradition that ought to shake a world of religious fetishism and blind belief out of its delusions. That a host of passages of such similarly epochal revelations of mangled truth have been written and read, and nothing done to align general understanding with the facts as they stand, is harrowing evidence of the hopelessness of trying to shake religious hypnotizations out of their lethal obsession of the common mind.

Guignebert has conjectured that Paul changed the apostles' ideas

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of the Christ by telling them that he had been a celestial hierarch and was on earth as an incarnation of the Spirit, the Pneuma of God. One has to ask where simple fishermen would have learned about the Pneuma of God. Such a datum goes far to prove that these simple "fishermen," loudly boasted of as children in mental culture, either were not historical men at all, or that they were somehow in the intellectual grade and attainment of university wranglers, familiar with abstruse and recondite philosophical technical terms, the Holy Ghost having worked a miracle by inspiring untutored men with divine knowledge.

And how does Guignebert know that Paul told the twelve fishermen anything? The historical existence of both the Galilean Jesus and the twelve disciples is questioned on the most solid of grounds,--lack of actual evidence and the implications of a host of "internal" evidences contradicting it. No Christian historian examined in much reading has claimed that Paul ever contacted or apparently ever heard of the man of Galilee, and therefore it is unlikely that he ever told the disciples--if they did exist--anything in person.

Then Guignebert characterizes the second wing of the Christian movement, the first having been described above:

"The other movement, known to Christianity from the second century and possibly even earlier, sets out from a different starting point. It, too, seeks to inflate the too simple confession of faith of the early days and to excavate deeper foundations for it. It can accomplish this purpose only by combining it with beliefs and theories borrowed from its surroundings. But in the first place it shows no discrimination in its choice, which settles upon numerous features widely different in nature: The Olympian paganism, Orphism, diverse Oriental religions, systems of philosophy--everything is gathered into its net. In the second place it takes no interest in reconciling what it borrows with the historical data or even with the traditions of the faith. Instead, it pretends to possess a special revelation of its own, which it uses to justify most anomalous combinations of ideas that constitute real syncretistic systems, in which true Christianity appears as only one more element. It becomes almost unrecognizable as part of a complicated cosmogony and an abstruse system of metaphysics, neither of which owes anything of value to it."

If this is a true historical record--and nobody has found warrant to dispute it--there is here again a disclosure of unrecognized truth that confutes all common belief about the early history of Christianity. Finding its first professions of simple faith too bodiless, too ephemeral, too subject to the flows and ebbs of pietistic fervor, too much an emo-

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tional surge with little of doctrinal rock to which to anchor its barque, Christianity sought to find firmer mooring by appropriating and tying in with itself the more stable structure of the great Hellenic philosophy. But such was the want of discerning intellectual power in its ranks that it grasped almost anything within reach amongst the religions it brushed against in its environment; it levied toll at once on Greek, Chaldean, Hebrew and Syrio-Egyptian ideologies and, says the narrator, appropriated their elements without discrimination. Nor does it attempt, he adds, to reconcile them after borrowing them. Could anything testify louder than these facts to the utter absence of any power either of apocalyptic divine revelation of supernal truth from heaven above, or even of human acumen in the way of an effective systematization of existent fragments, in the movement of Christianity? What a scenario it all projects on the screen! Groups lifted to near frenzy by religious afflations, feeling that their height of zeal for the kingdom of God gave them the right to claim any and all expressions in the religious domain as inclusive under the all-dominating tidal sweep of their wild ebullience!

All this makes it a proven case that Christianity was by no means a particular specific system of anything at all in the realm of organic thought structure--but instead was only a mass fervor, spurring its intoxicated partisans on to excesses of emotion and aberrancies of every sort and degree. The unbounded faith in Christ and abject surrender to him carried them easily over the widest abysses of logical inconsistency and even enabled them to spurn the truth of fact. They reached out to claim and appropriate everything in sight, until the little core of their own nest-egg contribution--the Christ made flesh in one man--becomes but one element in the large accumulation of their borrowings. Christianity is thus seen to be nothing but a hodge-podge assortment of scraps from prevalent religions around it. Historical testimony strengthens at every point the thesis that Christianity was a direct product of the soil of already existent religious systems and in no sense a new implantation from the heavens.

It is alluring to go on with Guignebert as he limns the picture of the early development still more in detail:

"To put it differently and perhaps preferably, the inflations borrowed from Hellenistic culture they had selected and fitted into the system were treated as properties of these postulates even in that wonderful School of

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Alexandria of which Origen was the pride, which completed the masterpiece: the metamorphosis of Christianity into a revealed and perfect philosophy."

What again glares at us from out this statement? This Christianity which allegedly came full-blown in its cosmic perfection from God through his Son--this Minerva-wisdom from the cleft brow of Jove, this finished system, first-born light amid heathen darkness--in reality was so anemic that it had to be kept alive only by forcible transfusions of virile blood of truth from surrounding Pagan philosophies! Whatever may have given it its initial impulse, it ended shortly by being jumbled in a melange of already existent systems perfected by the genius of the Greeks. It is therefore categorically concluded that Christianity was, as here contended, simply the conglomerated reorientation of some prominent elements of ancient religious cult teachings, given a most unfortunate and ruinous distortion of meaning and reference by ignorant miscomprehension. That is the essence and gist of all Christian history of origins, and any one who attempts to represent it in terms inconsonant with this analysis is laboring amid phantoms.

For still further enlightening detail another step with Guignebert is profitable (121):

"The ritual development of Christianity advances step by step with the dogmatic, and by the same process. It began with very simple practices, all taken from Judaism: baptism, the breaking of bread, the imposition of hands, prayer and fasting. Then a meaning more and more profound was assigned to them. They were amplified and gestures familiar to the Pagans added; they were loaded with the larger interests, for example, embraced in the rites of the Greek and Oriental Mysteries, and thus charged, as it were, with the ancient formidable power of magic. This work was instituted as soon as the Apostolic faith was transported from Palestine to Greek soil."

While this excerpt is pretty definitely corroborative of our position, it still is necessary to register dissent from one of the historian's assertions in the passage. He falls into the inveterate habit of Christian theorists in thinking that the more penetrating insight of the Christians took over practices and forms used by the Pagans in total incomprehension of their inner significance and imbued them with truer and deeper meaning not known before. This assumption has been advanced times without number and rests on no evidence anywhere discoverable. It is simply the product of Christian determination to leave no

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laurels resting on the brow of Paganism. The truth is as nearly the exact contrary as could well be. The truth, out at long last, is that the Pagans had possessed--and admittedly at one time and place or another already lost--the true esoteric import of all the rites, symbols and rituals of the arcana of the Mysteries. They administered them with splendid understanding until such time as that subtle and elusive mystic essence of apprehension had effervesced and vanished. If not known to every ancient hierophant or mystagogue or psychopomp or his candidates in instruction, this inner core of meaning was presented and preserved in Plato and Pythagoras, and the abstruse philosophies of Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus. Whatever high cryptic meaning inhered in the insignia lay in the hands of the Pagans, and never came to the surface again with the Christians. It was finally in Christian hands that every last vestige of true interior sense at spiritual or mystical levels was utterly swept aside and indeed violently negated and cast away. It is time this purely conjectural presupposition that Christianity took the empty shells of Pagan belief and clothed them--as Daniel Webster said that Justice John Marshall did with the skeletal form of the American constitution--with the flesh and blood of real meaning and power, should be tagged for the brash and unfounded falsehood that it is. Christianity it was that despoiled every doctrinal symbol, the crucifixion, the temptation, the baptism, the transfiguration, the eucharist, the "miracles" and every parable of its golden meaning in Paganism. And it is therefore back to Paganism that we have to go to recover every treasure of light that Christianity bartered away in its purchase of the favor of the masses.

And can the next paragraph from this candid writer be passed by (p. 121)?

"It is sometimes very difficult to tell exactly from which pagan rite a particular Christian rite is derived, but it remains certain that the spirit of pagan ritualism became by degrees impressed upon Christianity, to such an extent that at last the whole of it was distributed through its ceremonies. . . . Moreover, the power of the clergy was singularly enhanced by the almost exclusive right which they very early acquired, despite some faltering objections of ordering and dispensing the magic power inherent in the rites known as sacraments."

Again there is ground for astonishment for what is here revealed bearing on the refutation of age-old Christian claims. In every Christian history the pure power of the Christ in the heart of the believer has been set over against the claims of Pagan spiritual magic, the one

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divine in its purity, the other infernally diabolical. Yet here is the intelligent chronicler of that history asserting that the Christian priesthood actually built up its claims to be the wielders of divine unction of magic by taking over the rites of Pagan origin. It is here given to us by a Christian narrator that magic inhered in the Pagan rituals before the Christian priesthood claimed that all spiritual power flowed from the fountain-head in Christ, a historical person. Obviously it has been the interest of priestcraft ever since to hide these historical anomalies.

Again comes the statement, already corrected, that (p. 123):

"This order of clergy presides over the rites which more or less directly borrowed from Judaism or the pagan Mysteries, though entirely re-adapted to Christian uses and reinvested--the chief of them at any rate--with the magic mysterious power which the secret cults of Greece and the Orient had rendered familiar to the men of those days. Nevertheless Christianity became a real religion, the most complete of them all, because it has taken the best they possess from all of them."

Here again is the record of borrowing from outside and readapting to Christian uses. And again must protest be made against the subtle insinuation that Christian re-adaptation baptized the borrowed practices with a new spirit of light and power. If, however, by re-adaptation Guignebert means that, in total ignorance of the true inner import of the magical rites the Christians contorted them over to fit their own new and literal readings of the Scriptural allegories, dragged them from their lofty mystical reference down to suit the predication of the carnalized Jesus and his ostensible biography in the Gospels,--yes, sadly enough it is true that they effected such a drastic re-adaptation. It was precisely that re-adaptation that ruined true Christianity; it was that reorientation of all truly Christian meanings which constituted the betrayal of Pagan religion to ignorance and misuse. But it is categorically denied that this transferal of meaning from the world of spiritual consciousness to a supposed living personality implemented the first infusion of true meaning into these things. What is affirmed is that the readjustment of their substance to a new view utterly subverted all true sense which they formerly bore for knowing Pagans.

As to Guignebert's vigorous final assertion that Christianity became the best and most perfect of all religions because it appropriated the best of all of them, and presumably synthesized them all into a perfect organic whole, this must be viewed as another of those wholly gratuitous predications that flow so unctuously from the pens of Christian apologists. It is so obviously not true, because history records that it was at

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Alexandria that the highest and most enlightened project of syncretism of religious systems was effected, never in Palestine.

But Guignebert says (p. 123) that this religion of Christianity, so syncretistically constructed, declares itself invulnerably exclusive; it stands rigidly aloof from any other religion, even though this stiffness subjected it to the severest of perils, particularly because it challenged the animosity of the State as well as that of the civil community. Should one ask why, the conventional answer would doubtless be forthcoming that Christianity held something that no other religion had,--the precious all-sanctifying grace of God manifested uniquely to the world in the person of his only-begotten Son, sent to earth to pay the ransom for sinning man. Their possession of this item of transcendent blessedness warranted their collecting the best truth out of all the surrounding faiths, but closed the door to fellowship with any of them. Indeed this singular outcome proves the narrowness and not the broadness which should flow from true syncretism. It negatives the thesis of sound syncretistic principles. It might be supposed that the blessed possession of more knowledge and assurance of God's grace would generate in its fortunate beneficiaries a far wider graciousness of fellowship in the spirit of sharing its benignant treasure--which never loses by being lavished abroad--than the empty-handed heathen could have exhibited from their poorer store. From those who are the more lavishly endowed and blessed more is to be expected. Yet what do we see? Fuller tells us in his History of Philosophy what we see, and the story runs counter to what we would have a right to expect from the divinely commissioned Christian movement. He writes (p. 328):

"The new growth, however, differed in one vital respect from the old. The service of the ancient gods was one of perfect philosophical freedom. As long as their existence was not denied--and even that could be safely challenged save in religiously hidebound communities like Athens--freedom of criticism and speculation was untrammeled by interference from priest or populace. Heresy was as yet a thing unknown." [It even ran to unbounded philosophical licence, he adds.] "Still such licence was preferable to the straits in which philosophical speculation now found itself. Christianity was founded on revelation. . . . But now the true version of the nature and the constitution of reality, which in the past had been sought by the use and tested by the standards of reason, was made manifest once and for all to all mankind by God, speaking at sundry times and in divers manners by the Hebrew prophets and in these latter days by Christ. There was no gainsaying the content of this revelation, however repugnant to reason it might seem. Even to question it was heresy, and heresy might mean death."

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And the inevitable conclusion, which writes a historically damning count in the whole indictment of Christianity, follows:

"Under Christianity, then, the status of philosophy was reduced in theory at least to that of a slave. She was deprived of her essential activity of inquiring freely into the nature of the Real and of fearlessly publishing the conclusions drawn from her investigations. Her task, none the less menial for the greatness of the cause into whose service she was impressed, was to expound and defend the content of revelation in terms acceptable to the intellect as far as this was possible."

As ruthlessly as Russia today (1949) lays hold on philosophy and art and science and reduces them to a servitude to the cause of its world control program, did Christianity drag philosophy into captivity in the service of its cause deemed holy and beneficent. So, affirms the careful historian, did it reach out, appropriate what it felt it could utilize of the treasures of contemporary religions and bend them to its service. If history should ultimately decide that fifteen centuries of total silencing of the truth-searching instinct of the human mind exerted in free inquiry has not been too costly a price to pay for the sycophancy of philosophical investigation to an alleged "revelation" that was itself only the corrupted version of earlier spiritual genius, then we may hail the capture and degradation of "divine philosophy" by the bigoted Christians as a victory for faith and zeal. But this is to accede to the proposition that intelligence and light can be harnessed to the chariot of ignorance and darkness.

This painting of the picture throws Christianity's capture and enslavement of philosophy in the third century into true perspective for the first time. Historian after historian has seen this development, included it in his account, and more or less cursorily dilated upon it. Scarcely one of them has paused to comment on it as being perhaps history's most doleful tragedy and most calamitous human failure. Inasmuch as the genius of the race has advanced immeasurably further in knowledge and discovery in the two centuries or less since it has been liberated from the throttling hand of ecclesiastical fanaticism than it was able to do in some fifteen centuries under that allegedly holy thraldom, the bald inference is that Christianity has held back human progress by just that many centuries. Even this glaring object-lesson of history is blinked at and kept from natural emphasis.

The truth is that Christianity was just some more nibbling at the same feast of primal wisdom from which all systems had drawn their

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first nourishment, but in this case the nibbling was done not by capable philosophers and men of balance, but by illiterates, in the main, who plunged into a wild scramble to grab at it for the sake of the rabble. And this rabble could do nothing but rend it into meaningless shibboleths of miscomprehended phraseology as soon as it laid its defiling hands upon it. At one time or another later on more knowing minds did labor to coalesce the scattered fragments picked up in the wild melee of early ignorance into some approach to dialectical coherence.

And it will be instructive to record another evidence that Christianity--the simple faith of the apostolic fervor--had virtually changed character in the years following its initial impulsion, so as to become something quite other than it had been at the outset. Guignebert gives us a pointer to this effect that should not be missed or left out of account:

"Contemplate the Christian Church at the beginning of the fourth century and some difficulty will be experienced in recognizing in her the community of Apostolic times, we shall not be able to recognize it at all."

A community of simple unction of the spirit (or of the emotions so easily mistaken for the spirit) had by this time, through its efforts to meet and hold its own with one or all of the cult systems hemming it around on all sides, become so complex a mixture of all these elements as to bear little resemblance to what it was when little groups of pietists had first launched it into the currents of religious unction of that day.

We turn to Lundy, author of a valuable old work, Monumental Christianity, and find him corroborating our position, yet saying particular things that need to be challenged. We can agree with him when he says that treatises on Christianity "do not deal as they ought to do with the simple facts of an entire primitive Christianity before Protestantism and Romanism had existed." That is what the work here projected aims to do. But how he can be half right and half wrong in the same sentence is shown when he says that

"these religions were all, indeed, systems of idolatry, perversions and corruptions of the one primeval truth as held by such patriarchs as Abraham and Job; and yet these religions contained germs of this truth which it became the province of Christianity to develop and embody in a purer system for the good of mankind."

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How true he is in saying that the various separate systems, in their exoteric or more public and popular developments, were all perversions and corruptions of that one primeval truth (with the necessary correction that Abraham and Job were not historical but allegorical type figures in the ancient mythic representations), we here attest. It can be said without too much risk of error that all religions at all times since that primeval revelation have been just such more or less drastic perversions and corruptions of its pristine grandeur and truth by incompetent human understanding. So then those that were on the scene when Christianity arose were in this category. Some were more crassly distorted than others; a few, the esoteric, possibly held to the arcane truths pretty closely, thus being less corrupt. But how wrong Lundy is in asserting that it became the province of Christianity to "develop and embody" the "germs of this truth" "in a purer system for the benefit of mankind" we most vigorously proclaim. Since it faced the opportunity, it might be considered the "province" of Christianity to knit up the frayed strands of the great primeval truth into a potent system for the true edification of mankind. But, as he intimates that this is what Christianity did, it is the duty of truth-telling to say that this is just the thing it failed to do. It never did tie together the loose and tangled threads of the pattern into anything remotely resembling the original unity and beauty. Origen saw what was to be done and tried his hand at it. This, the closest effort in the right direction, was savagely attacked and beaten down. It lost the keys to this very secret and therefore left the design of consistent wholeness still irrationally disjointed, with the constituent parts wildly jostling each other in any thinker's sane reflection. It is one of the oddest of the quirks of history that the very nub of Christianity's failure should be put forth as the rock of its success! It levied tribute on all the Pagan cults in a way that Guignebert asserts bore no relation to an intelligent systematism at all; and ended by covering all Paganism with its blanket of universal condemnation, giving no thanks to previous systems for its wholesale pilferings; even in the long run denying the Pagan sources of much of the material it had made off with. This whole chapter of its history has been marked with complete insincerity, if not outright misrepresentation and coverage of facts. Perhaps it can be granted that Christianity did bring out the principles of the hidden wisdom for the intended edification of the populace. But the tragedy that resulted sprang from the fact that it offered cryptic Mystery teachings to the

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lowly in a form that turned their beneficent potentiality into a darkening of the mind through the conversion of luminous allegory into ridiculous history. Proofs of this will come later.

It is singular that this author, a man of fine analytic mind, could err so egregiously in some particulars of the situation as in this passage and another to be cited, when in between he writes one of the most keenly discerning reviews or surveys of the period, completely in harmony with our exegesis (op. cit., p. xvii):

"It is a most singular and astonishing fact, sought to be developed in this work, that the Christian faith, as embodied in the Apostles' Creed, finds its parallel or dimly foreshadowed counterpart, article by article in the different systems of Paganism here brought under review. No one can be more astonished at this than the author himself. It reveals a unity of religion, and shows that the faith of mankind has been essentially one and the same in all ages. It furthermore points to but one Source and Author."

If these words, inspired by their author's clear momentary vision of the virtual identity of all ancient Pagan systems and their common "Source," had been recognized as truth and sculptured in enduring stone on the front portals of all temples in all Christendom, there is no question but that world history would have proceeded on a course of felicity engendered by the fellowship of faiths instead of being disfigured by the division of mankind into groups expressing mutual acerbity.

And it must be entered on the record here that if there was one influence which more than any other tended to obliterate the marks and memorials of that fundamental unity and homogeneity of all religions, and hence to foster disunity in this greatest of all arenas of human communion and fellowship, that influence was Christianity. For this was the religion that in a passion of bigotry and fanaticism flung itself upon all the great literary evidences of the derivation of its own and others' forms and doctrines from that supernal Source and Author of light, and wiped them out of existence. Ever since that woeful day also its churlish temper has fostered religious division and separativeness to an inordinate degree.

Then follows Lundy's overweening and insupportable claim that

"Christianity is simply the full development of the old Patriarchal faith of the world, as Abraham and Job and Melchizedek held it, the complete realization and efflorescence of the one primitive religion given to mankind."

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Already refuted, this claim needs only the comment that Christianity was no development of that aboriginal gift at all, unless rank dismemberment and despoliation of a faith of all its true sense and organic unity is what is taken to constitute development. It is a gain in knowledge to record Lundy's affirmation that the primal religion was a unity of all elements of religious truth. But no facts warrant "realization and efflorescence" of it. With infinite reluctance it has to be said that on the contrary it was the corroding and catalytic influence, the express deflorescence of that primitive wisdom, by its transferal of mystic realization into empty husks of literal events.

Lundy later states (p. 202) that Christianity degenerated by associating with Paganism:

"The Church had now placed herself under the fostering care of the secular power, which was yet half-Pagan; what wonder is it that she degenerated with such frightful rapidity as to be almost overwhelmed by Mohammedanism by reason of her dissensions, corruptions and weakness? . . . Was the weakness borrowed from a distant Oriental Brahmanism? Or was it inherent in the Christian community itself?"

Is it not quite illogical to lay Christian degeneration at the door of its association with the Paganism from which it had drawn all its basic principles--save, of course, its transformation of the Christos spirit into a historical man? Rather can its deterioration be traced to its ignorant misconception and mishandling of the body of esoteric teachings it had picked up and then completely turned into the instruments of derationalization. Only so far as a measure of this same tendency to stupid literalism may have crept into the Mystery interpretations and vitiated their received message could Paganism have been a party to the corruption of Christianity. It was Christianity's own default and defection from the esoteric side of Paganism that led to its degeneration, its dissensions, corruptions and downfall.

Great light shines for us in G. R. S. Mead's studies and findings as announced in his Fragments of a Faith Forgotten. To rebut the claim advanced by Guignebert and Lundy that Christianity effected the syncretism of the old Pagan systems into a true and the best religion, we have asserted that that was not the case, but that the great work of syncretism was done by the Hellenists at Alexandria, some Christian, others non-Christian. Mead's conclusions are strong evidence in support of this thesis (p. 118):

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"It was the Alexandrian school of Christian philosophy, of which the most famous doctors were the same Clemens and Origen, which laid the first foundations of General Christian theology; and that school owed its evolution to its contact with Grecian thought."

Then Mead outlines the succeeding development so well that his brief statement could stand as an epitome of general Christian origination (p. 118):

"Now Christianity in its popular origins had entirely entangled itself with the popular Jewish tradition of religion, a tradition that was innocent of all philosophic or kabalistic mysticism. . . . As time went on, however, and either men of greater education joined their ranks, or in their propaganda they were forced to study themselves to meet the objections of educated opponents, wider and more liberal views obtained among a number of Christians, and the other great religious traditions and philosophies contacted the popular stream. All such views, however, were looked upon with great suspicion by the 'Orthodox,' or rather that view which finally became orthodox. And so as time went on, even the very moderate liberalism of Clemens and Origen was regarded as a grave danger; and with the triumph of the narrow orthodoxy and the condemnation of learning, Origen was himself at last anathematized."

It would be hard to tell the story of this early period in Christian development better and more succinctly.

Guignebert says that the arcana of the Mysteries exerted little or no influence upon Christianity. Others have stated the same thing. If so it is easy to understand. The Pagans understood more or less clearly (admittedly often less) the inner subjective reference and significance of the dramatic rituals; the Christians did not. Naturally a movement is not influenced by what goes beyond it and is alien to it. Also Mystery meaning was esoteric and secret. It did not spread abroad beyond its own membership. It is no derogation of Mystery ritual that it did not severely affect Christianity. This is a point that has long needed decisive reorientation.

Guignebert well says, however, that the several stages marking the Christian initiations undoubtedly reflect the gradations in the Hellenic Mystery ratings of its members. The Creed, also, he says, was the work of "ignorant folk," incapable of abstruse conceptions. The germs of Greek thought continued to exert an influence upon all those who had been edified by it before they yielded to the seductions of the Christian faith. These men, he says, can not, however hard they try, renounce altogether the remembered elucidations given out in their esoteric studies in Greek philosophy. Accordingly they fall back on

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these to expound the dogmas, such as those of the Trinity and Transubstantiation, when they are challenged by the stupid arguments of the ignorant, who have construed a wrong sense out of every doctrine.

In line with the arguments of other writers already noticed, we find George Hodges, in his work already cited, The Early Church, advancing the theory that the Pagan cults had used the "corn myth," or death of the seed in the ground over the winter and its germination in the spring, and had built their religion largely upon it. They had lifted the natural phenomenon into a spiritual significance. This would be a trite statement, hardly calling for repetition if it were not that this lifting of a fact of nature to a higher sphere of meaning has been expressly denied by so many expositors. But this beneficent apotheosization of meaning, he adds, "touched only a few of the people."

Here once more is the old charge: Paganism failed because it edified only a few more advanced minds. Yet after nineteen centuries of Christian effulgence of divine light, one may go across any Christian country and ask all farmers what there is of high spiritual illumination in the fall and spring phases of his activity, and not a soul will know what at least the instructed Pagan could have intimated lay hidden in the "corn myth." So that Christianity has not succeeded where Paganism has failed.

On the opposite side Hodges records for the Pagan devotee his belief that "there was a divinity for every act of life from birth to death." This could eventuate in odd superstitions, to be sure; but the good of a reverent attitude toward all nature and secular things, the constant feeling that the deific power and purpose are at work in the total world, can surely be admitted to be a more religious attitude than a sharp mental cleavage between things specifically sanctioned and things commonplace. Emerson has said that the true essence of the doctrine of the Omnipresence is to see the miraculous and the divine in the common. A religion that brings its people to regard the whole of life and all things as being instinct with divinity must surely be rated higher than one which attributes sanctity to only a few things in special buildings and on particular days.

Hodges highly lauds the eclecticism, the syncretism and the spiritual mysticism of the Pagans that has been so generally berated by apologists as the influence detrimental and hostile to Christianity.

Guignebert repeats that Christian dogma, liturgy, discipline were not the outcome of any spontaneous generation, but on the contrary were the product of a syncretism "from Oriental surroundings--from

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Israel, from the Mystery Religions and from Hellenistic philosophy." Little by little the new cult absorbed these elements, thus preserving all that was living and lasting from what the Graeco-Roman world contained. This process went on, he argues, slowly until the day when the Pagan cults disintegrated through the defluxion of their strength drained off by Christianity. If all this is so, it clinches the contention that Christianity was simply revamped Paganism. The crucial thing about it, however, never to be forgotten henceforth, is that Christianity did not revamp Paganism to a perfection or rationale or purity never manifested before, but virtually dismantled it. This assertion is a complete volte face in historical exposition of Christian origins.

Guignebert says that "the Christian faith, Oriental in its origin and mystic and excitable, was foreign to all that Roman customs regarded as a religion."

This is a true statement of the historian, but his implied conclusion that Christianity was a religion markedly characterized by elements of Greek wisdom and spiritually too deep for the Roman masses, is hardly as true. Or it is true in the specific sense that its myths, rites and symbols, which even the Christian masses never could understand, would also be too far above the Roman populace. The probable truth is that these things were not understood by either the Christians or the masses. If Origen, the very apex of intelligence in the Christian communion, could not entirely regain their true esoteric significance, the masses surely could not.

The truth of this position is further attested by consideration of the work, the position and the final repudiation of the Gnostics in early Christianity. They it was, of all the Christian groups, who attempted to structuralize the Christian system on a philosophical basis. Hodges says (op. cit., p. 73):

"Gnosticism arose from an honest desire to make Christianity a consistent intellectual system, to provide for it a theology which should appeal to men of learning and reflection. Such men were beginning to come into the Church, bringing their intellectual habits with them. They were somewhat dismayed at the informality of the Christian thinking, and undertook to introduce into it the element of order."

"But most of the Gnostics were honest and earnest men. They believed themselves to be . . . fighting over again the splendid battles which St. Paul fought."

These Gnostics, men of philosophical keenness, were not the last to be dismayed by the "informality," which must be taken as a euphe-

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mism for gross illogicality and complete unintelligibility (due to the conversion of allegory into "history") with which the Christian doctrinism has struck and dismayed the minds of disciplined thinkers.

But Christianity rejected these fine men and ended by casting them out branded with the stigma of heresy. These are the men who would have made Christianity a system adequate to satisfy the innate hunger of cultivated minds for high truth, without at the same time deluding the populace with caricatured untruth. That these lowly masses eventually did adopt it is evidence that it was not too high or profound for popular choice, as against its chief rival, another religion of esoteric depth, Mithraism.

Gnosticism was so esoteric and recondite that Marcion, the great Gnostic exegetist, held that, since spirit is so directly in opposition to debased matter, "the humanity of Christ was only in appearance," and that "Christ could not have taken on our mortal flesh, which is essentially evil." Marcion was carrying a doctrine to its extreme and illegitimate application in this case, since there can be no incarnation without the embodiment of spirit in the flesh. But such questions would hardly be matter of household debate among the people.

But again Hodges says that the Christians were dumbfounded by the cropping out of many "coincidences" and similarities between their faith and Mithraism. They were disconcerted to find that their "new religion" was not novel.

Massey's grave charges are seconded by a writer, J. R. L. Morrell, in his work Spiritism and the Beginnings of Christianity (Foreword):

"It is strange and amazing history that I have to tell, but it is true . . . every word of the charge which I make. It is an account of the deliberate and malicious corruption of the most ancient and honorable religion in the world. It involves the interpolation and destruction of a vast literature and finally the ruin of one of the greatest civilizations ever known, to cover up the crime. And so successfully was this work of interpolation and destruction brought about that few people of the present even suspect the colossal humbug that was played upon the world.

"The accusation which I make is that those religious beliefs constituting what is known today as the Christian religion do not owe their origin to the teachings and practices of a Jewish itinerant named Jesus Christ, but came into being in quite another manner, and actually existed before the time he is supposed to have lived. Indeed it is a matter of grave doubt among profound scholars whether any such person ever lived, or as to whom he may have been if he did live."

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The orthodox publicists have refuted these various claims as to the pre-Christian existence of Christianity, yet with more in the way of sheer assertion than competent documentary or historical evidence.

There is a school of opinion which holds that the mythical Jesus of the Gospels was the shadow character of a real personage whose birth was in the year 2 A.D., namely Apollonius of Tyana. His Life by Philostratus comes close to being a parallel of that of the Gospel Jesus. It is claimed that he was the living prototype of both Jesus and Paul, inasmuch as his biography runs much like that of Jesus, while oddly enough Paul addressed his letters to churches in precisely those places where Apollonius had traveled and founded religious societies studying Hellenized spiritual philosophy. Likewise Paul's name in the Acts has been associated with a mysterious Apollos; and still again Apollonius' personal attaché, Damis, seems to match well enough Paul's companion and personal friend Demas. A growing body of opinion holds that Apollonius was the flesh and blood reality behind the uncertain and in many respects decidedly unsubstantial historicity of both Jesus and Paul.

What is claimed to be convincing proof of the pre-Christian associations before the first century is to be found in the Jewish philosopher Philo, born close to the year 1 A.D. But such evidences are neither more sensational nor more definite than the general fact now largely conceded that Christianity built up its creeds and dogmas, rituals and practices upon what it drew from antecedent Pagan cults. Early churches were Essene temples and Orphic temples and monasteries throughout the Eastern world.

A definite testimony is the charge of Hierocles, a learned Pagan statesmen, that the priests plagiarized the Gospels from the writings of Apollonius of Tyana, the "original Gospel" of those days. When one reads that "the proclamation of Hierocles was destroyed by Eusebius," and that the latter in a work against Hierocles threw discredit on the claims for the derivation of the Gospels from Apollonius' writings, one must wonder where the truth lies--in view of Eusebius' well-known reputation for twisting the facts to make them tell a story favorable to Christianity.

When it is stated that Philostratus' Life of Apollonius was based upon original MSS in the possession of the cultured Empress Julia Domna, there seems to be ground for the authenticity of the claims of Hierocles. Assertion is made that Philostratus' work on the great Pythagorean philosopher has suffered greatly at the hands of Christian

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redactors and been much caricatured, "the real truth being obtainable only by careful scrutiny." If Christian scribes and partisan zealots could show a record for probity and honesty in the handling of old MSS, the claims for the Apollonian background of the Gospels and Acts might be heavily discounted. But in view of a record notorious and well-nigh incredible for tampering and mutilation of documents and the invention of whole "gospels" out of fancy, the situation can well merit cautious conclusions.

Apollonius at the age of twelve studied at Tarsus! This was Paul's city, one of three basic centers of Hellenic culture. The name Apollos, in the Acts, is said to be given as Apollonius in the Codex Beza, found in a monastery in France by a Huguenot soldier.

Morrell points out the strange feature of Jesus' being suddenly and without any events leading up to it, recognized and accepted "throughout all Syria." His inference from this is that only Apollonius could have fulfilled this role and character, since it was in Syria that he had founded the many "churches." The writers have always wondered, not too loudly, how and when it was that Paul could have been in Syria and Asia Minor and have so quickly founded a list of growing congregations to whom he wrote his Epistles. The autochthonous growth of these "Christian" communities so early in the history of Christianity is indeed a phenomenon that has never been satisfactorily explained. Particularly that society at Antioch, where the "brethren" were first called Christians, indicates stubbornly that the movement that came to be included under the general term "Christian" was a concurrent activity among groups on the ground and functioning before the advent of a heavenly Savior and his life of thirty-three years and his death could have been in any way a determining element in their formation.

The clear implication of these and concomitant facts in the historical scene in the first century and antedating it is that almost beyond dispute there were associations and brotherhoods practicing cult programs constituted of elements of Oriental, Jewish, Graeco-Egyptian and Chaldean esotericism, which little by little, starting at Antioch, came to be subsumed under the general name of "Christians," adopted from the Greek term Christos, meaning, like Messiah, the "anointed." This name would be appropriate to all of them in virtue of their all having made the Christos-in-man the central or basic teaching in their systems. The Gnostics, Docetists, Elkasites, Ebionites, Ophites, Therapeutai and even Nazarenes and Christianoi, later denounced as here-

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tics, all accentuated this note even in the pale of early Christianity. Indeed there is every reason to believe that the wing of the Christian movement that was stirred into activity in the Syria and Asia Minor sector by Paul's preaching had not the slightest connection with the Palestinian apostolic Christianity; nor had it anything doctrinally or theologically in common with it. There is no sound reason for their inclusion in the movement that later appropriated the name of "Christian" and made it historical. There is a total dearth of data which would establish the claim that these Syrio-Asian "Christians" promulgated their religious movement with the remotest reference to the Galilean Jesus as founder of their faith. The "Lord Jesus Christ" whom they expounded was the spiritual Christos within the heart of all men, and not any historical personage. For the former is what he is with St. Paul himself.

There is not room to make this an elucidation of data from comparative religion. But it may impress readers unfamiliar with the endless run of such parallels to be confronted with at least one item of identity between Christian legend (taken for history) and ancient Egyptian allegorism. Horus, the perennial Christ of Egypt, as a babe was laid in a manger in a scenic reconstruction of a stable, and an image of his mother Isis was placed beside it. Also Hermes, Egyptian Logos figure was born in a cave, son of Zeus and Maya (Mary), and represented as a child wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in a manger.

Images of the Christ have been found much resembling those of Apollo, Greek Sun-God, and of Orpheus, mythical divine teacher.

Morrell's summary is that

"Christianity is but a combination of Pythagorean spiritualism with the essential features of Pagan supernaturalism, in which every trace of the original spiritualism has been distorted or suppressed; and the symbols greatly exaggerated and interpreted literally as Christianity."

Is it not singular that so many men have been inexorably led to the conclusion that Christianity is ancient Paganism with its Scriptures literalized?

The outcome of this sweep from Hellenic philosophical Christianity over to practical Roman ecclesiasticism is well stated by Guignebert (op. cit., 180):

"In reality, however, the Church is passing through a crisis of growth. The outcome of her 'growing pains' will be an orthodoxy which will per-

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petuate the victory of the mass over the individual, and will lay the foundation for the necessity of intolerance in God's name.

"The formula prescribed settled down into a tyranny, the initiative native to religious sentiment grows feeble and personal enthusiasm renders one suspect of heresy. Henceforth doctrine will take control of faith, an event of capital importance in the history of the Christian life."

How Christianity made its synthesis of diverse elements borrowed from Pagan creeds is well limned by Guignebert (p. 181):

"Side by side with the data of the Apostolic faith are fundamentally dissimilar religions and philosophical ideas borrowed from the complex surroundings in which Christianity has been living its life, and a union is effected between them by arguments very similar to those in use by Greek sophistry, concealed beneath more or less ingenious formulas, but at bottom empty and deceptive. In this work the influence can be specially traced of the aristocrats of the intellect, the men of letters and the philosophers whom the faith has won over. I must repeat that in adopting Christianity these men have not divested themselves either of the substance or even more particularly of the method and forms of speculation which they had hitherto used."

It is a pity that too much quotation prevents the reader's having every word of a splendid analytic passage from Guignebert's history. It shows so clearly how the process of borrowing by Christianity originated and continued on to its final stages. He reminds us that while the people at large appear submissive to the clergy and ready to accept their dicta, they are far less passive than they seem. In them, ultimately, rather than in the work of the priests, will be found the determining causes of the changes by which Pagan backgrounds of the common life transformed Christianity. The common people do not reflect or reason, but still they are sensitive to the effects of change or innovation. Their faith is intense and spontaneous, becoming habitual and automatic, and its exploitation in religious ceremonial must continue to yield them its inflations and expansions. They have been accustomed to find these exaltations, however illogically baseless, through the means of their forms of Pagan inheritances. They will cling persistently, therefore, to the time-honored, custom-bound rites and beliefs of ancestral origin, and will make these the nucleus of their Christianity. The human birth and existence of the Christos must be seen as a miracle; the worship of Mary must take on the color of goddess veneration, and the adoration of Saints helps to keep alive the sense of polytheism. Legends of Pagan heroes are woven into the construct of

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thought and feeling. It is easy for them to fit into their church worship the imagery and splendor of the Pagan ceremonies, with the comforting sense of magic and mystery.

Naturally, Guignebert is frank to admit, all this faces the clergy with some embarrassing problems, calling upon all their ingenuity for adjustments or compromises. But, cost what it may, these maneuvers are made and they succeed tolerably. The accommodations found necessary are "clarified, sifted, arranged and finally imposed upon the theologians who had to adjust themselves to them as best they might."

"Thus by a sort of unintentional collaboration of influences of somewhat diverse origin, yet convergent in their effect, a religion very different from the Christianity that we caught a glimpse of in the beginning of the third century acquired shape and form in the fourth, and has become practically mistress of the Roman world when the fifth century opens."

Then he carries the religion thus transformed by the necessity of adapting its original program to the inveterate fixations of Pagan religion into its medieval period and notes how it was further vastly oriented by the forces governing its development. And it is a picture in contrasts that should be missed by nobody.

These, he writes, are the features of the Christian religion in the Middle Ages: it is universalist in temper, bent on warfare; exclusive, violently intolerant, especially to the Jews; bustling with summary dogmas which "set reason at defiance", flourishing elaborate rites, which exercise a mighty and mysterious potency, an arm of power never to be ignored; cluttered up with numberless special "devotions" addressed to a catalogue of Virgins, specialized Saints; directed by a clergy in strict control of the conscience of the laity, who are being herded more and more under the direct authority of one sole center and kept in line by an army of monks and a quibbling troop of acute theologians. If we look at this scene and then compare it with the religion of the Galilean prophet, meek and lowly, who came to announce only the "glad tidings" of the coming of the Kingdom and to galvanize heedless hearts in readiness to receive it, "it is difficult to discover what these two have in common." Stage by stage the gospel of Paul, the Gnosis of Origen, the theology of Augustine, the faith of the Crusaders, and at last Thomism, this religion has built a bridge across the centuries that linked the humble Galilean's simple preachment with the panoply of regal world power. And, concludes Guignebert,

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"It is no less true that the triumph of the Church in the course of the fourth century was rendered possible only by the failure of the early faith, of that which we may call the faith of the twelve."

But what does all this show? A picture so different from what the body of communicants of this religion have been led to construct in their imagination that the republication of the truth would be shockingly unacceptable. Instead of presenting from the first a firm and well-defined compact body of truth given by the Messenger of God to illumine a world groaning in heathen blindness, and holding this gleam steadily before the world right down the centuries, till finally its brightness won the masses to rejoice in its comforts, there is the record of a surge of zealotry amid the ignorant masses, a ferment of fanatical pietism, carrying its contagion to the down-trodden populace of the Roman Empire, winning by its very abandon of devotion, gaining power through numbers, intriguing more learned people to join it and then strengthening it by the introduction of philosophical elements to hold the more intelligent, and then when political expediency had gained its recognition from the State, at once becoming arrogant and tyrannical, and going on thence to execute in regal glow of power its original frenzied purpose to conquer mankind.

And all its victories can be considered won by accommodations, surrenders, compromises, intrigues and finally by violence and slaughter; never shining as one clear single light of truth and wisdom, but a power sinuous, insidious, sycophantic and fickle, changing form like a chameleon, fastening its clutch upon the sensibilities of the gullible masses by mingled ministrations of faith, beauty, art, subtly intertwined with the psychologies of fear and intimidation, particularly of the young. If this is the form and the program which had to be taken to bring mankind in the West from darkness to blessedness, it is nevertheless a horrendous spectacle and a procedure shocking to sincere minds.