CHAPTER XIII

WISDOM IS MUTE

The people of the Church, says the historian, more especially after the persecutions had ceased, could relax from the high tension of witnessing for God in the heroic spirit of martyrdom. The Christian could live a normal life and, without the spur of the challenge of consummate sacrifice, his high-pitched consecrations could be deflated, from sheer want of incentive. He was left to sink back into an acceptance of and by the world and a compromise with its spirit, terms and obligations.

"In other words the mystic struggle which primitive Christianity undertook against life had ended in complete defeat. In fact the Church accepted and acquiesced in it, and was content to transform the ideal which contains the very essence of the primitive faith and indeed constituted her own raison d'être into a theme for pious meditation."

Her own numerous converts, while giving her success and power, were themselves a large factor in her spiritual defeat. For these people were let into the Church too hastily prepared and were for that reason less capable of keeping in check the basic force of the ordinary low-level sensual nature of average man, the formidable antagonist of true religion.

So, avers Guignebert, the "triumph of Christianity," culminating in the fifth century with the silencing of Paganism was, when regarded from a deeper point of view, "a triumph in appearance only." Indeed, so far from Christianity having changed and conquered the Roman Empire, it was the Empire that absorbed Christianity, is this astute critic's verdict.

"Far from having transformed the Graeco-Roman world, Christianity was really absorbed by it and applied to its own atavistic needs and customs in the whole domain of both mind and body."

After some centuries the Church was to learn that the stolid mass mind and its staunch rock of collective feelings, its fixed habitudes,

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its impregnable solidity and stolidity of traditional inheritances, its immalleability, its intellectual inertia, can be a massif against which even the waves of a turbulent religious upheaval can dash themselves in futility. The storm subsides, the thunder and lightning pass, and the cliff stands as unmoved as before. Not much was Paganism changed by the sweep of the besom of pietism; it was Christianity that came out of the cauldron changed almost beyond recognition. And so far was Paganism from being extinguished that nearly two thousand years from Christianity's founding era whole nations of Europe long dominated by a Christianity that seemed as secure and ordained as the sun, suddenly threw off the shackles of this religion that had never been a native growth from their own soil but an unnatural grafting from without, and hurled it with the virulence of a pent-up curse completely out of their life. Paganism had been a more natural, indigenous growth, connecting the social and the mental life of the peoples with their natural habitat and their very hills and vales. Early religions had always connected the manifestations of Deity more closely with nature itself. Christianity came in as an exotic importation, foisted upon them by force and violence, or the persuasions of expediency. That in hundreds of years it was not able to entrench itself with real strength in the life of its subservient nations so as to be able to withstand a sudden modern revolt against its despotism indicates how shallow and extrinsic had been its hold in the antecedent years. Guignebert puts the responsibility for the hollowness of Christianity's "triumph" and the evil consequences following its real failure squarely on the doorstep of the Church.

With the fall of the Roman state power in 476 A.D. the Church, just because her power is invisible and intangible and is therefore rooted in superstition, remains the one structure that will maintain organic unity and a semblance of authority in the dismantled West. Innate reverence even of so-called barbarians for things outwardly paraded as sacred effected for the Church and Christianity a safety which it was quick to enhance and buttress into actual power. But this very security, with its great advantages, rapidly became the means and alluring opportunity for her development in a direction farther and farther away from the spiritual unction of her primeval idealism and plunged her deeper and deeper into the stream of secular and political concerns. Thus her utter metamorphosis of character and mission is completed.

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Guignebert reaffirms that Christianity must always be remembered as essentially an Oriental product--

"an edifice for which Judaism provided the foundations, and all the materials of the superstructure were obtained from the Hellenistic world in which Greek and more accurately Eastern (Asiatic, Syrian, Mesopotamian, Iranian and Egyptian) influences were mingled, from the time of Alexander. The Western world was prepared for Christian permeation by the propaganda done on their own behalf--on the long commercial routes or in the camps--by various Oriental religious Redeeming cults, such as that of Isis and the Great Mother (Cybele) of Phrygia, of Mithra and others. But it took no part itself in the formation of the new religion. It gulped it down whole, as it were, and after assimilation by it, Christianity became more massive and stricter."

It could not, he says, either grasp or express in the inflexible Latin of its day the

"subtle fluid cultures of Greek thought, the foster-mother of early theology. It became hard, crystallized and encrusted in fixed modes of legalistic determination. In this spiritual poverty and barren sterility the needs of the people sought means of self-expression by utilizing the ancient cults and inflating the old myths. But again these can not adequately supply the spiritual vacuum and fail."

The old mythic forms fail because they

"are too narrow a framework to be an adequate setting for ideas which are constantly growing and for which they were not designed."

These final words are cited so that they may be rebutted. Condensing pages of dissertation already given herein, let it be asserted finally that myth is only as narrow as the unintelligence that misapprehends it, and that there are practically no basic ideas, deep and luminous as life itself, which the myths have not been designed to dramatize and illuminate, when a capably receptive mind of clear vision is at hand to interpret their recondite sense. But solutions will never be found for the riddles of mythology and allegory when the requisite insight into the esoteric depths of the near-divine genius that formulated those myths is totally wanting and a prejudice of nescience defeats the will and aspiration of the mind to encompass true discernment.

Guignebert makes the venturesome assertion--mistakenly, as we have shown--that Christianity was the first to succeed in making this syncretism because it stepped in to profit by the preparatory work of its Jewish antecedents, which had put into its hands "a fundamental monotheism and an exclusiveness, intolerant, to be sure, but at that

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time also salutary." Certain ancient nations, or their initiated priesthoods, had needed no syncretism, because they had the entire wondrous structure of divine-human truth virtually intact. It had not yet become fragmented by schism and ignorance. Later, when it had thus been in part dismantled, efforts of more knowing ones had to be made to reintegrate it. But so far was Christianity at any time from making a perfected syncretism of it all, that it carried its disintegration to the lowest stage of ruin imaginable, and has never yet brought into any degree of harmony with each other the monotheism (which it must be said was by no means an attainment of the Jewish religion alone) of the Hebrews with the polytheistic elements of the Greek and Oriental cults.

That a harmony between these two seemingly so diverse conceptions is at all possible is even yet not contemplated by Christian thought. Monotheism contemplates God as One; polytheism contemplates that organic Oneness from the point of view of man who can see the One only in his manifold constituent parts. Christianity has wrought incalculable mischief in the realm of the human mind by ascribing divinity to life in its conceived Oneness; but denied divinity to life in its component divisions and segments. It is as if we should consider wholeness, but scorn and deny the separate organic parts and functions. This has brought about in Christendom as almost in no other religious segment of the globe that sharp distinction between things "holy" or "sacred" and things secular and profane, which has made the Western nations a race of people who feel no nearness of the divine in the commonplace, but set aside only an hour or two a week in a feeble consecration to something gropingly sought after as "spiritual." Christianity has never mustered the philosophical acumen to discern that in casting out the rational polytheism of the Oriental religions it was condemning the West to a rule of real "paganism" hardly ever matched in Eastern civilizations. Admittedly ignorance can misconstrue polytheism into crude forms of nature worship, fetishism, animism and a pantheism wanting in balanced comprehension. But just as fatally can ignorance fail to make anything of monotheism. God as One must remain perpetually an abstraction, called indeed the Unknowable. God as One is the Infinite, the Absolute, the Unmanifest. The God that man can know through life itself is the living universe, which he contacts through his endowment of sense and reason. God, the

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Monon, man can only wonder about; it is with God, the polytheistic whole of organic being, that man must deal.

If Christianity had at any time mastered the profound cosmogonic and anthropogenic principles by which the ancient sages such as Orpheus and Hermes had expounded the truth about God in his multiple expression in the universe, and had understood that man's approach to God is through the logical synthesis of this multiplicity, the Occidental world would never have become either so distinctively secular-minded or so lawless.

Guignebert brings out the odd fact that Christianity's two main antagonists in the days of its inception, Neo-Platonism and Manichaeism, were of Oriental origin like itself; they took rise out of the same general trends of thought as it did; they were nourished by the same religious sentiments and deal with the same religious matter, and were products of the same religious crises as that which generated Christianity. They took form at the same time in the second half of the third century. Neo-Platonism proclaimed the Christos as divine principle lodged and to be developed in human consciousness; Mani proclaimed himself to be a spiritual descendant of Jesus, one of the messengers of God who had preceded him. But the Jesus he speaks of is more akin to the "Lord Jesus Christ" or the Christos of Paul and the Jesus Aeon of the Gnostics than referable to the Galilean. This is itself a notable, indeed a tell-tale fact.

What, then, made the difference between Christianity and the two others? Again the sad answer has to be--ignorance; ignorance on the part of the rabble that followed the Christian groundswell. Neo-Platonists were men of the highest contemplative culture and studiousness. Manichaeans were about at the same level. But the Christians were those, mainly, who were readily instigated to despise books, learning and philosophy with a flame of fury that consumed the Alexandrian library and the priceless volumes of the arcane truth. The two great philosophical rivals of Christianity held the ancient body of sage wisdom to its high standards of intellectual appreciation. Not so Christianity. It took the lower road of adaptation of mythic representation and abstruse principia to the crass mind, thus wrecking the organic beauty of the structure and enslaving the thought of its devotees to idolatrous conceptions and materialized entifications.

That the orthodoxy established in the fourth century did not wholly eradicate the seeds of Neo-Platonism and Manichaeism is indicated by many developments in the succeeding periods. Paul's proselyte, Dio-

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nysius the Areopagite, was soon to base a new presentation of esoteric philosophy on the Neo-Platonic structure and see it assume some prominence. A little later came Scotus Erigena, who repeated a procedure of much the same sort. And on down in the Middle Ages there were the Albigenses, whose system of powerful philosophical strength was, according to Guignebert, "a Christian adaptation of Manichaeism." Indeed the Church has had almost constantly to wrestle with recurrent upsurges of interest in the ancient philosophical deposit by individuals or groups. Guignebert deprecates Augustine's "unworthy twaddle derogatory of" these cult philosophies "current in Christian circles."

But when the scholar asserts that Christianity supplanted these two noble philosophies "because it could express their own tendencies better than they could themselves," and also express them with a harmonization of their differences so as to render them capable of "answering the needs of all the various classes of men who were seeking spiritual sustenance for themselves," dissent must be registered. That Christianity was, or is, capable of inculcating the profound principia of the Neo-Platonic philosophy better than the Greek academies or the Alexandrian syncretists could do it, or indeed that it could ever fully apprehend and apply to the edification of its own people the precepts of that exalted system, is a claim that any competent scholar would not seriously consider supportable. At any rate history holds the disproof of the assertion. Christianity not only did not exploit Neo-Platonic wisdom to any appreciable degree, but indeed suffered it to pass out into near oblivion. It never urged or abetted a revival of interest in it, but in case after case when an attempt was made to revive it, including the preaching of Nicholas of Cusa and of Giordano Bruno, stamped any recrudescence of it out like a fire in forest leaves. Among the Church's exploits that helped give it "victory" certainly was not that of applying or expressing Neo-Platonism (or Manichaeism) better than they could do it themselves. But what they could and most certainly did do "better," was to reduce a few of the basic fundamenta of those systems into a caricatured form which could delude the mass mind into the belief that spiritual essences were historical figures, and thus generate superstitious notions and irrational passions.

Guignebert affirms rightly, however, that in condemning Origen and his writings and methods, "they inadvertently shut themselves off from the main highway for their speculative thought and the path that it had been following for more than a century." Even in Augus-

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tine's work, he argues, was epitomized the whole Christian thought of the fourth century, and it was "interpreted, cleared up and put in good order by the profound, though not always visible, aid of Platonic principles."

Then our chronicler really extends himself in a genuine laudation of Augustine's work, which, since he assured us it was largely a product of Platonic systematism, is well worth noting in full:

"His doctrine constitutes a landmark, erects a ledge, as it were, in the increasingly steep climb upwards of the faith. For this reason it can be said with equal exactness that all the Medieval evaluation of Christian theology in the West originated with St. Augustine. He is the founder of the mysticism of the Reformation as well as of the Middle Ages, and he is an inspiration to Protestantism as he was to the Medieval Church. . . . His doctrine is looked up to as the supreme authority by the doctors of all schools. . . . Finally his opinions upon certain essential points of the faith, on grace and on predestination, for instance, or upon the connection between reason and revelation, from his times to our own, have supplied the grist for all the discussions of the theologians. His dread statements also on the necessity of punishing the sacrilegious furnish the justification in advance, of all the later Medieval intolerance and the Inquisition."

This last sour note is made still more astringent by the next tribute, which says that

"No one contributed more than he toward the adoption of the opinion that a decision of the Church is a truth against which human reason is not qualified to rebel, and that the worth of Holy Scripture itself is due to the guarantee and the interpretation given it by the Church."

Who can say to what degree this influence from the far-off fourth century is responsible for the feebleness of the democratic spirit that is threatening to let arrogant dictators and cliques crush out again for ages the human rights and liberties won by centuries of heroic sacrifice?

Guignebert tells how the ignorant thronged into the early Church and how the clergy, aiming at numbers and letting down all bars of qualification, admitted men who knew little of Christianity save a few formulas and phrases. These people, he says, in making connection with the new movement, had forgotten none of their Pagan customs. They were simply forced to dress their Paganism in a Christian cloak. The ancient festivals were kept as holidays and celebrated in the country districts; and the Church can only neutralize their effect by turning them to account for her profit. It is thus apparent that in adopting

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Christianity, the Roman population were trying on a garment that was a misfit and uncomfortable, and that the wearers had to cut it down to size and adapt it to their former habits of convenience.

It is not yet time for a summarization, but as the reader comes to the end of the long trail followed through by this renowned historian and takes some stock of what has been revealed, it is hard to avoid the realization that here has been painted the picture of a great sweeping movement in human history that leaves one stupefied with its record of weakness, deception, misguided zealotry, mental despotism and general miscarriage of intelligence and integrity that at last sickens the very soul. Critics of this Juggernaut of triumphant faith, as they see it winning by stealth, by preying on superstitions and pietism, are without exception accused of bigotry and intolerance. Yet this charge falls down, when it is realized that the alleged bigotry and intolerance of criticism has been generated by a revulsion against the bigotry and intolerance of the system they criticize. Is it bigotry and intolerance to denounce obvious bigotry and intolerance? The ultimate feeling in reaction to a study of the recorded course of this surge of human beliefs, first compounded of ancient creeds and customs utterly misconceived and jumbled together into an unimaginable association of illogical theology, then speciously made organic by the skulduggery of priestcraft, then pursuing its relentless march down through the centuries of Western struggle, crushing every hopeful revival of intelligence and enforcing its ruthless regime of faith, is at last the nauseous conviction that all sincerity has long since evaporated from its counsels, and that the whole gorgeous fabric of its pietism is the organic instrument used for the religious exploitation of mass credulity and the grandiose agent employed to regiment mass psychology. Such is the revulsion of mind arising from the endless rehearsal of the story that "piety" takes on the character of a thing to be hated and "sanctity" becomes a thing of revulsion. If historians like Massey, Higgins and others have turned bitterly critical and condemnatory of Christianity, it is because its history reeks of the things that breed this revulsion in men of mental integrity. It is little wonder that the conscience of later Europe, even in the Church itself, could no longer endure the onus of supporting such an edifice of duplicity, corruption and shameless insincerity, and broke away to demand a cleaning out of its temple. But that sally of honest resentment against deceit had not the tools (which only ancient Egypt could have furnished) wherewith to cut its way clear of the whole distortion, and went only a fraction of its

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way to full reformation. It is time now, and the missing tools are at hand, to carry that task the rest of its long way to complete eradication of the false principles wrought into the structure in the fourth century. And what could stir mankind today more acutely to come alive to its task of winning emancipation from groveling superstition than to meditate, and then act, upon the words of Sir Gilbert Murray, when, as the upshot of his life-long studies in the influence of religion in the world, he was moved to indite his soul's conviction that

"It is obvious indeed that most religions, if analyzed into intellectual beliefs, are false; and I suppose that a thoroughly orthodox member of any one of the million religious bodies that exist in the world must be clear in his mind that the other million minus one are wrong, if not wickedly wrong." (Five Stages of Greek Religion, p. 21.)

If further incentive to prompt action were needed, it can be found in his further declaration:

"But we must always remember two things about it [religion]: first, that the liability of error is enormous, indeed almost infinite; and second, that the results of confident error are very terrible. Probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion, and I do not think this has entirely ceased to be true at the present day."

"The record of early Christian and Medieval persecutions which were the direct result of that one confident religious error comes curiously near to one's conception of the wickedness of the damned."

These strictures should not lose, but immensely gain, cogency by their temperate and unemotional utterance.

The general populace must go on, perforce, being led with a ring in its nose by designing ecclesiastical polity and psychologically crafty showmanship. But if there is a modicum of sincerity left in men in high places, it is a terrible obligation facing religious leaders to take rational account of the whole broad condition of the world as regards the power and function of religion. Man's folly as the result of inexperience, undevelopment and ignorance is great and tragic. But if he is still too ignorant to correct the evil, there is nothing to do but accredit it to him as the best he could do and let him take the sorry consequences as best he may. But when he can see by merely looking at the conspicuous record that his infatuation with religion is a false leading, and that the religious development in history itself reveals the utter error and fatuity of his addiction to it, there is no justification of leaders in continuing to bind the masses to further com-

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mitment to proven folly. The logical basis of this radical statement is Sir Gilbert's observation, so obvious if people will think beyond their noses, that since there are multitudinous religious cults of differing and opposing persuasions, at least half of them are at once convicted of being invincibly wrong; for if two systems are opposed to each other, at least one must be in error. Man has no way of avoiding a plunge into possible error when he can not be sure beforehand whether his contemplated course is right or not. But he has a means to put an end to a course which has already demonstrated its folly. With history's black pages open before us, a continuance in this brute madness must seem to all, as it did to Murray, the wickedness of the damned.

Challenged to outline a program which would end the dementia, we would answer with the obvious application of the open lesson of history itself. The world--or a section of it--once basked in the shining light of a wisdom that the gods themselves, we must believe, designed to impart to mankind for its guidance over the precarious path of human growth to divinity. We still have the tomes of this sage gift. We see now how closely the low ebb of intelligence and the upheaval of ignorance came to obliterating the light in those two fatal centuries, the third and the fourth of the Christian day. We see how the wrong promulgation of the mere husks of this divine message turned the world from truth to its deceptive mirages. The one sane thing to do is to let go of the mirages and come back to the reality of that ancient sunlight of man's morning. The literary lamps that kept that flame alight are, happily, still in our possession and Egypt has now instructed us how to relight them. But the same folly and perpetuated ignorance persists in keeping this benignant light under a bushel. It needs but to be set on the hill. The infinite calamity of the fourth century must be undone.

If the present appalling danger of the loss of civilization is in any measure due to the world's failure to venerate God, then the single point of wisdom indicated for us is to take the word of that one nation that had the intelligence to woo the divinity of man into its most beautiful expression in all history, the one nation that was in position to judge accurately--Greece. And that nation, as Sir Gilbert points out, called Christianity atheism!

The need plainly indicated, therefore, for the salvation of the world's culture is the complete, not partial and timid, Reformation of Christianity. Unless it is brought back to the forms and meanings which it

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(under other names) bore in the early days, it will, in its present vitiated character, continue to pollute the Western mind with ideas that constitute the genuine atheism. For it continues to hold the mind at arms' length from the final realization that the saving power of divine light must be cultivated within the individual, and was not delivered to the world and made effective for its work by one person. Piety will go on in its futile way until it is really sanctified by the knowledge that it flows from within to outer conduct, and will never be won by pleadings to sources believed to lie without. Only by such an expression can the leaven of righteousness come to pervade society.

Christianity keeps blatantly accusing Greek esoteric philosophy of having failed the masses because it put the problem of personal salvation forth in terms of its knowledge of the multiple constitution of man by which salvation was to be implemented, a knowledge which demanded something in the way of erudition and intelligence to comprehend. Christianity took the simpler way of telling the masses that a man had come and he would do the complicated work in and upon them. Even untutored fishermen could see the ineffable light of divinity glowing in his features, shining in his words and acts. But in giving to the people a Savior in the person of a single historical character Christianity unwittingly robbed the masses of the knowledge of the one path by which alone salvation can be won by the human mortal, the path of self-evolution. It set them gaping in stupid wonder and grasping in pitiable hope at the Judean paragon, utterly bereft of any realization that their salvation from animal brutishness to human-divine graciousness is a work that must be consummated in every stage of its long progress by their rousing to consciousness the divinity slumbering within their own bosoms. Christianity turned the hopes, prayers and aspirations upon the man of Galilee; and this was their tragic following of the mirage. The mirage pictures wells of life-giving water in the skies of faith and belief in this Jesus. All the while the real water of life springing up on every side out of the common experience on earth was missed. The one solid fact, as alleged, that Christianity offered--the epiphany of divine salvation to man in one person in history--was from the first moment of its presentation and ever since, the one most fatal delusion of all time.

Christianity directed the eyes of the world to two explicit places where man could look to find his divinity: in the skies; and in one man in history. Both were false; both lured man away from his true direction of aim. Greek philosophy had indicated where alone it could

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be found,--in the soul of the individual. By its ignorant forsaking of the Greek wisdom it condemned humanity to two thousand years--and how many more?--of wandering in the darksome cave of Plato's splendid allegory, in suffering, wretchedness and horror past the telling. It condemned him to these centuries of the continued domination of his life by the instincts of the beast in his own nature; for it did not tell him that the Christ in history can do nothing for him until he himself tames the ferocity of the beast within him. It set the King of Glory on the throne in Jerusalem; but failed to persuade its millions to set this king on his proper throne in the human mind. This was the cost and consequence of its revulsion against Greek esoteric wisdom. When Tertullian cried, What have Homer and Virgil to do with the Gospels or with Jesus? there was no voice to answer: "They have the fate of the West for two millennia at stake. They have the one possibility of the world's escape from unthinkable tragedy to do with it."

When the cry arose that with the coming of Christianity "Great Pan is dead," there was no voice to answer: Yes, woe is the world! Great Pan is dead, and twenty centuries will rue his passing. When on his death-bed the Emperor Julian is reported to have said--as cited jubilantly by Christians as the evidence of victory for their faith and poetic vengeance for one who tried to extinguish it--"The Galilean has conquered," there was no voice to shout back: Yes; too true! Too true! And now the world will reap the harvest of a mental infatuation that will blight the sanity of nations for sixteen centuries!

It is by no means surprising that a system so potent for misguidance of the lower orders, so grounded on a distortion of former high enlightenment, should have been at straits in nearly every period of its career to hold its power and smooth its way against disaffection, indifference or rebellion by resort to every type of duplicity and forgery in the catalogue. It has indeed a record for such chicanery as would require volumes to detail. And such volumes have been written. Nearly every historian not too preponderantly overweighted with bias to condone or skip this aspect of its history has had to include in his narration the regrettable chapter of what has come to be known as "pious frauds"; tampering with manuscripts, forgery of interpolations in documents, not to mention the wholesale concoction of entire "gospels" and "epistles," and the misrepresentations of historians like Eusebius, Hippolytus and Epiphanius. This story is well known; it is unimpeachable and indefensible, though ably apologized for and sometimes

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shamelessly condoned "for the glory of God and the faith." The plan and scope of this work militates against the devotion of a chapter to rehearse this segment of Christian history. It is real enough, true enough and appalling enough to shake the whole edifice of pious sacerdotalism based on it if the whole of it was widely known. It is doubtful whether in all history any movement of such volume in either the religious or the secular field of human activity ever won and held its power over millions by such an unending course of fraud and imposture, deception and dishonesty. And when these did not work productively enough, slaughter and extinction of opponents could be resorted to. It must be indeed an atrocious career about which a careful historian, Guignebert, can print without the possibility of a charge of slander or defamation such a summary passage as the following (op. cit., p. 248):

"It is a fact that they did derive advantage thus and so persistently that the Greeks have some little foundation for saying, as they do, that the fabrication of documents is the characteristic industry of Rome. At these inventions Gregory VII, as well as Nicholas I, will himself be caught, and all the other Popes throughout the Middle Ages."

If there is any historic application of the statement that we war against the powers of darkness in the air and spiritual wickedness in high places, this subtle nest of plotting and skulduggery in the headship of this ecclesiastical conspiracy must certainly be the chief object of the reference.

"Nearly every pontificate will add its supplement of false documents to this formidable corpus, whence the theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas among them, will for a long period confidently derive the justification for whatever the Roman pontiffs may desire to do or to say. Much more guilty than the forgers themselves are men such as Baronius, Bellarmin and different Jesuits who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, employ their erudition and their zeal in the face of considerations of fact and good sense which admit of no reasonable rejoinder, to bolster up a body of arguments for the sake of conclusions drawn from them which they could not consent to abandon."

And if the actuality of these disclosures, which must be new and incredible to most readers of our work, is not as yet impressed duly upon minds set to believe that the religion of the Christian Church has been developed and propagated by a "Christian" regard for integrity and decency, this final shocking revelation must certainly complete the realization of unwelcome truth (op. cit., p. 251):

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"About this time of Gregory VII in particular (1073-1085) the work of forging false documents and their systematic utilization, i.e., fitting them together into a body of doctrine, reached a magnitude and a degree of openness absolutely stupefying."

"Towards the year 1140 the monk Gratianus, the first professor of canon law in the University of Bologna, blends together the earlier forgeries, adds others, and constitutes a corpus which becomes the legal framework of the 'papal system,' and of an 'authority' beyond dispute."

The authority and power of the pontiff thus built up, the manipulators find it not too difficult to represent it as having been so authenticated from the beginning. They "find" documents which leave it unquestioned that the Roman bishop was the supreme delegate of divine power on earth from the very beginning. By so scheming, Guignebert asserts, "they render the Pope a service, but not Christendom."

The lust for unified power was in no wise to be deterred or thwarted. It meant nothing to the power-hungry clique that rebellion of sensible honest groups or individuals against its arbitrary seizure of the religious hegemony was registered time and again in the later Middle Ages. Mystical religion, no matter how devoted to a system, must have unbounded freedom to adventure into its unbounded field of inner experience. It can not be hedged in by legalistic or doctrinal limitations. It must be free to roam at will over the limitless expanse of spiritual feeling and psychic vision. Hence groups of "the mystical unlearned" were constantly rising to challenge the prescribed boundaries charted around the province of the mind by ecclesiastical authority. It is surely significant that even then the Papal sovereignty, growing every decade more imperious, was regarded as an evil power in the world, even by its own loyal devotees. For Guignebert says that all these revolts "are inspired by unconquerable hatred of the established Church, in recoil from the luxurious and dissolute life of the clergy, all steeped in asceticism."

Here fall in line those later movements of groups here and there to revive and revitalize Manichaeism, and the still lingering memories and secret propagations of the Neo-Platonic wisdom. First come the Paulicians; then the Catharists and then the Albigensians, people inspired with as lofty and genuine a purpose to cleanse their lives in spiritual purity as mortals can ever well be. When their growth and influence could not be stopped by churchly mandate, Pope Innocent III cut the Gordian knot of scruple or hesitation with the brusque announcement that "it is necessary that the horrors of war should

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bring them back to the Church." Having crushed down the free spirit of Christly aspiration in men, imperfect in its expression, but evolving through the experience permitted by freedom, the ecclesiastical power dared not suffer its grip to be loosened in the slightest. Ruthless suppression was fully justified by the necessity of maintaining unbroken solidarity of the holy faith. Order, obedience, docility, submission must be kept intact at any cost. "Christ" would understand the holy motive that regrettably made murder necessary, and would bless the sacred intent. So Europe had to go down through the valley of everlasting ignominy and the shadow of nameless terror and slaughter before the terrified conscience of men was sufficiently aroused in Huss and Luther to rise and defy the wolf-monster of frightfulness masquerading in the clothing of the Lamb of God, the gentle Jesus.

There arose after the slaughter of the Albigensians such rebellious upheavals as those of the Waldensians, the Patarini of Milan, the Beguines (Lambert le Bègue), the Beghards, the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life. All of these advocated a return to the Scriptures and to the freedom of the spirit as it sought union directly with the divine nature in transports of mystical exaltation.

Let imagination try to reconstruct the state of mental unbalance and spiritual hypocrisy in which an institution posing as the earthly custodian of true religion and arrogating to itself the shepherd control of man's conscious relation to the Creator, would justify its necessity of crushing down with savage butchery the sincerest upreachings of the souls of Europe's finest people in the name and for the love of the Christ! Our work is aimed to be the history of the dementia that contorted the aspirations of men in the fourth century into this wretched slavery to misconceived ideals of good. Civilization hardly less now than at any former time is menaced by the unbroken continuity of that same dementia.

These movements, continuing to spring up incessantly, were so persistent and

"this multiform agitation was so prevalent that it harries the Church without respite, at the very time when she seems to be most completely mistress of the thought and conduct of men, and all present philosophical thought and human science in revolt against orthodox dogma and revealed cognition."

We have here, of course, the growing resentment that was to explode finally in the sixteenth century in the Protestant Reformation. One

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needs not a score of books to make clear the prime motivations of this revolt. It was a fight to free the human mystical propensity from the fetters of an externalized authority or formal limitations and to emancipate from any external tyranny the spirit of innermost man. It was a fight to disburden the individual of the intermediary trappings and formalities by which an ecclesiastical power had asserted its right to regulate the communion of the spirit with Deity.

It is worthy of note, comments Guignebert, that most of the weighty doctrinal heresies originating in the intellectual circles of the Middle Ages took a pantheistic turn, and were definitely the product of the old Neo-Platonic spirit rediscovered once more either in the writings of Scotus Erigena or in those of the Arabian doctors. Amaury de Bène (died 1204) drew heavily upon Erigena's De Divisione Naturae, a work on Neo-Platonism. The "modernists" of Paris and Oxford maintained that "the Christian faith is an obstacle to the progress of knowledge." And it is significant that while the Archbishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, condemns 919 Averroist errors in 1277, and the Archbishop of Canterbury does likewise, we note a sort of crusade in process of organization among the orthodox doctors against the "fresh spirit of unbelief which is filtered down from the Schools to the lower classes in the form of a gross materialism, to such a degree that the Inquisition will be forced to take note of it . . . in the beginning of the fourteenth century."

Then the Church had its hands full to combat a tendency of another sort, the status and influence of which are forever a matter of indeterminate evaluation. This is the unconquerable propensity of nearly every grade of human intelligence to indulge in one or another form of what is called the "occult." It is a region of interest and experience not far removed from the mystical, indeed a close brother to it. Some aspects of its exploitation are almost inescapable in even the most intelligent minds, for the "occult" forces are just the deeper and less commonly observable influences that activate feeling and conduct from within the psyche. Even the hardest headed in the modern age dominated by the scientific mood can no longer hold the "occult" in cold disdain, since modern psychological science has itself disclosed a whole world of unconscious sources of motivation lying underneath the open area of consciousness. Investigation of psychic awareness lying beyond the possible scope of intelligence obtained through the normal channels of the senses and reason, has been taken up by the universities. Man is recognized as being an entity related to other worlds or regions of

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consciousness beside the one he commonly contacts by means of his physical organism. There is danger that this epochal discovery may open the door to a new vogue of license in the mystic life, and threaten science's exact procedure in obtaining knowledge. However, the tremendous authority of science in the present age gives promise that advance of new investigation will proceed cautiously in this strange domain. At least there is the fortunate assurance that the most novel phenomena encountered in the search will not again generate that rueful horror of witch-burning and devil-exorcism that blackens the escutcheon of official Christianity with one of the most wretched of its many frightful inhumanities.

The Medieval Church was surrounded and harassed on all sides by all kinds of adversaries absorbed in this interest.

"The belief in the reality of occult forces, in the value of astrology, in the power of sorcery, was a bequest from antiquity; its adepts were to be found in all the nations; folklore helped to keep it alive with its innumerable legends, and it seemed to be confirmed by a mass of those hearsay experiences which strengthen in the simple-minded and the illiterate a dogmatic faith in the absurd . . . the conquest of the Western world by Christianity had not destroyed these older heterogeneous layers of varied superstitions."

This is the historian's version, no doubt, betraying something of his personal attitude to this aspect of "religion." The tendency, indeed the inevitable bent of the human mind to hypothecate the play of forces or intelligences in our lives in the realm of the unknown is ever a thing to be reckoned with. People have experiences which do not seem explicable on any of the known grounds of causation. Beings in a world invisible may be able to reach the human consciousness by short-length high-frequency waves of mind bearing messages. Telepathy under rigidly prescribed testing has not been too successful in positive demonstration. But spontaneous telepathy has established a record that can hardly be ignored. Science has not yet mastered the basic conditions of formal success. Man is obviously a citizen of more worlds than the one he commonly moves in. Hypnotism, still a science in swaddling clothes, has revealed incredible powers of a subconscious (or superconscious) intelligence within us. Inventors have found the elusive secrets of new mechanisms in their sleep, or worked out on awaking. Writers, musicians, artists, orators bring forth productions of a genius that is by no means their own normal reach of creative power. Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, Blake and many more have written under

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the "drive" of a power that actually pushed aside their own minds and dictated its own versions, even guiding their pens as by an automatism. People with no skill or technique have suddenly rendered difficult musical compositions or painted pictures of real merit.

What is of great importance in all this is the challenge that it casts before humanity in this modern day, to see that this recrudescence of interest in supernormal (falsely called for so long the supernatural) activities of the psyche in man's composite consciousness be accepted in the spirit of scientific balance, and not again turned into a holocaust of ignominious persecution. Superstition unquestionably can all too easily becloud the reaction of thoughtless people to the incidence of such phenomena. But superstition has been no less evident and surely less pardonable in the exercise of ecclesiastical power through the inhuman savagery with which innocent young girls, lads, men and women who manifested psychic abilities were sacrificed on the altar of the Church's invincible regimentation. The despicable murder of Joan of Arc is still a shuddering memory, not one whit extenuated, but rather more heavily to be resented, by her later canonization.

We can fall back on Guignebert's language to conclude this part of the story:

"It is much more certain that the authority of the Church has deeply implanted in the credulous public and in the poor brains of the deranged this lamentable aberration of witchcraft. No better example can be cited to prove the extent to which the Church has failed to prevail with her infallible verities over the prejudices and errors of all the ages, but has on the contrary submitted to them and at times systematized and justified them."

"The shameful sore will go on spreading incessantly, particularly in the sixteenth century . . . the evils of all kinds and especially the horrible sufferings of miserable human beings for which the Church is responsible in this way can not easily be exaggerated. . . . The Church by its obstinate persecution of magic and witchcraft has already begun to struggle against science."

Truly enough there begins then that stubborn intransigency of the churchly power against the first and then the later waves of the movement of "modern science." Science threatened to break the hold of the absurd doctrinal theologies over the stupid mass mind. It must be resisted, turned back, defeated. No one can picture the horrific realities of this prolonged fight of "holy Church" against the advance of empirical science, which seemed so likely to rend its foul pretensions to bits, who has not read Draper's work on the conflict between religion

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and science and Andrew D. White's two monumental volumes on The History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christendom. One need but picture Galileo writhing as the flames of the faggot pile crept closer to his flesh, martyred for having refused to recant his announcement that the earth revolved around the sun.

There is no question but that the upsurge, in spite of all the hellish devices of persecution, of science in the seventeenth century shook the power of the religious system to its base. Millions escaped from its tyranny, those who saw in science the sure grounds of the wholly preposterous "scheme of salvation." After fifteen centuries of fearful suppression, the mind of Europe began to tear free from its mental thongs to regain again the use of the sword of reason to cut its pathway out of the jungle of killing superstitions grown to rank exuberance through ages of stifling tradition and authority imposed on childhood.

The Inquisition had failed to crush the divine spirit in man. Since even its unforgettable savageries are being condoned and even denied, it might be well to hear again Guignebert's caustic summarization of it (p. 316):

"Pronouncing secretly and without right of appeal the most terrible penalties, it constitutes one of the most horrible inventions ever conceived by fanaticism in any age."

It might be added that the same power that executed this satanic inhumanity is grasping greedily still to obtain that predominance over the modern world that will enable it again to wipe away all civil rights of the individual and tyrannize once more over the minds of the people as it did in Medieval days. The part of the world that still believes it is free had better look to its liberties. They were lost in the third century and but barely regained in the eighteenth. The monster Ignorance, or the craft of those aiming to wield its massive power, is straining at the leash to grasp again the authority it held so long. The world struggle is always the warfare between intelligence and ignorance. The almost immovable obstacle thwarting the dawn of intelligence and equally bulwarking the cause of ignorance, is the great body of untutored, unawakened, undisciplined masses. It blocks every sacrificial heroism of its hopeful liberators; it kills its emancipators, as Socrates and Lincoln, and symbolically its Christs. Religion, insinuated into the sensitive mind of childhood, is the instrument by which, even though seductively interwoven with the beauty aspects of ritual, music and art, this

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conspiracy of pietism aims to retain its hold on the populace in every generation, and by rapid birth accretion, gain voting strength and power. While philosophy, the true emancipator, is converted into idle speculation, or is as widely neglected as possible, religion gains the day.

True democracy aims to educate all its members and thus avoid the dangers that inhere in mass ignorance. But ecclesiastical authority, which desires to wield the power of the ignorant masses, discourages education, except such as will condition the mass mind to easier susceptibility to its program and shibboleths.

One of these shibboleths of the Church is that the sense of the sacredness of life which, as Fisher says, "prevails at the present day," is due to Christianity. Doubtless pious sentimentality has spread widely the ideal of life's worth. But the mawkish and revolting insincerity of such a claim, at any rate its shocking falsity, could be seen by any one who will look. A religion which, historians estimate, has been responsible for the deaths of fifty millions of people from bigotry and persecution even before the two mammoth holocausts of modern world war, which were bred and inaugurated by the leading Christian nations, with the Church either indisposed or helpless to avert them, should be ashamed to put forth the claim that it has inculcated in mankind a sense either of the dignity (another of its arrant and preposterous claims) or the sacredness of individual life. An institution which has never stopped at murder to gain its ends should not boast of its regard for the sacredness of life.

Perhaps the whole nub of the failure of Christianity, its fall into impossible Christianism, can be seen most vividly from a glance at one of those felicitous phrases which now and then flash into a mind and epitomize whole movements in history. Allan Upward says in his book, The New World:

"If the foregoing pages point to any truth, it seems to be that the Divine Man is a type of the divine in man."

This well condenses in a phrase the cause of Christian failure. Christianity took the type figure of the divine in man for the Divine Man. It exalted the alleged Divine Man (when not using him to excuse and exculpate its atrocities), but left the divine in man to grovel in the dust, even drove its spirit down to think of itself as a miserable worm. Christianity cut itself off from all possibility of commanding the loyalty of high intelligence and maintaining a connection with sanifying philosophy when it shifted the center of gravity, so to say, from the

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cult of the Christ within to that of the Christ without, or from the Christ as principle to Christ as a man. Christianity stakes its all on this displacement of human incentive and location of human power. Indeed this single aberration, by which it took a stand of utter uniqueness in its day or any other day, is in the finale the one mark of character that gives it noteworthy distinction from a number of other religious cults in its time. Those other systems strove to hold the understanding of the Christos-Messiah principle to the high level of its spiritual conception. The Orphic, Mosaic, Hermetic, Platonic, Pythagorean; the Gnostic, Essenian, Docetic; the Neo-Platonic, Stoic, Mithraic, Manichaean had presented the Christ as the ray of Divine Mind born and to be reared in the consciousness of the human race.

Naturally the masses can go only a certain length of the intellectual road toward entifying this principle beyond the stage of a remote abstraction. And abstrusities leave the lower ranks cold to religion of the philosophical kind. This condition confronted the world of intelligence with a constant problem, which it sought to meet generally by methods of esoteric polity. But whether through sheer chance or by a happy hit on a device that yielded unexpected results or by shrewd connivance, Christianity at a given point in its early career suddenly presented the Christ as a man. The effect began to be magical. The untutored could lay hold of the "personality" of Jesus with a human warmth with which it could never adopt the conception of the mystical Christ. It proved a ten-strike. It caught the fancy and aroused the sensitivities of the lowly. The Christ, the cosmic Logos, had been here on earth, in Galilee, in Jerusalem, had wrought wondrous miracles, had radiated blessing and divine grace, had been wickedly murdered while still blessing his enemies, had risen and ascended in glory to the skies--the whole scenario was overpowering in its human appeal. Where philosophy passed over the heads of the common people, the Gospel story, turned from dramatic suggestiveness to realistic "history," won the populace. No religion had ever brought divinity home to man on earth in the form of palpable history. This was something the common fancy could take hold of. And it was a thing to move the humblest to awesome reverence, to love and pity, to worship and loyalty. It swept over the multitudes, lighting its emotional fires in all hearts, inciting all minds; while poor philosophy could light a glow in but a rare mind here and there. And it won the day in the Roman Empire.

But thrice blind is he who would acclaim this as a victory for culture, for civilization, for humanity. The victory of Christianity wrote

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defeat for mankind. It was victory of the baser, the cruder, the elementary segment of human motivation over the refined, the disciplined, the cultured and reasoned way of life. This is the party of the first part in human nature which has always been winning its victories over the party of the second part, "the Lord from heaven," as Paul names it. But Christianity is the first party in history that has ventured to call it a victory for humanity. Philosophy, learning, intelligence, mystical profundity, spiritual purity were ruthlessly suppressed and driven underground, while fanaticism, bigotry, ignorance, intolerance and fraud reigned in insolent tyranny. And a thousand Christian publicists have hailed this as the greatest, the culminating victory for humanity.

Christianity won on those terms and on those grounds on which a prostitution of refined taste in beauty, truth and goodness to meet the levels of low appreciation of rude humanity will always win those whose preferences can not rise to higher things. It ever marks a deplorable turn in mankind's upward progress when culture has to give way to mass boorishness and go in retreat to esoteric sanctuary to wait until a new and perhaps fairer trial may be adventured.

Christianity's triumph was a harrowing victory for rampant pietism over studied intellection. The third century should ever be shrouded in the memory colors of gloom and mourning, for it witnessed the disappearance of philosophical enterprise for centuries. The present hope of perpetuating the very existence of mankind in a state of culture higher than barbarism depends upon breaking this spell of psychopathic hallucination under which the Council of Nicaea has laid the consciousness of the West since its fateful meeting. What the Occident should have learned from these centuries of tragedy is that religionism not balanced and sanified by philosophy and intelligence will plunge the world in wreck and ruin.

This work is the first effort to interpret the conquest of the Roman world by Christianity as a tragedy and not a great, far less the greatest, blessing for mankind. It is designed to point the way in which effort must now and quickly be made to end the run of evil consequence following that unfortunate debacle.

Forever must be dropped the wholly spurious tradition that Christianity came as the first burst of true light out of heathen darkness. It was a new departure only in the peculiar sense that it took off from long established and familiar bases and shot out in a direction never taken by a movement of any volume before. That direction was unique

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because, to a degree unparalleled in any previous time, it proceeded not forward to a clarification of something vague and less defined hitherto, but went in exactly the opposite direction, from clarity to befuddlement. It took a weird turn in an unheard-of direction, because it attempted to recast its Scriptural constitution in the terms of outer history, when they had hitherto only been applicable to the life of inner consciousness. It was a movement away from the light.

Christianity had to wait for its victory until in the long course of philosophical degradation the state of general culture in the East had sunk to the low ebb at which for the first time in all history the popular apprehension of the coming of the Christ-Messiah as the birth of a spiritual motif in all humanity was finally lowered to the birth of a babe in a Judean village. And what has happened since in the name of that babe proves its calamitous character.

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CHAPTER XIV

THE MYTH-GHOSTS WALK ABROAD

Christianity was in no wise new, since it was a reissuing, in the main, of ancient Egyptian lore. Says Allan Upward (op. cit., p. 222):

"When the test of emotion is applied to it, Christianity stands revealed as an Egyptian faith. Those cries of the soul that were heard in the liturgies of Osiris have passed into the Psalms of Zion and into the Christian liturgy. The pilgrimage and warfare of the soul is the theme that underlies all the astrological and all the historical allegory. The inspired prisoner who wove The Pilgrim's Progress (as he tells us) out of the substance of his dreams, has reproduced with marvelous fidelity the very incidents of the initiation ceremonies of ancient Egypt almost in the language of the Book of the Dead."

The same writer, standing in the Niger Valley of Africa, wrote:

"Elsewhere I trod a green hill outside a city wall, whereon a man had been sacrificed at Easter from time immemorial."

In his The Divine Mystery (p. 217) he says:

"In the meanwhile the originals of whole chapters of Genesis and whole sections of the Mosaic law have been deciphered amid the dust of Babylon. A vivid light has been thrown on the Canaan of the fifteenth century B.C. by the discovery of correspondence between the petty kings of the country and their Egyptian overlord; and it reveals the whole region at the very time assigned by the legend for the exploits of the mythical Joshua, already inhabited by a population which wrote the Hebrew language in the Babylonian script."

Little by little the historical foundations of the Christian hypothesis crumble away, leaving nothing but the original myth and allegory whose lucid interpretations will restore Christianity to its original light and power.

Joseph Klausner in his Jesus of Nazareth (p. 107), referring to Joseph Salvador, says:

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"He finds the whole of the 'Sermon on the Mount' in Ben Sara, so anticipating Kalthoff."

"Salvador explained that much of what was told of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus was derived not from the Old Testament, but from Oriental and contemporary Greek mythology. In this and also in explaining the genesis of Christianity from the pagan religious corporations (thiastoi), Salvador anticipated the celebrated writings of Pfleiderer, from whom Kalthoff drew most of his ideas."

More pointed than this is the outspoken opinion of Graetz, the profound investigator of the German group. Says Klausner:

"Graetz frankly acknowledges that even what seems most certain in the study of the life of Jesus has only the value of an hypothesis. The sole historical fact we possess is that Christianity arose out of Essenism." He calls Christianity "Essenism mixed with foreign elements."

Klausner states that Graetz' grounds for his tracing Christianity to Essenian origins are the fact that

"John the Baptist, who paved the way for Jesus' manifestation, was an Essene in all his manner of life, and that James, the Lord's brother, who led the Church after the crucifixion, had all the habits of an Essene; and that even the entire Church . . . behaved in all respects like an Essene community."

It is doubtful if too much credit can be granted such speculations and conjectures as these, for the extreme likelihood is that all these characters are dramatis personae out of the old religious dramas, like the Prodigal Son. What may be well conceived to be a connection with historical truth is that the first pious Christians were a cult of much the same order and purpose as the Essenes. Graetz could be right in assuming that it started as a cult of Essenism, with much evidence tending to prove that, whatever it was at the outset, it soon mixed with "foreign elements."

The work of G. Friedlaender, The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount, says Klausner,

"shows with much authority that not only the Sermon on the Mount, but the entire Christian system (excluding its asceticism) is borrowed from the Old Testament, the Book of Ben Sira, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Philo of Alexandria and the earlier portions of the Talmud and Midrash."

Similarly precise corroboration of our thesis is found in Klausner's saying that Abraham Geiger agrees with Graetz in thinking that in Jesus' teaching

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"there is either nothing new or that what is new is put before us in somewhat enervated form just as it originated during an enervated period." (From Geiger's Das Judentum und Seine Geschichte, p. 119.)

That Christianity was just a weird and twisted malformation of old truth by an enervated mentality in an enervated period (Cf. Murray's "failure of nerve") is the theme of this portion of our work. The astute German critics evidently inclined to this opinion.

What else would dispose another erudite German scholar, Chwolson, to say (a specially noteworthy observation) that

"rightly to understand Pauline and post-Pauline Christianity, a knowledge of the Sibylline Oracles, Philo and Greek literature generally is most important"?

Josephus and Zeller endeavor to show that the line of development from esoteric secrecy out into more general deployment came originally through Pythagorean channels.

Klausner asserts that "Christianity therefore drew from Essenism for a short time before Jesus and immediately after the death of Jesus." But what could be the meaning of "Christianity . . . before Jesus"? Christianity was not predicated as being in existence before Jesus founded it!

Klausner traces other points of resemblance between the early Christians and the Essenes. But the Essenes maintained strictly their high standards of mental and spiritual culture and lived within monastery walls and colonies. The Christians certainly did not long hold this status in common with them. In fact they soon became the antithesis of nearly everything the Essenes stood for, including esotericism, allegorism, mysticism, philosophy, study, libraries and a certain exclusiveness based on qualification. The Christians soon let down all bars, opened all doors, reached out and embraced the lowest and least disciplined of men.

The finality of Klausner's strong statement should not be missed (op. cit., 384):

"Yet, with Geiger and Graetz, we can aver, without laying ourselves to the charge of subjectivity, and without any desire to argue in defence of Judaism, that throughout the Gospels there is not one item of ethical teaching which can not be paralleled either in the Old Testament, the Apocrypha or in the Talmudic and Midrashic literature of the period near the time of Jesus."

"Every single clause in 'the Lord's Prayer' is, however, to be found in Jewish prayers and sayings in the Talmud."

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Since the whole position of Christianity rests on "the divinity of Jesus," it is quite pertinent to consider what Gerald Massey has to reflect on this feature. In The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (p. 22), he writes:

"It is not I that deny the divinity of Jesus the Christ; I assert it! He never was and never could be any other than a divinity, that is, a character non-human and entirely mythical, who had been the pagan divinity of various pagan myths, that had been pagan during thousands of years before our era."

And it is brought out that the Christian Father Justin Martyr (Apol. ii) incautiously admits that this rite, in which bread and wine are partaken of as symbolical of the flesh and blood of the Sun-God, had been celebrated from time immemorial in the Mysteries and ministrations of Mithras.

Even such a renowned modern Christian theologian as Benjamin Bacon (Jesus and Paul, 77) says:

"It may help us to know that Philo, thirty years before this time had already advanced the doctrine of a transfiguration of Moses through his intercourse with God, and that Philo always makes this Moses' preparation for immortality. Describing his departure into heaven at the summons of the Father, Philo declares that by the vision of God Moses' soul and body had been blended into a single new substance, an immortal mind-substance having the appearance of the sun." (Matching the features of Jesus' transfiguration, to the letter.)

If Christians--and all others--but recognized it, there is here the complete resolution of all Christian systematism, theology and creed back into the old sun-worship of ancient Paganism. For this merging of the human into the divine in the final union, or marriage, of male spirit with female matter, is the essence of the much-derided "heathen" sun-cult worship. If Christianity had ever possessed the insight to discern the great reality concealed behind the forms of ancient sun-worship--the spiritual cosmic sun and not merely the physical solar orb--it would have maintained the high glory of the arcane sapiency of yore and spared the later world its orgies of blood-baptisms.

In his Jesus and Paul Benjamin Bacon, noted Yale theologian, admits that Paul clothed his teaching in "the figures of speech which he borrowed from Hellenistic religion." "He is speaking that which he knows and has seen, even if he is driven for expression to language borrowed from Hellenistic faiths." Bacon does not glimpse that Paul's background was the Hellenistic systems and not Jerusalem Christianity

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at all. He employed these formulae of the Mystery cults because they were the coin current among the groups seeking true spiritual culture in his day.

J. M. Robertson, who with Drews and W. B. Smith of Tulane University, some decades ago put the Christian system under a severe challenge to uphold the historicity of the Gospels, is decisive in his final assertion that

"In short, the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage."

And he proclaims openly and unhesitatingly that ignorance got the upper hand, took the body of myths and turned them into the "history." Paul had set forth how that the heavenly Messiah, in his descent from the empyrean, had been stripped of his celestial glories and reduced to a state of "poverty" on earth. So, says Robertson, when the myth was altered to read as history, "Christ was turned into a poor man in the economic sense of the word, while Joseph, the divine artificer and father of the sun, became an ordinary carpenter."

The arguments advanced by Robertson, Drews, Smith and Dupuis have been countered by many Christian writers contending for the absolute historicity of the Gospels. But their protestations for the historicity are refuted by the amazing veridical situation itself: the Gospel stories that they contend can stand on their own feet as positive historical occurrences on given days and dates at given localities still pointed out to tourists, very surprisingly are found to be but copies of allegories now brought to light through the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the Behistun Rock in Mesopotamia. If myths afloat for centuries in Chaldea and Egypt did not become concreted into alleged history, how is one to account for the fact that the actual "history" only repeats the myths? Few realize it, but the Christian system will stand or fall according to the way it ultimately decides to meet the challenge of this modern denouement. It has held off the fateful decision till now only because so few are in possession of the data that constitute the challenge.

One of Robertson's sharpest critics, T. J. Thorburn, in a work called The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, admits that it was "simple folk who formed the bulk of the earliest converts to Christianity," but does not see that this would vastly increase the probability of their misinterpreting myth as true history. He is right in saying that it is not likely that myths would be pruned down so as to be rendered accept-

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able to thinking people. But it was not thinking people who did accept the myths as history. They were forced out of the religion just because they could not accept the "fables of the Church" as history. It is not a process of "pruning down" that makes the myths acceptable to thinking people, but a process of profound analysis of the elements of the myth that makes them luminous to understanding of the cryptic message they convey. The myths were accepted as history only by the fanatics who had so far set aside what reason they might have exercised and reduced their minds to that state in which the belief in the factuality of the myths became a tragic possibility. This sad collapse of reason accounts in full for the debacle of sanity in the third century and the consequent launching of a body of weird beliefs that till then had never been accepted even by ignorant people, much less by the thinking class.

The myths were extant and afloat for hundreds of years before the Christian era, with nobody, unless only the most abjectly ignorant, mistaking them for history. But finally they began to be taken for objective events. What is the only sane conclusion that properly explains such a denouement? Surely nothing but that after performing their proper service and function as myths for many ages, they finally fell upon an era of degenerate mentality so blunted and blinded that their esoteric non-historical nature could no longer be made understandable, and minds wanting in keenness at last accepted their objective historicity.

In his Christianity and Mythology J. M. Robertson (pp. 82, 85) writes:

"That Joshua is a purely mythical personage was long ago decided by the historical criticism of the school of Colenso and Kuenen; that he was originally a solar deity can be established at least as satisfactorily as the solar character of Moses, if not as that of Samson"--whose very name is from the Hebrew shemesh, the sun.

And how can such a datum as the following be ignored as of little effect upon Christian foundations, when Thorburn cites Robertson as saying:

"The cave of Bethlehem had been from time immemorial a place of worship in the cult of Tammuz, as it actually was in the time of Jerome; and as the quasi-historic David bore the name of the sun-god Daoud, or Dodo (Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 56-7), who was identical with Tammuz, it was not improbable on that account that Bethlehem was traditionally the city of David, and therefore, no doubt, was deemed by the

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New Testament myth-makers the most suitable place for the birth of Jesus, the mythical descendant of that quasi-historic embodiment of the god Tammuz or Adonis."

As Bethlehem yields unshakable connections with myth long antecedent, likewise does Nazareth. From data given us by Epiphanius (Haer. xxix, 6) brotherhoods or sects of religionists under the name of Nazaraioi (Nazoreans) had existed in pre-Christian times. Drews ventures the likely surmise that "Nazareth took its name from the sect of Nazoreans instead of the reverse, as is admitted by so distinguished a scholar as W. Nestle." And Epiphanius gives out the startling datum that "all men called the Christians Nazoraeans" in his time. Again he writes: "The heresy of the Nazarees was before Christ, and knew not Christ." The Arabian name for Christians was "Nasara."

Authority supports Massey's statement that "the doctrine of the incarnation had been evolved and established in the Osirian religion at least four thousand and possibly ten thousand years before it was purloined and perverted in Christianity."

Massey's life-long pursuit of Egyptian wisdom left his mind with no escape from the knowledge that the Mosaic corpus of mythic literature in the Pentateuch derived from Egypt.

"A profound study of the Ritual reveals the fact that the wisdom of Egypt was the source and fountain-head of the books of wisdom assigned to Moses and David, to Solomon and Jesus; and also proves the personages and characters to have been Egyptian. It is chiefly the wisdom of Egypt that gives a value to the Hebrew writings."

A systematic study of Philo would cinch the correctness of these assertions.

A fair section of modern scholarship has heard these most sincere and voluminously corroborated protestations of this scholar and has treated them as so much froth and vaporing of a misguided zealot and enemy of Christianity. Outside of his mislocation of Amenta, the Egyptian "underworld," in the world beyond the grave instead of here on earth--a mistake made by every Egyptologist down to the present--Massey's insight into what the religion of Egypt was presenting to the human mind was so superior to that of the more noted investigators that beside his monumental analyses their light is almost total darkness. And the day may happily be not far removed when his six prodigious volumes will be held as treasures beyond estimate, and reprinted.

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Lack of space forbids unfolding the full thread of the reasoning by which he pretty clearly proves that the alleged three years of the Lord's ministry was a fallacious development from the Old-Testament phrase, "the acceptable year of the Lord." In the symbolic language of ancient Scripture both "year" and "day" stand for any completed cosmic or evolutionary cycle. So the divine soul's cycle of ministry to the lower element in human nature was termed his "year." Likewise his ministry effectuated the development in man of the four prime grades of conscious power, sense, emotion, thought and spiritual will; which were poetically likened unto the course of the four seasons of the year. Then, too, this ministry was to unfold in man the full glory of the twelve rays of divine consciousness, completing the twelve months. Further, as the trinitarian aspect of divine emanative energy was always prominently accentuated, by a quirk of misunderstanding hard to locate but easy to imagine, the "year of the Lord" was at some time converted into three years, and from emblemism was turned into history.

After tracing seemingly endless items of resemblance or identity between the Horus-Child of Egypt and the Gospel Jesus, Massey ends by saying:

"The catacombs of Rome are crowded with the Egypto-Gnostic types which had served the Roman, Persian, Greek and Jew as evidence for the non-historic origins of Christianity."

The child-Horus of Egypt reappears as the mummy-babe in the catacombs.

And who can be obtuse to the pointed significance of the item Massey now presents? "There is neither date nor history of Horus between the age of twelve and thirty years." Never have Christian theologians been able to "explain" either to themselves or to others this long and singular lacuna in the history of their Gospel Savior, eighteen years from puberty to full manhood. This bafflement was inevitable for the very simple reason that what is composed of the tenuous essence of allegory can not be explained as history.

And what can be the answer to such a challenge to every one of Christianity's historic claims as this from Massey's researches?

"The story of the Annunciation, the miraculous conception (or incarnation), the birth and the adoration of the Messianic infant had already been engraved in stone and represented in four consecutive scenes upon the innermost walls of the holy of holies (the Meskhen) in the temple of

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Luxor, which was built by Amen-Hotep III about 1700 B.C., or some seventeen centuries before the events depicted are commonly supposed to have taken place."

And some day not too far distant the fateful character of Massey's concluding paragraph of his stupendous work, Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, will be recognized as not the ranting of an overwrought scholar, but the oracular pronouncement of sober and sobering truth:

"From this we learn by means of comparative process that the literalizers of the legend and carnalizers of the Egypto-Gnostic Christ have but gathered up the empty husks of Pagan tradition, minus the kernel of the Gnosis; so that when we have taken away all which pertains to Horus, the Egypto-Gnostic Jesus, all that remains to base a Judean history upon is nothing more than the accretion of blindly ignorant belief; and that of all the Gospels and collections of 'Sayings' derived from the Ritual of the resurrection in the names of Mati or Matthew, Aan or John, Thomas or Tum, Hermes, Iu-em-hetep or Jesus, those that were canonized at last as Christian, are the most exoteric, and therefore the farthest away from the underlying, hidden, buried, but imperishable truth."

How one item of the dramatic ritual was converted into "history" can be plainly seen when the name and role of the Gospel Herod is scrutinized:

"The name of Herod in Syriac denotes a red dragon; and the red dragon in Revelation, which stands ready to devour the young child that is about to be born, is the mythical form of the Herod who has been made historical in our Gospels."

To strengthen this inference, already well grounded on comparative religion studies, is the additional fact that the same red dragon, or evil serpent of the lower nature in man, is in the Egyptian myths the monster Apap (Apep, Apepi) whose other name is found to be the Herut reptile! When also the name for the "dense sea" (of matter) under which the Christ aeon was said to suffer in its incarnation is seen appearing in old creedal formulae as the Greek pontos piletos, and we have thus the entirely non-historical origins of "Pontius Pilate" along with "Herod" in the Gospel framework, there is a clear challenge to the upholders of the historicity of the Gospels to explain how these two names, the one threatening the Christos in its infancy, the other carrying him to his death, have found their way into the story in precisely the same place, role and character as the two non-historical elements of the names!

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Alluding to the Greek myth of Heracles and the Hindu one of Krishna, Edward Carpenter (Pagan and Christian Creeds, 245) writes these words which fall with entire agreement into the structure of theses we are establishing:

"What we chiefly notice so far are two points: on the one hand the general similarity of these stories with that of Jesus Christ; on the other their analogy with the yearly phenomena of nature as illustrated by the course of the Sun in heaven and the changes of vegetation on the earth."

On these two features--identity of construction and conformity with nature--the entire fabric of ancient religious formulations, so far as they could be embalmed in literature or representation, was solidly based. But both these absolutely fundamental generic elements, indispensable for interpretation by later ages, fell out of the purview of the Christian mind. Both went into desuetude and oblivion. And the engines of persecution were turned against any group or individual who strove, under the impulsion of the spirit of truth and the spur of true knowledge, to restore them to their proper place at the corner of the temple of understanding.

And what becomes of the raucously insistent claims of this religious establishment to the sole uniqueness of all its creeds and dogmas in the face of this pronouncement from one of its three greatest witnesses and advocates in the whole second century, Justin Martyr? He tells the Romans that by

"declaring the Logos, the first-begotten of God, our Master Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin mother, without any human mixture, and to be crucified and dead, and to have risen again and ascended into heaven, we say no more than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove."

And can such an accredited item of fact in the descent of Christian doctrine from antecedent forms as the following from Massey be ignored? (Natural Genesis, 1-32.)

"But it is well known as a matter of history that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the early Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form of the worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior and so passed into the European ceremonial. We have, therefore, the Virgin Mary connected by linear succession and descent with that remote zodiacal cluster in the sky." (Referring to the constellation Virgo.)

Here one sees a bit of the part played by the second element pointed out by Carpenter just now, the association and vital kinship between ancient religious types and external nature.

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Again this feature is brought out in strong light when we consider that late summer festival known as the Assumption of the Virgin, a cardinal institute of the Catholic Church and still noticed by the Anglican and some Protestant bodies, though apparently in complete innocence of its signification! To typify the reabsorption of primal matter, the "virgin" substance, the first pure mother of life, back into the all-capacious bosom of cosmic being at the end of the cycle of manifestation or creation, the sagacious ancient seers fell back upon that demonstration of nature's energies which is the phenomenon of the physical order at the very end of the yearly cycle of the sun, when the luminary has returned to the heights of heaven after its wintry immersion in the round of "death" and limitation in darkness. There is enough of suggestion and instruction in this one doctrine alone to illuminate the stolid mind of Christian dogmatism with a conception that would revolutionize the entire science of religious methodology. For the doctrine of the Assumption can have no rational resolution of meaning as long as the "virgin" is taken as a historical woman! Only as the type of matter in its first and "unpolluted" state of "virginity," allegorically considered, and standing as the figure of cosmic motherhood, can the Assumption dogma have not only sane signification, but any acceptation at all. The hollowness and total fatuity of thinking that the woman Mary was absorbed into the August skies must be apparent to any person who still retains normal faculty. Yet nature shows us every summer, in the Dog Days (the helical rising of the great Dog-star Sirius) how water-vapor, the natural symbol of virgin matter, is absorbed into the capacious expanse of the heated air and the solar rays. The ancient conception was the reabsorption of the virgin matter (Latin mater, mother) "into the rays of her own Son" (Sun). Here is sense and sanity; the other way leads to nonsense and insanity. Such wreckage of high typings of truth has Christianity foisted upon the world as its surpassing wisdom.

Perhaps this is the place to inject that rebuke and censure that Christian interpretative theology so roundly has earned by its age-long obtuseness, incapacity and recalcitrancy in respect to the perfectly obvious implications of comparative religion study. How the completely conclusive case for the uniformity of the myths of all lands, their descent from a common mental origin and their unanimity in proclaiming the same one body of high truth could have been ignored in spite of evidence that is more than overwhelming to every honest mind that has ever looked broadly over the field, is a thing that seems

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past comprehension. The conclusion is obvious that there has been present and in ceaseless play a force of deliberate obduracy adequate to achieve the determined stand against recognition of a situation that would be subversive of organic religion if honestly recognized. But the spectacle of the suppression of truth and fact is not pleasant. Sooner or later sincerity must force the issue.

And what would be the challenge to both intellect and conscience in Christendom as they confront the picture of Prometheus, the first and greatest benefactor of mankind, nailed by the hands and feet, and with arms extended, on the rocks of Mt. Caucasus, with the sobering reflection that beyond question Prometheus (Forethought, the primeval Idea), with his brother Epimetheus (Afterthought, or the manifest universe), can not be taken as living historical persons? When it is clearly seen that the continued ignoring of these items of comparative religion lead to the stultification instead of the edification of humans, one must ask how long the stubborn obstinacy generated by the fear of what such data could do to pious religious legends turned to "history" is going to continue.

Then there is a doctrine which, if it had not fallen quite into oblivion in the Christian system, would likewise trace its origin incontrovertibly to ancient Pagan forms,--the doctrine of the dismemberment of the god or the Christ node of mind upon its descent into the human flesh. As the Titans tore the body of Bacchus into fragments--later to be united again by Apollo--and the evil power of Sut dismembered the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces--to be reconstituted by Thoth "whole and entire"--so the Christ, breaking a loaf, intimated that his (spiritual) body, too, was "broken" for us, and that we in the unity of the reconstituted wholeness of our divine principle were to bring a "re-membrance" of his dismantled nature; since we are all members of his one body, and in re-membering or re-collecting our own scattered segments we resurrect him.

Edward Carpenter goes into the matter of the long-previous hope of the nations of antiquity of the coming of the Messiah-Savior. He enlarges on the item by saying that this doctrine, which is commonly believed to be distinctive of Christianity and Judaism, "comes down from the remotest times, and perhaps every country in the world. The Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah emptied themselves into the Christian teachings."

So reliable an authority as Papias emphatically declares that the Christian Gospels were founded on and originated in the Logia, or

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sayings of the Lord, remnants of such Logia having been found quite apart from any inclusion in the Gospels. Massey connects Matthew with the Egyptian Mati, or utterances of truth by the goddess of the balance, Maat; also with muthoi (mythoi), as the etymological ground of "myth" and "mythology." The Greek meta also, he avers, is cognate with Maat, since Mati in Egyptian means that perfect measure of balance between right and wrong which becomes the eventual definition of right and true. Utterances are not true unless they express this exact measure of the equilibrium between higher and lower, spiritual and material, on the line of which boundary normal evolution can alone advance.

How Christianity has spread abroad the claim that it has offered to humanity the assurance of resurrection for the souls of the deceased from the grave of rock or of earth by having based its very existence on the fact of a corporeal resurrection of the divine-human Son of God, is well known. It has staked its all upon this feature; for, says Paul, "if Christ be not risen, then is our faith vain." But again derivation and not origination of a new fact never demonstrated before, but now based on a historical reality, is indicated by the massed data of comparative religion. The soul's "death" in incarnation and its resurrection from this "death" on the cross of matter, had been memorialized in ancient systems from a distant past. The ancient Egyptian, no less than his late Christian copyist, had the assurance that he would rise from this death on the cross of incarnation, because the myths and rituals had represented Osiris as rising anew to life from his dismembered and deadened condition under the limitations of the flesh. And what the Egyptian knew that his Christian imitator did not, was that the Osiris whose death and resurrection were thus portrayed was the divine element within his own constitution and not a man perishing on a wooden cross and pushing away a rock from his hillside tomb two days later.

This same cross on which the Christian believed his personal Master had groaned in physical anguish had been an emblem in nearly every religion of the world for ages past.

Is it to be taken without significant implications that the founder of Christian theology, Augustine, naively confesses that it was by mean of the Platonic system that he was enabled to understand properly the great doctrine of the Trinity, which became the bone of contention between two split sections of the Church and threatened to rend it in pieces for over two hundred years? It is hardly questionable that

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there is almost no clear and specific comprehension of this mystery dogma in Christian minds today, the true elucidation of it having been made impossible by the rejection of all Platonic philosophy in the third century, and the keys having been lost by the time Plato's Timaeus was later made the manual for a deeper survey of Christian doctrine. And the Church stands in the anomalous and ridiculous position of having to go back and call upon the resources of a system she has spurned in order to find the light to clarify her own doctrines.

Justin Martyr also had come into Christianity with the enlightenment that he had derived from Platonism. It is superfluous to mention Pantaenus, Clement, Origen, who brought to Christian exposition the luminous principles they had gleaned from Philo's work, who in turn was revitalizing more ancient wisdom in a syncretism of its profoundest expressions from Egypt and Greece with the Mosaic stream.

What becomes of the Christian claim that it alone--if the Hebrew antecedents are comprehended in its system--gave the world the conception of Monotheism, when Budge, the great authority on Egyptian studies, can write (Introduction to the Book of the Dead, xciv) this sentence?

"At all events the One God of the Egyptians possessed all the essential attributes of the Christian God."

And what possibilities of a needed rectification in conventional views as to the "primitive" origin of tribal religions, which it is the Christian and general academic custom to scan with the condescending interest of an entomologist studying an insect, might be opened up if the full involvements of the following passage from Budge's other great work, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (Vol. II, p. 201), were given their due meed of attention:

"Wherever we find fetishism it seems to be a corruption or modification of some former system of worship rather than the result of a primitive faith . . . the people might forget the doctrine, and their ancestral figures, amulets, etc., would then degenerate into fetishes; authorities on modern African religions tell us that this is exactly what has taken place among the peoples of West Africa."

And this tell-tale excerpt is strengthened by the testimony of a Col. Ellis who states that there is more fetishism among the Negroes of the West Indies who have been Christianized for more than half a century than there is among those of West Africa; for side by side

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with the newly implanted Christianity have lingered the old superstitions, whose true import has been forgotten or corrupted.

How close this analysis comes to fitting, or in fact being a true description of, Christianity itself this work may possibly establish. If there is one thing that can be predicated and sustained by multitudinous evidences, it is that Christianity is a system of doctrines so contorted from original sense to outrageous illogicality that they are properly described as superstitions whose once truly apprehended import has become lost or corrupted.

If Massey is not penning a madman's ravings, what is to be done about the truth of such a disclosure as is contained in the following from his The Natural Genesis (Vol. II, p. 378)?

"The Revelation assigned to John the Divine is the Christian form of the Mithraic Revelation. In the Parsee sacred books the original Scriptures are always quoted and referred to as the 'Revelation.' . . . And the Bahman Yasht contains the same drama of mystery that is drawn out and magnified in the book of Revelation. . . . The personages, scenes, circumstances and transactions are identical in both. Each revelation relates to the Kronian allegory and in both the prophecy is solely astronomical."

The God Agni of the Hindu system is sevenfold in constitution. Does this hold any menace to the Christian scheme? Only if that scheme persists in claiming that it presented formulas of truth never known or understood before. Nearly every deity of Pagan religions was described as a Oneness (Monotheism) manifesting seven distinctive creative forces, like white light and its seven segmentations of color. Christianity chants its seven Archangels before the throne of God, but hesitates to give them proper place and importance in its scheme, lest it take even half a step toward polytheism. That these were the seven primary differentiations of the first Oneness is scarcely understood in Christian circles even today. And that these seven physically creative powers, called in all old religions the Seven Elementaries, when united in operation, as they are in man's own constitution as in the cosmos at large, with the Trinity of spiritual intelligences constituting the divine soul of life, give us the meaning at last of the Beast with seven heads and ten horns of Revelation, is still a dark mystery in Christian minds. Christianity must face the humiliation of turning back and learning what the despised Pagans knew if it is to redeem its own dogmas from sheer gibberish.

Scorning astrology as heathen superstition, it will have to scan the zodiac and re-learn the symbolism of Pisces and the star Fomalhaut,

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in the mouth of the Southern Fish constellation, and the River Eridanus (the Jordan) which flows out of this piscis vesica or fish's mouth and runs clear up to the feet of Orion, and which must be traversed or "crossed" by all souls to pass over the watery course of evolution from their birth out of matter up to their deification in and as Orion, the Christ, if it is to understand why its own Founder and Savior was called by the Greeks Ichthys (Greek, "fish"), the Divine Fish, and why the twelve disciples were "fishermen," and much more of its own detail in the Gospels.

How thoroughly early Christianism was dominated by its inheritance from Pagan influences is clearly shown by Massey's statement in The Natural Genesis that as late as the fifth century A.D. the Pope was compelled to rebuke the "pestiferous persuasion" of those Christians who kept on celebrating Christmas day not for the birth of Jesus Christ, but for the solstitial resurrection of the sun. As has been so often admitted by its proponents, Christianity was almost wholly unable to shake its converts loose from their hereditary or ancestral customs and traditions, and had to try as best it could to interpolate its doctrinal ideas into the frame of established and unchangeable usage, the inner purport of which, as in present-day Yuletide ritualism, actually belied or negated the very principles of the new faith. It is in reality not carrying the case too far to assert that in much of its ceremonial still adhering to it from Pagan custom Christianity dramatizes meanings virtually subversive of its own accepted beliefs.

The Egyptologist Wilkinson, commenting on the role of Osiris in the Egyptian religion, as matching that of Christ in the Christian, remarks on the similarities between the two, suggesting that one has no escape from thinking that the Egyptians were aware of the promises regarding the real Savior and had anticipated the event, writing of it as if it had already taken place and constituting it a part of their religious system. If these parallels are so extensive and challenging as to lead the mind of a scholar to so firm a conviction, the fact of their virtual identity should be given the weight due so significant a circumstance. Massey has listed so many of these correspondences that for him the case for the derivation of the later Christian from the earlier Egyptian was closed past all controversy. As the vast body of evidence he has assembled would close the case likewise for his readers, it was found necessary to derogate his work and permit it to gather dust on library shelves.

Von Mosheim, who obviously felt his obligation to give the truth

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as investigation brought it to light, says that the monks of early Christianity, first appearing in Egypt, seem to have taken as their models of the monastic life the Essenes, the practical mystics of the Judean nation for many centuries.

"Indeed," he says, "the account given us by Josephus of the latter corresponds so exactly with the institutions and habits of the early votaries of monachism that it is impossible for any two things more nearly to resemble each other."

Even in another not too praiseworthy feature that has received scant notice in the histories the Pagans were copied. Says Mosheim (History, Vol. I, p. 110):

"Since it has been pretty clearly ascertained that the same spirit of vainglory which prompted ancient nations to pronounce themselves the offspring of the soil, or the descendants of the gods, found its way into the churches of Christ and induced many of them to suppress the truth and claim for themselves a more illustrious origin than in reality belonged to them."

And this historian gives the position of one of the Christian religion's greatest early Fathers, Clement of Alexandria. This renowned and learned Christian teacher says (Stromata I, cap. 1, p. 326) that he would not hand down Christian truth pure and unmixed, but "associated with or rather veiled by and shrouded under the precepts of philosophy." He even says that the basic archai of the Christ's teachings lay hid in the philosophy of the Greeks, as the edible part of the nut lies concealed within the shell. He has convinced himself that the essence of the Greek philosophy was sound, wholesome and salutary, perfectly accordant with Christian wisdom. He even goes so far as to say that the Greek system had emanated from the same divine source as had the Christian and, coming earlier, had constituted the basis of the doctrine later reissued by the Christ.

If this view, shared by his even more illustrious pupil Origen, was the intelligent and surely well-grounded conclusion of this most brilliant duo of the Christian Fathers, there is warrant for asking why this luminous understanding was permitted to go into oblivion. Was it a thing too dangerous to later pretensions? Did such truth demand suppression? What could have made the revelation of this kinship of Christian faith with Greek philosophy so perilous that it dared not be allowed to become common knowledge?

Origen was fully persuaded that the wisdom proclaimed by Christ

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was based upon Greek philosophy and that all Christian doctrines might be explained and vindicated by that philosophy. He even sanguinely hoped for a combination of Hellenic philosophy with Christianity. He did his part toward this laudable end by "introducing the whole of the Academy into the Church," as Bacon puts it.

Origen had here caught the view that has been recaptured now and again by men of consecrated intelligence bent on finding truth, apart from ecclesiastical pressure to condition it. In the bright flash of such insight, vouchsafed only after years of recondite study, the vision of truth discloses at last that not only might the keys supplied by the "divine philosophy" of the Orphic-Hermetic system serve to open the Scriptures to an infinitely clearer intelligibility than can be gleaned without them, but that these keys, picked up again out of the archaic presentations, being in nature astrological, symbolic, mythic, allegorical, numerological, are in fact the indispensable semantic cipher code by which alone the deeper cryptic sense of the Scriptures can be recovered at all. This recognition is that extra final reluctant step that Christian systematism must take if it is to restore its discredited Bible to its true place of power over the modern mind.

It is certainly a matter of pointed significance in the estimate of Christian origins to consider that Origen, as Mosheim says,

"did not aim to overthrow the ancient and simple religion of the previous ages, which he himself taught and recommended; but he wished the supervisors and doctors of the Christian Church to have a more profound knowledge, and to be able, when occasion required it, to explain rationally that simple religion."

One can feel this high-minded Patristic's inward struggle as he wrestled with the problem of how to convey esoteric and always semi-mystical sense of the deep Scriptures he labored over so industriously to the less capable minds of the Christian converts. The deep instructive power of the picture should not be lost on Christian thought: here was a Christian, and the most profoundly learned of all, hoping to enlighten Christian ignorance with the rays of a knowledge that on his part was wholly Pagan! The ordinary Christian of today would be bewildered by the implications of this picture; he would not understand why it was not a Christian trying to enlighten Pagans with Christian material.

Grethenbach in a work called A Secular View of the Gospels, comments on the fact that at the close of Jesus' ministry, after all his

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mighty "signs and wonders," the number of followers attached to him was just one hundred and twenty. Were the number to be multiplied by ten, by one hundred, even by ten thousand, "one might still be left in amazement at the signal failure of a divine personage to impress itself on a contemporary people; and this, too, in an age when credulity was co-extensive with ignorance, and among a people willing for and expectant of divine interposition."

This can be matched by what Gibbon (and others) has commented on as so odd a circumstance as to throw doubt on the historicity of the events recorded in the Gospels,--the fact that of the series of preternatural occurrences, such as the three hours of darkness over the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour, the earthquakes and even the rending of the veil of the temple at the Savior's crucifixion, not a single mention of any of them has ever been found recorded in the books of the historians or any other persons of the age. The supposed "biography" of Jesus runs, as a phenomenon, precisely counter to that of all known historical characters: generally the record made at the very time the personage lived is authentic, full and clear, and only grows dim and legendary in the centuries following his day. With Jesus it is precisely the reverse: the record made at the time of his life is not only dim and legendary; it practically is non-existent. Nearly two centuries elapse before, so to say, the character appears on the stage in a history that has to be made retroactive to place him at the time alleged for his career. Even the four Gospels selected finally as canonical, which allegedly were written somewhere in the latter part of the first century, do not come out into general use so as to be quoted in early Christian writings until near the beginning of the third century. The age in which he lived was totally silent about his existence, in spite of the cited facts that after his miracles thousands excitedly followed him and five-thousands believed and were converted. How could it be that none of these throngs of grateful and awe-struck people ever wrote letters to friends recounting the miracles or left some literary survival of the events? Only after some two whole centuries does this wonderman and his wonder-life emerge from oblivion and then only within the limits of a narrow sectarian group. Events such as he participated in would have made him the most widely heralded figure in centuries.

There is nothing in this situation to suggest that we are here dealing with an authentic historical character, for the presentment breaks down with every historical test and tradition. There are hundreds of points which militate against its being history. We have to face the fact that

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a character, under various names, Bacchus, Dionysus, Tammuz, Izdubar, Mithra, Witoba, Krishna, or Horus, and standing almost as an exact counterpart or model of the Jesus personage, was already extant in the religious literature of many nations and that this figure was obviously made up into the historical man of flesh two hundred years after the period of his alleged existence. If this is history it defies all the natural and inexorable requirements and phenomena of true history.

And these "events" of his life did not fall in an age which was too illiterate, too far removed from literary activity or notice to have received adequate recording, considering the marvels alleged to have occurred. Indeed they "occurred" in an age which was exceptionally well marked for the notable work of historians, Jewish writers and the official records of the Roman government.

What would be advanced in explanation of the dearth of all literary notice of the man Jesus during his "life" and for close to two centuries following it? Only the series of theses presented in this work and in that of Massey, Higgins, Robertson, Drews, Smith, Brandes and others: that the figure was accreted out of the mythic dramatic types of the non-personal but ever-living Christ-man as divine principle coming into humanity as its Messianic Savior, and from that intellectualized form and pattern transformed by ignorant men into a living personage. Had he lived in fact, the age of his life would have carried the record; since it carried no such record, the inference is practically irrefragible that his later appearance in Christian literature was the outcome of a later reinterpretation of man for principle. This elucidation is supported by a thousand items of fact and of literature, by all the intimations of internal textual evidence and by the glaringly palpable features of this history itself. And finally it is the only conclusion completely compatible with that allegorical rendition of the esoteric purport of the great Scriptures on which the Western religion rests. For only the unqualified spiritual character of the Christ-Messiah figure which Paul preached--against fierce opposition from the Petrine wing--supplies the dialectical key to the wholly consistent interpretation of Scripture. A personal historical Savior incarnated in one mortal body, throws this interpretation into confusion. And to support itself it has to conjure up as its background and setting, its frame and accompaniment, a picture of assumed history that becomes chimerical, disjointed and whimsical, often preposterous, at every turn. And all these ill-fitting and immaterial accretions fall away and leave the structure clear

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and distinct, legible and intelligible, if the thesis of the historical man is not needlessly interjected to toss everything about in confusion.

Massey sums up all this contention in his statement in Ancient Egypt (Vol. I, p. 29) that any attempt to explain or structuralize the mythologies and religious systems of ancient nations, even of the forest tribes and denizens of the sea-isles, without resort to the nature forms and sage conceptions of the ancient Egyptians is doomed to abject failure.

But it is quite worth our while to look at the reaction of America's most eminent modern theologians to the suggestion of a thousand data like those here adduced, as an example of the complete ineptitude and apparent helplessness of mind of this age when confronted with the growing strength of the case for the non-historicity of the Nazarene. Says Shirley Jackson Case, of the University of Chicago Theological Seminary, in his work on the historicity of Jesus: if the earthly Jesus must go, how much more completely must any supposed reality of a supernatural Christ be abandoned!

As an example of twisted "logic" this declaration gains high rating. If the historical man-Christ must be let go from our theology, there would remain, he says, nothing substantial for Christian faith to build upon; man must then grope into the higher realms of mystical spirit to lay hold, if he can, on some sort of supposed "reality" in the form of a "supernatural Christ." Is it not at once obvious how completely a Christian theological mind must turn to belittle or negative even its own highest reaches of abstract conception when it is a case of discrediting a Pagan idea? Have not millions of pages in Christian books been written to postulate the reality of a supernatural Christ element with which man might inwardly coalesce his very being in rapturous rapport? Yet obviously in Case's thought, that reality is so unsubstantial, so impalpable, that Christians can not rely upon it, and must have a personal fleshly man-Savior to guarantee certitude for believers. In the finale, Christianity has put itself on record as maintaining the position that even if every son and daughter of humanity were inwardly possessed and transfigured by the Christ-light, there still is no reality to the presence of Christos in the world except as embodied in the person of the one historic Jesus! And this tacit imputation has opened the gates of tragedy for half the world.

How can the testimony of the great Egyptologist, Budge, be ignored which proclaims that a study of the texts of all periods proves the immemorial existence of the great fundamental religious ideas of the

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Egyptians from remotest times, and discovers among the most prominent and pivotal features of that archaic religion the doctrine of immortality and the belief in the resurrection of the (spiritual, not physical) body? What becomes of the claim for the originality of all Christian doctrinism in the face of a massive datum of this sort? And, affirms Budge, these mighty tomes of the ancient Egyptians

"cannot be the literary product of savages or negroes; there is no evidence to show that they are of Semitic origin, and the general testimony of their contents indicates an Asiatic home for their birthplace."

True Christianity had its roots in the earliest gift of divine spiritual science from gods to men in most distant periods. The claim of its total newness is the pretension of that arrant Christianism that supplanted it.

Yet what a revelation of degeneration of high mental concept into wrecking literalism is before us even in this statement from Budge! He makes it an inexpugnable fact that Christianity inherited its doctrine of the resurrection from the ancient Egyptians. But what a change has taken place in the substance of the doctrine in its passing into Christian hands! In that recension it emerges as the doctrine of "the resurrection of the body," as recited in Christian creeds, and this body has been accepted as the actual physical frame of the earthly man! Could any vitiation of lofty esoteric doctrinism be more completely wretched than this? The Egyptian concept never asserted the re-arising or restitution of the physical corpus (or corpse) of the defunct human. With Paul, it proclaimed the resurrection out of the flesh of the physically deceased of the soul of the man in its shining body of spiritual light. For it was, they averred, sown a natural body; and it was raised in or as a spiritual body. Paul could affirm that we have a psychic and a spiritual body, in addition to the natural physical one, because he had studied religious philosophy anciently derived from the Egyptians, who constituted man of seven distinct bodies, held together by radiant forces and affinities within the frame of the living mortal. The lower three separated at death; the higher four survived and could encompass embodiment on earth again. The latter doctrine also was incorporated in the highest strata of early Christian belief, but, as recorded, was ousted finally in the sixth century by the Second Council of Constantinople, the wording of the decree being: "Whosoever shall support the mythical doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul and the consequent wonderful opinion of its return, let him be anathema." If there is a reaction of indignant horror at the assertion that Christi-

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anity, in its form as Christianism, is a degenerated offspring from Egyptian religion, the challenge of this item of corrupted knowledge must be answered.

That Case could hold to his assumption of the proven historicity of Jesus in the face of some of his own adduced data of comparative religion is difficult to see. He tells of Joshua with his twelve helpers passing over Jordan and offering the Paschal Lamb on the farther shore; of Jason with his twelve companions seeking the Golden Fleece (Lamb symbolism); and mentions that all these stories were the myths of the sun's wandering through the twelve signs of the zodiac! Had he gone further into this exploration and found that all the groups of twelve from the twelve reapers in the Egyptian "harvest of Amenta," the twelve rowers or sailors with Horus in the lower ship, and the twelve companions of Ra in the Ship of the Sun; the twelve labors of Hercules; to the twelve knights around Arthur's table and still other such representations of the number, were nothing but allegorical depictions of the twelve powers of divine consciousness to be evolved in the human sphere of mind by the growth of the Christ nature in man, and this divine energy being symbolized by the sun with its power to give life and light to all creatures evolving out of darkness, he might have gained the insight to discern the non-historicity of the Gospel texts, built up on ancient allegorical foundations, particularly the astrological. His failure to espy this truth is all the more surprising in view of his saying that before Peter's time forms of pre-Christian Christianity were already in existence, not only in Palestine but also throughout the Diaspora. Also it is fairly incomprehensible when we hear him state that nature-myths personifying the winter's death and the vernal revival of life were common among the "heathen mythologies"; just as if the universal prevalence of this corn-myth could be dismissed as having had no relation to the Gospel death and resurrection of a Messianic Savior, when the similar portrayals of that Avataric denouement had already been outlined over the analogy of the natural seasonal course of the sun through wintry death to summer life again in its eternal cycles. He believes he is venturing far in stating that acquaintance with these forms of dramatization was "possible and even probable" on the part of the Jews, but reveals how shallow his knowledge of ancient comparative mythology is in saying that

"evidence that these notions formed an important part in the construction of the messianic hope is scanty. Certainly a mere collection of isolated points

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suggesting similarities of ideas is not sufficient proof of borrowing, particularly when the Jewish literature shows so little to confirm the suppositions."

What shall one say to this? What can one say save that the evidence he estimates as scanty is well-nigh voluminous in all Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek and even in the Gospel literature itself, and that if all this is a "mere collection of isolated points," then the house of Christianity rests on very frail foundations indeed. When in the aggregate of positive identities among scores of ancient religious fabrications to adumbrate truth he can see only "points suggesting similarities of ideas," the conclusion of scholars who have surveyed the almost limitless mass of such identities can only be that Case's observation of what there is to be seen has been myopic and imperfect indeed. When scholars are so fortunate as to uncover points suggesting similarities of ideas in diverse systems, they are usually ready to welcome them as significant clues and to follow them out to fulfilment of every intimation of importance. But this laudable instinct is non-operative when such pursuit threatens established Christian positions. In that case even a mass of most patently evidential material denoting positive identity of meaning throughout all ancient literature is to be dismissed with a slighting allusion to its scantiness. And it would, of course, never be taken into account by Christian champions that one reason for the "scantiness" of much of the Pagan literature is that it was fiendishly destroyed by Christian zealots haunted by terror inspired by the multiplying ghosts of their own teachings springing up all around them in the guise of Greek and Egyptian formulations.

Thus it has been the fashion of Christian defenders to brush aside with a sheer word assertion the evidences of Pagan origins of the faith, when the grounds for the factuality of these origins can be stoutly established by adequate examination and competent interpretative genius. Thus the Christian tradition has survived and thriven upon a determined neglect of honest critical evaluation of comparative religion material and an arrogant bluster of contemptuous reference to points in it which, if accorded full rating for their great significance, would prove menacing to settled positions and claims.

In The Relevance of the Prophets (p. 57) R. B. Y. Scott says that in Babylonian literature and to a greater extent in the Egyptian are to be found writings similar to the Hebrew prophetic records. Likewise there is much for any one to ponder over in such an extraordinary observation as that made by the renowned scholar Cumont when in

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his Die Mysterien des Mithra (p. 4), comparing Christianity and Mithrism, he writes:

"Both opponents perceived with astonishment how similar they were in many respects, without being able to account for the causes of this similarity."

But is this much different from the situation today when scores of sects and cults face each other across gulfs of prejudice and aloofness, yet manifest such similarities in fundamental principles that few could clearly express the points of difference? And almost no one could account historically for the near-similarity of their creeds. So Christianity stands as a whole in the same relation to other religions, expressing a vast quanta of similar tenets with them, yet unable to understand why there is this identity. The reason for this blindness is the widespread unfamiliarity with the truth of ancient religious history. Were the people at large more conversant with the true history of their religion instead of being hallucinated with a run of fables and persuasions, none of which are indeed true at all, let us imagine what would be the effect of the amended knowledge of just the one item that appears on a page of one of our note-books open before us, in which Kershner (Pioneers of Christian Thought, p. 68) makes the statement that "the Gnostics were the founders of Christian theology in the full sense of the word." With what astonishment this fact, which is provably true, would strike the minds of millions in the Christian establishment who, first, never heard of the Gnostics at all, and who, next, would have to be ostracized as heretics! And if then the newly enlightened church member, recovering from the shock of such an anomalous situation, should ask why he was never told of such predicaments in the life of his religion, what might be his final reaction when told that it has not for centuries been held for his good that he and other people should know about such unpalatable oddities and quirks of Christian history? And what might conceivably happen if all rational communicants of this religion should, in the democracy of general intelligence at last come to know of this and a hundred like idiosyncrasies of Christian history?

While Tertullian was calling the Greek philosophers "the patriarchs of the heretics," a greater Christian than he, Clement of Alexandria,

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in his catechetical school at the Egyptian city was providing the motive power of a great stream of Christian influence that flowed forth to irrigate the age when Christianity was forming its character. How many pew occupants today would know that Clement had been initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries; and that he writes: "I have eaten out of the drum, I have drunk out of the cymbal, I have carried the kernos, I have slipped into the chamber" in his initiations in these ancient brotherhoods?

What indeed must have been the scourge of base corruption that swept a movement among people of sincerity so far beneath the level of intelligence that it turned upon and denounced the work and the contribution of those men whose profounder genius and learning had alone given stability to an outcropping of pietistic fervor lacking any appeal to thinking people! It was from Alexandria that Canon Farrar says Christianity received a powerful impress. "It was the cradle of Christian theology."

And for these eminent services, which are generally agreed to have saved a wave of unintelligent pietism from quick extinction, the two eminent philosophers who made this contribution were rewarded with suspicion, denunciation and final repudiation and anathema. The point of vast significance in the matter is that these two eminent philosophers brought to Christianity from out their store of Pagan learning those principles of philosophy and a system having nothing in common with or generically related to the movement which without their accretions stood so deficient, so naked and bleak on its intellectual side that all men of mental culture held it in supreme contempt and derision.

But, comes the rejoinder, it was Paul who saved Christianity from a quick dissipation of its purely emotional energies amongst the rabble. Many writers have so declared. To the considerable degree to which this is true, the same reasoning applies as in the case of Clement and Origen, Philo, Ammonius Saccas and even Plotinus. Paul saved Christianity with the same philosophical resources that were brought to its aid from Alexandria. And he saved it from its own poverty with the wealth of philosophical wisdom that came from the same non-Christian world of thought, and that likewise bore no cognate relation to the Christianity of the Gospels, or the Apostolic religion that those Gospels generated. For Paul, be it said, gave no place to the Gospel biography of Jesus in his contribution to Christianity; he apparently never heard of Jesus as a living person, referring to the Lord Jesus Christ only as a spiritual principle in all men, and gave it no play or place in his

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majestic and truly Christian documents. If Paul, Clement, Origen and others saved Christianity from vanishing, they did it with Pagan philosophy.

It can readily be seen that the motive of a few eminent Pagan philosophers in uniting with the popular religious movement was an inclination to forfend it against its own wild propensities by instilling in it the light of their higher wisdom for its safer guidance and its ultimate benefit. They aimed to lend their better knowledge to a philosophically naked, barren, destitute, lean and hungry Christianity. And as is so frequently the case in such circumstance, the beneficiary, too abject to comprehend fully and appreciate adequately the boon extended, turned shortly and cast the princely gift in the dirt and trampled it underfoot, snapping at the hand that proffered it. We know how Clement and Origen were calumniated; Paul was kept at arm's length for some years after his adoption of the faith and sullenly tolerated, while rated as "Apostle of the heretics" by the whole Apostolic Petrine or Jerusalem nucleus of the orthodox party.

Barring the revival of Platonism by Dionysus the Areopagite and later by Erigena, this revolt against the Pauline Hellenism and Origen's introduction "of the whole of the Academy" into Christianity held the field until the Schoolmen in the tenth to twelfth centuries began to revive the Platonic and later the Aristotelian literature and apply it to the reconstruction of the faith on its intellectual side.

Remarkable indeed are the utterances on this crucial phase of Christian history by the writer of one of the most sagacious of all Christian histories, Dean Milman. He introduces the colossal figure of Paul into the story with the statement that

"to propagate Christianity in the enlightened West . . . to emancipate it from the trammels of Judaism, a man was wanting of large and more comprehensive views; of higher education and more liberal accomplishments. Such an instrument for its momentous scheme of benevolence to the human race Divine Providence found in Saul of Tarsus."

Late modern horror of war generated in Christian lands has thrown grave doubt over the claim that the spread and dominance of the Christianism of eighteen centuries is a scheme of benevolence engineered by Divine Providence, and not just a bad miscarriage of poor human intelligence, costing the world untold anguish for modest benefits. But Milman goes on to say that Paul's role in human history was to be so prodigious that "no event in Christian history . . . would

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so demand . . . the Divine intervention as the conversion of St. Paul." Milman will not allow us to construe it otherwise in human thought. "To doubt, in whatever manner it took place, the divine mission of Paul would be to discard all providential interposition in the design and propagation of Christianity." This all depends on the ultimate definition of "Divine" and "intervention." It raises the whole question of whether a divine mind interposes in special acts of fiat. Deistic thought regards all things as divine, but none in any special sense, or in dissociation from established laws of order and sequence. The mother bird bringing a worm to the mouth of the fledgling is divine, too, in most human thought.

At any rate "Paul was essentially necessary to the development of the Christian scheme," avers Milman. This is fine grist for our mill. But while the scholars blare this fact abroad, to extol the "Christian scheme," how little disposed they are at the same time to stand by the major concomitants of Paul's contribution, which consists of the Hellenic Theosophy and the cosmo-anthropological fundamentals of the great Pagan philosophies! And how little the Christians whom he immediately joined after the stoning of Stephen were prepared to welcome him into their fold is painfully evident also! Says Milman (p. 156):

"The Christians, far from welcoming so distinguished a proselyte, looked on him at first with natural mistrust and suspicion." "Even the apostles stood aloof." "Unquestionably it is remarkable how little encouragement Paul seems at first to have received from the party to join which he had sacrificed all his popularity with his countrymen, the favor of the supreme magistracy. . . . Barnabas alone espoused his cause, removed the timid suspicions of the apostles, and Paul was admitted into the reluctant Christian community." "But a new conspiracy again endangering his life, he was carried away by the care of his friends to Caesarea."

The stern opposition of Peter's faction to the true founder of the Christian Church is in print in the books, but the laity knows nothing of such items and blithely goes on believing that the great Apostle to the Gentiles, following his vision of light, was a devotee of the cult of the Nazarene and enthusiastically welcomed by his followers. The universally hailed apostolic promulgators of Christianity, believed to be saints of piercing insight into divine truth, stood ready to murder the man who came to them and eventually saved their ribald "system" from ignominy and oblivion! They are here revealed, by a great Christian historian, men of such boorish grossness that they would murder

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the first scholar who ventured to join their movement of rancor against learning and culture!

It becomes obvious that these philosophers did not join or countenance the Christian movement under any sense of need of its ministrations for themselves. In all likelihood they must have come in with the motive of contributing to it the elements that would supply its deficiencies, fill up its philosophical vacuum and as far as possible justify rationally its basic affirmations.

Guignebert goes the length of saying that Paul at first detested Apostolic Christianity. In a philosopher of his grade that would be understandable, especially when for some three years this group of enraptured enthusiasts held him off and eyed him askance. Then Barnabas broke down the impasse and Paul decided to visit the Jerusalem Christian colony.