CHAPTER XV

PAUL KNOWS NOT JESUS

The Church, says the historian, has never faced the implications of Paul's visit to Peter. The fact is, it has never faced the positive implications of Paul's contribution at all, seeing that Paul does not preach the Gospel message, but presents the magnificent conclusions of Hellenic-Egyptian esotericism, or spiritual philosophy having direct connection with prior Pagan systems and none at all with the cult based on Bethlehem and Calvary event. In fact, says Guignebert, Paul came to Jerusalem to meet the consecrated band of disciples there, to spend a fortnight with Peter and James, the brother of the Lord himself; and propounded such a Greek doctrine that he aroused a tumult and was forced to leave the city!

So far from his having based his preachment of the risen Christ upon the alleged veridical resurrection of the Galilean Jesus only a dozen years before he came to Jerusalem, Paul is affirmed by Guignebert to have drawn his theology of the death of the Savior from the several Hellenic Mysteries.

Commenting on Paul's visit with Peter in Jerusalem over fifteen days, Fisher (op. cit., p. 477) writes that this was indeed "a memorable visit, and a fact fraught with interest in its bearings on the evidences of Christianity." For these two men (assuming for the moment that it is actual personal history and not converted allegory we are here dealing with), as they faced each other, represented those two wings of the Christian influence that began their warfare with each other at this meeting and have prolonged it ever since. It is clash between the two most salient elements that manifest in the religious life of mankind: formal, fixed, authoritative, canonized and invested religious power on the one side, requiring only prescribed loyalty and routine observance; and on the other the free sweep of man's individual spirit in its aspiration to reach up to the divine above it or within it, unfettered by external supervision and needing no intermediary save its own

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bridge of intelligent communication. Fisher is right: the atmosphere of dissent that must have loomed thick in the room where these two met was ominous for Christianity, for the world. At any rate Paul came away from the fifteen days of what must have been a keenly dispiriting experience, filling his disciplined philosophical mind with dismay at the Petrine expressions of great doctrinal principles turned into unbelievable oddities of assumed "history," and with the solemn resolve to mention nothing about the Apostolic belief that the saving principle of life had come as a man. And what must have been the effect on Paul's mind of his meeting in person James, the very blood brother of the Logos of God and the Second Person of the Cosmic Trinity!

If this sounds next to blasphemous in its flouting of all traditional view, let us hear what Guignebert injects on the subject (p. 101), referring to Paul:

"Wholly indifferent to the Nazarene so dear to the Twelve, he resolved to know the Crucified alone, whom he would portray as a divine personality, in existence before the beginning of the world, a kind of incarnation of the Spirit of God, a 'celestial man' long retained in reserve, as it were, in heaven beside God, and at last come down to earth to institute a veritably new humanity, of which he would be the Adam."

There is instructive suggestion in Guignebert's saying that it was in the Syrian atmosphere that the first Gentile Christian communities were born and grew to influence. The very word Kurios, Lord, that figures so prominently in the New Testament, is not a Hebrew word, but comes from the Hellenic world in Asia Minor. Again the misinformed common belief of Christians everywhere that the faith of Christ spread from the Judean villages where multitudes witnessed the Christ's and then the Apostles' miracles of healing, and thence radiated out and made converts in all directions, must be sharply negatived and the real truth recorded. Not only were the "churches" found or spoken of as existing so early after the crucifixion and resurrection events in Jerusalem not the products of the missionary evangelization of either the twelve or the seventy, but it is close to a certainty that they were in existence in Syria and Asia Minor even before the climactic denouement of the Gospel scenario. There were communities not only of Essenes, but also of Nazarenes, Naasenes and Christians (Greek: Christianoi) in those countries before the founding of Christianity.

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There is but one rational and completely plausible explanation of this startling fact: these were associations, modeled more or less closely upon the pattern of the Essenes, of brethren instituted to lead the monastic-spiritual life under conditions of fellowship and abstraction from the world, and some had taken the name of "Christian" from the central motive of their organization, i.e., the cultivation of the Christos in the individual consciousness. They could have had no reference to or connection with the biographical eventualities of the Gospel Jesus, although these may have been in the venerable texts as the allegory of the Logos-Monad of spirit made flesh in all men, and typically personified in one dramatic figure, long antecedent to the first century. They would certainly have embodied the esoteric essence of Greek philosophy in their practice of the mystical life.

All this gains credence when taken with that significant fact given in the Acts that it was at Antioch that the believers or brethren were first called Christians. From this tell-tale datum it becomes apparent that another devoutly but falsely cherished belief of Christian people must be overthrown, to the further discomfiture of confident Christian persuasion. It is the accepted conviction that the Christian group took from the start the title of "Christian" from the man, Christ. Nothing could be more fallacious. The name, as Guignebert declares (with others), traces back to the Greek Christos, the Anointed, which had never in all previous time borne a reference to a historical personage, but only to a divine conscious mind coming to manifestation slowly in mankind or in human nature.

And now the relevant fact must be faced that it was not the adherents, even the inner circle of the followers of a man Christ, who gave themselves the title of cultivators of the inner Christos, or "Christians." The title emanated from groups of Syrian spiritualists, devoted to the cultus of the subjective Christ consciousness, with no intimation of allusion to the Founder of Christianity at all. The name arose among and was applied to communities of Hellenistic philosophico-religious cultism and was only later seized upon by the Jerusalem Jewish Messiah-enchanted religionists. Antioch must have been one of the most prominent and powerful of those centers of Hellenic philosophical interest.

Again there is the strongest sort of hint that the view here enunciated is close to the truth, in a statement made by Fisher (op. cit., p. 479), since it describes precisely what would be expected to be the

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reaction of the Apostolic party in Judea upon their learning of these Graeco-Christian (but, so to say, not Jesus-Christian) "churches" flourishing over in Syria:

"The surprising growth of the Gentile Church at Antioch could not fail to excite the attention and awaken misgivings. There the disciples first began to be called Christians, and properly, for there they first became Christians in the full sense--a body distinguished from the Jews. Before, they had called one another 'brethren' and had been termed by their enemies, by way of opprobrium, Nazarenes, Galileans or Ebionites. It was natural that anxieties should arise at Jerusalem when the Jewish Christians saw the rapid progress of the Gentile Church in the flourishing capital of Roman Asia."

But there is more here than meets the eye or reaches the mind of the reader. Fisher's analysis may not be the basically correct one. He makes the cause of the Christian mistrust and concern over the strong growth of their own religion at Antioch a matter of a clash of sentiment on the part of Jewish Christians between their loyalty to a purely Jewish Christianity and their misgivings about a Gentile upsurge of Christianity. This logically implies that they were all for Christianity as long as it was of a Jewish cast, but distrustful of it when taken up by the Gentiles. But this presents anomalies in the situation which Christian analysts would not like to face, if not indeed fundamental absurdities. Reason would seem to deduce from this the rather unwelcome conclusion that, if Judaic Christianity was to the founding group of the faith the one true and revealed religion, but that Gentile Christianity was to be viewed with misgiving, then Christianity was more Judaism than it was Christianity.

One of the most salient points in the platform of early Christianity was that it was to transcend all national, racial and creedal bounds and be preached to all nations as the one true faith supreme over all and transcending all. What, then, if this was the spirit and understanding of the original propagating group who had (presumably) heard Jesus command them to go into all the world and preach the tidings of great joy over the coming of the Kingdom of God to all nations, should have been to them the cause of apprehension and misgiving over the good news that the great city of Antioch had come up with a powerful congregation of Christians? What could have been lurking deep in the minds of the Apostolic religionists at Jerusalem that made them fearful of the church at Antioch? Either they had not at all caught the spirit of universality for their fanatically cherished new faith, and did not

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either expect, hope or dream of propagating a flame of religious unction that would sweep over a third of the earth; or they felt that what was springing up to such rapid growth over in Antioch was not the same thing as they were committed to. Out there in Syria, they heard, was a strong and advancing cultism which had taken the Greek name of Christianoi. It had philosophical and esoteric backgrounds and a spiritual mystical character. Could the Lord Jesus Christ they spoke of be an incarnation of God in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, or might he be put forth as only the spirit of truth and love, an abstract principle? Could the Antioch movement be welcomed into the fold of the incarnated and crucified Christ?

There are no doubt particular circumstances that condition the attitude of hesitation and suspicion at Jerusalem; but the fact still looms large and glaring that the spread of their cult at Antioch was none too welcome to the first propagators of the faith. This is a predicament that needs more than a merely Jewish explanation. It militates decidedly against the presumption that the founding group began their evangelizing work with the broad motive of breaking through all local or national religionism and going out to spread a pristine new gospel over all the world. It indicates that their aims were narrowly restricted to elements inbound with Jewish or at any rate a limited purview of religious interest. Why should not the Christians who were launching a new world faith rejoice unreservedly at the news that their program was gaining converts in a neighboring land? There is but one conclusion to be reached, which is that their reluctance to receive Paul, a Hellenistic philosopher, and to be joyous over the rising tide of Christianity at Antioch were due to one and the same cause--their knowledge that the Syrian brand of Christianity was by no means the same thing they were ebullient with zeal about.

The outcome clearly pointed to in this analysis is that, in so far as the alleged Gospel events furnished the first impetus to the Christian movement, that movement was nothing more than an outbreak of emotional fervor of a heavy pietistic tinge on the part of common Jewish folk who mistook the Messianic allegorism, spiritual prophecy and the divine Israelitish mission for historic reality in the objective literal sense and, being wrought up to a pitch of frenzy over the realistic immediacy of the events so prophesied, preached this body of convictions with such force and unction that they inaugurated a sweeping popular agitation, all the more durable among the illiterate because of the element of literalism that gave it apparent substantiality, while it

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increased its power to hypnotize uncritical minds. Philosophers are mentally critical and emotionally placid; they therefore despised the violent swing of uncritical irrational pietism; they both scorned the tide of faith and held aloof from it. Hence they were at once its enemies and its targets of hostility.

From Guignebert (op. cit., p. 87) we have this pertinent allusion to what is here under discussion. Speaking of Paul, he says:

"Since apparently he did not create, even if he was able to improve upon, those ideas peculiar to himself, the assumption is warranted that he found them outside the Apostolic Christian circle of ideas, and this could be only in a Hellenic community. It is most probable that Antioch was the one."

It is pretty substantially established on these grounds, then, that Christianity was not so much, or not at all, the product of a new cycle of either historical occurrences or revealed truths centered about or emanating from a unique character in the flesh, who came from heaven and, flouting all antecedent religious development, proclaimed all afresh out of cosmic wisdom the one first universal code of truth. What it appears truly to have been was a singular aberration of religious fanaticism springing up in the popular form it took from the conditions of the times, the locale and the distinctive qualities of mental development and status of prevalent belief, of those amongst whom the ferment originated. It arose from the play of mental-emotional forces charactered by the Jewish background of Mosaic and Messianic preachment, and then twisted into a new mésalliance and a misshapen configuration by the fantastic outcome of gross misconception of high truth which had become traduced from metaphysical reference to absurd and impossible local event. It had its origination and its motivation not from the alleged veridical events of the Gospel narrative, but from the unconscionable contortions of divine ideas given to man by deific intelligence, into the freakish predications of allegory wrenched awry into supposed history. It thus sprang, like Athena from Jove's forehead, from the fanciful hypostatization of a structure of ideal and metaphysical truths conceived in the perfervid regions of deluded belief.

Neglected and slandered as he has been, Massey is still right; he is the one investigator who on this matter of Christian origins is completely right. He had been overwhelmed with the volume and clear intimations of the evidence; Christianity arose out of the fervor that was generated by the mental disorder that ensued among the ignorant of the Roman Empire when magnificent spiritual allegory, ritualistic

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dramatism and symbol language were mistaken for human history. The entification of a whole assumed cycle of historical events out of the sacred allegories in the minds of deluded devotees provided the alleged factual foundation for the ferment. It rests on no other ground.

Is this lèse majesté against the sacred truth? Could Massey alone be right and billions of Christians be wrong? Impossible, preposterous, unthinkable, is the uprush of all reaction to the suggestion.

Yet--Paul was on the scene of the crucifixion and resurrection within a few years of those events--if they were events--and a little later passed two weeks with Peter and the Lord's brother; and in all his fervid writing and exhortation to the churches of the religion ostensibly founded by this personage, it is as if to him these things had never been. The life of Jesus had nothing to do, played no part, was of no consequence, in Paul's Christianity. His Christianity rested upon those foundations on which the rising church at Antioch rested, not on the events of the Gospel narrative. His Christianity was a non-Judean Christianity, Greek and philosophical, mystical and allegorical, which was the Christianity that caused alarm and opposition when its resurgence at Antioch was announced to the little group of unintelligent devotees in Jerusalem. And this spiritual Christianity flourishing at Antioch was a Christianity that was to be known in history as "the heresy of Antioch." What does this announce but that to the fanatical deluded emotionalists at Jerusalem true Christianity was the heresy, and an utterly warped and irrational substitute was the true Christianity? And what has it meant to two millennia of human struggle in mental darkness that this misjudgment of the fishermen and their companions in delusion as to true and false Christianity has been the acceptance also of the mind of the Western world ever since?

In fact there is not one iota of evidence in Paul's fifteen letters in the canon that he is writing to churches that were built upon the premises of the Christianity of the Gospels. He is clearly writing to groups propagating the spiritual-mystic esoteric philosophy of the Greek systems of that culture in which he had been reared. His terms, as has often been noted, are those that were current coin in the Egypto-Hellenic Mysteries. His Lord Jesus Christ, even when he says "this Jesus whom we have seen," is not a man of flesh, but a divine radiation of light in consciousness. For Paul had never seen any physical Galilean Christ Jesus, but only the flashing light of an inner mystical illumination.

We have seen that one of the names by which the "brethren" were

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designated by those who held them in derision, before they won the name of "Christians," was the Ebionites. From any Encyclopedia we learn that these were a sect of Jewish Christians who were close to the original band of Palestinian Christians. It is not odd that Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Tertullian describe them as hostile to Paul. They are also described by Epiphanius as strongly tinctured with "Essene peculiarities." Origen, however, distinguishes two sects of Ebionites, the one accepting, the other rejecting, the miraculous birth of Jesus from the Virgin. The more rigidly orthodox faction, as was to be expected, were of that remnant of the Judaizing party that had persistently attacked the doctrine and person of the Apostle to the Gentiles. This is additional testimony to the fact that Paul was out of favor among the group nearest to the apostles and disciples at Jerusalem.

Cerinthus was the most prominent among the groups of those Christians who, fleeing in the year 70 A.D. from the destruction of Jerusalem eastward to the Trans-Jordan, came in touch with the Essene monastery colonies in that region and effected a union of Christian ideas with the principles of the Essenes. The group known as the Elkasites (Elchesaits) were the product of this amalgamation. This datum is worth noting as evidence of how Christianity was acted upon and modified by surrounding influences. Additional evidence of the correctness of our analysis is that, as Fisher says, the theology of the second century Christian, Justin Martyr, "is thoroughly repugnant to Ebionism." There was too much of the Gnostic strain, so soon to be purged out of the orthodox body, in a Christianity influenced toward Essenism.

That Christianity is, as here claimed, a pitiful aberration of misconceived Judaism is evident from a thousand sources, and is testified to, tacitly at any rate, by hundreds of writers. Says Fisher (op. cit., p. 469):

"Christianity was born of Judaism: it was the offspring of Old Testament Religion."

This indubitable fact then casts the shadow of grave suspicion over the truth of the claims that Jesus established a wholly new religion, overriding all local bounds of traditional Jewish ecclesiasticism, to become a vast universal faith. That this claim is made and commonly accepted, in spite of much hedging and compromising with its outright factuality, is certified by a sentence from Milman's great history (p. 158):

"Nothing is more remarkable than to see the horizon of the apostles gradually receding and, instead of resting on the borders of the Holy Land,

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comprehending at length the whole world; barrier after barrier having fallen down before the superior wisdom which was infused into their minds; first the proselytes of the gate, the foreign conformists to Judaism and, ere long, the Gentiles themselves admitted within the pale; until Christianity stood forth, demanded the homage and promised its rewards to the faith of the whole human race; proclaiming itself in language which the world had as yet never heard, the one, true, universal religion."

This passage could well be made the subject of a whole chapter of discussion. Considered for what it asserts that is not true at all, being sheer bombast; for what it admits that, when seen in proper perspective, is very unfavorable to Christianity; and for what it presents of elements of self-contradiction, it is indeed a very remarkable paragraph. It admits first that the disciples had not started their movement from the motives of compliance with Jesus' command to preach his gospel to all nations,--although all narrow cultists are invariably persuaded it is their heaven-ordered duty to impose their particular strain of religionism upon all humanity--the bane incidentally of most religion. It confesses they had a very limited prospective view of their faith. That view, he says, gradually widened, driving back the narrow horizons, Jews first, then Gentiles, then the whole world, to feel the sweep of their fantastic ambitions.

And then Milman well says that Christianity stood forth and proclaimed in language the world had never yet heard that it was the one true universal religion. Christian thought, it is to be feared, has never yet realized how terribly, how incredibly true Milman's burst of magniloquence in this sentence really is. The ghastly truth it is that never before had the world been called upon to witness, or to hear, such a proclamation of blind ignorant zealotry. Again and again, indeed almost continually, the world has to look upon religious parties, small bands of sectarian cultists, made heady as with new wine by the experience of some type of psycho-spiritualist manifestations, stand forth proclaiming that they have contacted the main line of divine voltage from the dynamo of God. And again and again the world has had to watch barrier after barrier of good sense and intelligence fall away before these movements as thousands follow the swelling tide of credulous infatuation. This tragedy is constantly being reenacted. But alas! Milman is not right when he says that these barriers fell "before the superior wisdom which was infused into their minds" by the revelations of a divine man. It is now proven beyond cavil that the divine man uttered not a single true word that was not

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in the Jewish-Graeco-Egyptian-Gnostic-Christian books long antedating his period. What they took for a flashing new revelation was--as they so soon found to their confusion and dismay--just the old esoteric wisdom, which they at once transformed in their pitiably incompetent intellects into frenzy-breeding literal history. The barriers, the natural or cultural safeguards with which God has endeavored to shield man against his own too ready gullibility, did not succumb in the case of the apostles to "superior wisdom," it must at last be said. They were burned away by the excess of fiery zeal that swept in like a prairie or woodland blaze, under the force of persuasions that in others were restrained and moderated by some balance of philosophical understanding. But the Christian disciples hated philosophy. Therefore they had not the salutary benefit of its rational modulators.

Time and again a sectarian group has stood forth and demanded the homage and promised its rewards to the faith of the whole human race. It is being glaringly repeated at this age as often before. Milman, with the centuries of Christian history under his eye as a fait accompli to lend sanction to his reconstruction of the prophetic vision of the apostles,--an instance of how the reconstruction of Christian history is colored by modern imagination--subtly casts in the assumption that this was the one instance in which the sectarian group in question offered in reality the one true universal religion. The gem of precious assumption thus slyly dropped into our intellectual treasure-box by Milman is that these illiterate fishermen had fully, clearly, with the highest and the profoundest intellectual rationalism, comprehended the whole system of supernal wisdom as none had ever comprehended it before; and therefore he can place them as standing before the world with this lamp of truth to demand its homage and offer its gleaming rewards.

Out of all this discussion should emerge the sane conclusion that the matter of supreme importance is the verdict to be arrived at as to why this one proclamation of narrow religious sectarianism succeeded to such a prodigious extent, while hundreds of more or less similar effusions of pietistic zealotry did not. The answer to that question is the one thing of transcendent moment to the future of the human race. That crucial knowledge is what this work is aimed to establish, on the strength of irrefragible data. The presentation of that body of data demands much space. But the matter adduced so far points to the major element in the answer, the prime fact that the legend of Messiah's coming had finally been materialized in human history and

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fulfilled in the birth and life of a personal Savior, and that the Scriptures were converted from a metaphysical realm of reference to external occurrence in order to uphold this interpretation, all of which directly and powerfully challenged the interest and seduced the loyalty of the lower masses.

But the very pertinent question also arises: if Christianity grew out of Jewish roots, why did Judaism repudiate it? Here is the nub indeed. Obviously they did not accept it for the very good reason that its announced Messiah had not come in the form and manner at all congruous with their ideas. Except probably among the most crudely ignorant, they were not prepared to receive the Divine Avatar or Messiah in the low character and status of a mere mortal man. This description demeaned their loftier conception of Deity's epiphany on earth to a nadir of concreteness impossible for them to accept. They could not endorse the embodiment of the second person of the Cosmic Trinity and an Aeon of the Supreme God coequal with him from the foundation of the world, in the fleshly person of a Galilean carpenter. The intelligent Hebrew would want to know how such powers of cosmic range could be housed in a single body of mortal decay. They were not prepared to look for the Logos to come walking through the streets of their villages.

What the instructed Jew was looking for in the Messiah tradition was the coming into the world of the universal spirit of divine wisdom and power, truth and righteousness, first developed to dynamic expression through their theocratic Israelitic kingdom and from them being disseminated throughout all the world. Naturally he was taken aback by the sudden announcement that Messiah had already come in the form and person of a given man in Galilee. If one has defined the word Messiah as a spirit of unified law and love animating or to animate all human beings, he will not welcome the proclamation of his presence in one single individual. It is important to recall here Guignebert's succinct statement that a Hebrew mind could not countenance the thought of the ineffable majesty of the Godhead, so sacred that he feared even to pronounce its Jehovistic name, being "enclosed within the narrow confines of a human body."

Our work could well stop with this note and make it the culminating point of the exegesis. For it strikes the key that correctly sounds forth the consummate thesis of the dissertation. If Milman can work his mind to a pitch of rhapsodic intoxication over the conception that the half-demented band of Palestine zealots were offering to the world

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its first true and universal religion, he does so in complete disregard of the sobering fact that this all-highest religion was offered to mankind on the terms of a predication which itself contradicted, flouted and outrageously demeaned one of the most sacred considerations of all wise sages of a glorious antiquity. All astute philosophy has agreed that to localize supreme Deity in a given concretion, even to define it in terms of human conception, is to defame it. How strongly, then, a philosophic mind would derogate the religion that presented the whole majestic Being of the Godhead in the pitiably feeble scope of expression offered by a human body! So that this surpassing boon of a true and universal religion that Milman, in a grandiose flourish of rhetoric, says Christianity first proffered to the human race, was not only not a true religion at all, but on the contrary, that which it offered as its supreme blessing, the incarnation of Messiah in one man of flesh, was itself a conception that had been endlessly scrutinized before and rejected as a base hypothesis infinitely dishonoring to the Ineffable Supreme. In brief, it is the staggering truth that the central and pivotal proposition advanced by Christianity, the one that carried its appeal with winning force to the millions of uncritical minds everywhere, was a tenet of religious speculation long regarded as so infamous and defamatory of the Godhead that a respectful silence was tacitly imposed on human thought and inquiry with respect to it. To suggest to philosophers that this unthinkable majesty of Being could not only be named, but also incorporated in the confines of a single human body, was a thought horrendous beyond belief. Could anything, then, more completely indicate the low intellectual state of a religious group that would blare abroad the message that the Divine Mind and Nature had taken residence in the body of a peasant in Judea? To think of the Logos as being made one hundred and seventy pounds of human flesh--this was unconscionable.

But if the Jew rejected with shocked reverence the personal incarnation of God in one man, this did not impugn his true interest in the Messianic idea. By no means did his rejection of any man Jesus close the door against the sane doctrine of the Advent. In truth it opened the door to his understanding of that coming in all the height and depth of its real historical denouement. For it left him free to conceive of it in the one and only way in which it can be rationally envisaged, as the birth, growth and eventual rulership of the spirit of charity in all hearts. If it was a blasphemous defamation of Deity to think of it

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as being cribbed, cabined and confined within the pitiable limitations of one human form, it was quite a different matter to consider the mind of Christ as coming to gradual dominance at the very core of consciousness in all men.

So Guignebert writes that, while the Hebrew mind could not accede to the recognition of the Logos-Messiah as incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth or any man of flesh, it was not the less expectant of the actual advent of a Christly motif in the lives of men and nations (108):

"But it was a proposition easy to reconcile with Paul's Christology, or, rather, closely allied to it, when the Apostle's fundamental declaration is recalled, that 'the Lord is the Spirit.'"

The Judaic religion contemplated the coming of Messiah in the form of a spiritual regeneration that would glorify mankind in a solidarity of brotherhood under the moral law that had been enunciated from Mt. Sinai; it did not envision it in the form of the birth of a babe. It realized that there is only one form in which the Christ can arrive to all men,--a new spirit in the heart and a new intelligence in the mind. The Christian pronouncement of Messiah's coming did not in any measure fulfil the Hebraic expectation of the Savior. Of that high and mystical conception the Bethlehem "event" was but a gross misshapen caricature; and was accordingly rejected.

The delusion that the Christos can come--nay, has come--to the world in the form of a historical human; that he comes singly and not collectively, is close to the most fatuous imbecility that has ever engrossed man's consciousness. Indeed Christianity must answer to the ages the opprobrious accusation that it offered the Christ mind to the world in but one man, and not in all men. That is the final summation of all the stricture that this work marshalls against Christianity. It is the ultimate focus and core of all critique of Christianity.

We have dissertated on the church at Antioch; the one at Corinth demands notice also. When Paul speaks of "the Church of God which is at Corinth," it must not be understood that he is referring to an organized congregation in the later Christian sense. It was one of those communities of esoteric students cultivating the mystical and intellectual philosophy theoretically and practically. Little did they dream of initiating a movement that would eventually establish a great priestly commonwealth and virtually rule the world. In short neither Paul nor his confreres could justly be considered as members of the historical Christian Church. They were bound together only by the

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strength of kinship in a high mystical experience. Indeed the historian describes this fellowship as an "anarchy of full dependence upon direct divine guidance." It is "self-governing and controlled by the hazardous suggestions of the inspired." And well we know, he adds, that "the directly inspired are the natural enemies of all ecclesiastical orders."

Yet when after centuries of a far worse anarchy--rather a tyranny--of ecclesiastical power, the people under this system turned against its overweening and overreaching central control and threw off the yoke of its strangling clutch, they did so precisely in order to regain this "anarchy" of the spirit, in the effort to set up again the dynamics of communion directly with divine guidance. And all through its history the publicists of this system have advertised their intellectual insincerity by alternately exalting to the heavens this same subjective mystical communion which links the soul of man ecstatically with the divine shekinah, lauding it as the climax of Christian spiritual attainment, superior to anything in Pagan religious experience; and again condemning it,--especially when it was the experience of Pagans--as the "anarchy" of wild licence in the mystic domain. Once the powerful ecclesiastical organism was in full authority, the sublimest of subjective ecstasies, though the individual spirit melt into the very soul of God in rapturous union, but were it outside the pale of the churchly authority, had to be frowned upon. Once the Church of God held sway, all personal benison must come through its channel or be condemned. The Protestant Reformation did indeed fling a large segment of revolters free of this outrageous imprisonment. But alas! it made but the first halting steps away from the prison door and stands there uncertain whither to proceed and badly confused as to the location of its goal or its home.

Our work is designed to prove that the unsound ideas that generated Christianity contributed to induce a fearful dementia in Western mentality. What it could do to derationalize the mind of an Augustine, it would do in tenfold measure to lesser people. Says Farrar:

Augustine's "personality becomes less attractive as his episcopacy becomes more triumphant, until at last the man who sighed so ardently for Christian charity, and was so much opposed to sacerdotal tyranny, uses expressions and arguments which become the boasted watchwords of the most ruthless inquisitors and are quoted to sanction deeds so unchristian and so infamous as the brutalities of Alva and the massacre of St. Bartholomew."

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Here indeed is a psychograph of great value tracing in most vivid relief the horrid warping of mind under Christian corruption. On him directly most writers of the Christian saga lay the blame for the holocaust of Medieval murder. He set up the wanton authority which later lent sanction to this sickening chapter of "Christian" history.

Out of the twisted mentalities of early Christian "saints" like Augustine, Jerome, Tertullian and others, whose consciences were captivated and racked with the deadly concepts of sin, issued that black and turbid stream of morbidity that has darkened the lives of billions in their train. We have seen how Augustine and Jerome mentally lashed themselves for having yielded momentarily to the delight of reading Homer, Virgil and other classic literature. It can be said that Christianity bequeathed to the West a sickly mind, a deranged darksome view of life and a psychopathic haunting obsession of the evil of happiness.

At this point it is more than interesting to compare two insertions standing on the same page in our notebooks. The first is from Lecky (The History of European Morals, p. 99):

"Religion is the one romance of the poor. It alone extends the narrow horizon of their thoughts, supplies the images of their dreams, allures them to the supersensual. . . ."

The other is from Dr. Macdonald-Bayne (The Higher Power You Can Use, p. 41):

"But thousands have lost their lives, many murdered in cold blood, because of crystallized concepts held immovable in the minds of many people. The secret of growth and understanding is to have a flexible mind, so that we can receive new knowledge and discard old worn-out concepts that are hindering the progress of humanity."

The juxtaposition of these two observations, both supremely wise, is next to tragic in its shocking revelation of man's pitiable victimization by his own feebleness. The romanticism of religion need, however, not be restricted to the poor. It is the one ultimate possibility of romance for the human mind, if the far reach of its influence is taken into account. It is the one avenue of escape from the deadly tawdriness of mortal things for rich and poor alike. It is the one thing that man instinctively flees to when he rises above the sheer interest in physical existence and the objective focus of interest. When the sweetness of its release of the soul from bondage to material interests is once felt, there

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is no delight to be cherished equal to its power to vivify the enjoyment of life itself. It is or can be truly man's savior.

But the tragic side of this noble interest comes to view in the second observation. The golden allure of the sweets of religion can so soon become a deadly Midas touch. The Katha Upanishad of India says, speaking of the Lord of Life, the divine soul at the heart of all consciousness, "with sharp and subtle mind is he beheld." Alas! the religious mind of man is not commonly either sharp or subtle. It is naive, dull, not keenly discerning. It does not sagaciously choose among all the alternatives and possibilities; it sees generally only what chances to come in front of it, and if there be a bit of novelty to stir interest in this segment of truth, it fastens it upon itself with eager readiness and deadly finality. The concept then takes control of the mind accepting it and molds the whole personality over its pattern. The pity is that when one mental scene occupies the stage of vision, it shuts out all the others. The price of our possession of a truth is the privation of all other truth,--unless indeed the sharp and subtle intellect can develop the power and breadth of vision to include practically all segments in a universal organic construct of meaning, in which each truth can be fitted into its proper place in harmony with all other facets. But it is only the few, the philosophers, who can manage this synthetic accomplishment. The commonality of souls remain steeped in dormancy of intellect. They are unawakened to this keenness of perception and lack the power to hold and relate the many data together in one view. They see through a glass darkly, and see in part. As their attention becomes fixed on one part, and that out of its context in the larger whole, they are blind to what is still not in the range of vision, which, if seen, would alter even the significance of the little section that is in view. For all values are relative.

To give absolute meaning or value to a fraction of the whole, instead of relative value, is the crime constantly perpetrated by ignorance. It is the crime of naiveté. The greatest, most telling and thrilling enterprise, the highest joy open to mankind, is the growth of the power of mind to discern the relations of the knowledge fragments to the whole context of ultimate meaning. Modern psychology has come to see that the prime condition of health for the human mind inheres in its ability to integrate its components. This demands, as Hocking of Harvard has said, a consultation with "the total meaning of the world." This is the supreme lesson which education can bring to its hopeful matricu-

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lants. And for this reason it is a shrieking necessity that the ancient "divine philosophy" be restored to its place of central status in the curriculum of all education.

And all too clearly can it now be seen that Christianity's spite at philosophy, its divorce of religion from philosophy, stands as the consummate wreckage of human cultural aim. In ancient philosophy was embodied the vast knowledge vouchsafed to early races by semi-divine intelligence, which outlined enough of the cosmic perspective for the capable mind to perceive the place and part man was to fill in relation to the scope of the whole. In throwing out cosmology, anthropology, the hierarchical ranks of beings in the evolutionary gradient, the multiple spiritual, psychic, etheric and physical constituent bodies of man's nature, Christianity despoiled both philosophy and religion of their structurally regulative frame of reference. For humans to form judgments without possessing the whole of the data or some knowledge of the ultimate plan and design of Creative Mind, is to leap in the dark. This was the reason why the sagacious philosophers of antiquity made so much of the symbol of the sun and its light. They likened the luminary of day to the divine intelligence. Mind brought to the multitudinous objects of the world a light of understanding because it revealed all things standing in relation to each other and to the whole, in the same way that sunlight, by making things visible at their place in the context, gives meaning to all visible objects. Darkness prevents this vision of relationship, hence of meaning. All human ills are therefore due to imperfect mental vision, limitation of range and inability to see enough of the all to form true judgments about any part.

Had Greek wisdom not been blacked out by the surge of piety rendered unintelligent by the crushing philosophy, the Christian cultism would not have plunged into the unconscionable blunder of building a new faith on the epiphany of divine life allegedly manifested in one historical person. For this would have been seen as an undue allocation of significance to one item of supposedly historical fact standing without relation to or support from larger segments of the context. For the race of man can never be divinized by the glow of deity shining on the face of one Avatar. The leaven must permeate the whole lump. Divinity outside of man is a glory of life; but only divinity born, reared, magnified and made king inside a mortal man will convert him into the god he is to be. The glorified life, mission and meaning of the one Christ claimed for history stands utterly out

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of possible harmonious relation to the total of the evolutionary scheme. It can find no niche of perfect articulation into which it alone fits. The Protestant Reformation itself established the thesis that the fragment of God in the individual can make complete union with the God of all; and in so doing it reduced to superfluous status not only the Roman Catholic hierarchical intermediacy but the similar intermediacy of the man Jesus. An external historical Jesus is rendered not only not indispensable, but not even necessary. He might be ancillary and auxiliary; he certainly is not essential. The scheme of salvation can ignore him, dispense with him. The individual soul can make its own peace with God. The High Priest of God, King of Righteousness after the order of Melchizedek, is an oversoul of intelligence within the area of the individual consciousness. Tertullian's arrant challenge to the intelligence of his day can now be reversed: instead of asking what Homer, Plato and academic philosophy had to do with the Gospels of Jesus, the proper question now is: what have Jesus and the Gospels (taken as history, of course) to do with the deification of the Christ in man? On what basis do they have a claim to be considered an essential element in the subjective kingdom and activity of the Christ in every man? How do extraneous and fortuitous "events" and personalities in an almost totally uncertified chapter of Judean history become uniquely an integrated part of the structure of cosmic and human racial evolution? Would the failure of the man Jesus to appear in history at that specific period have left man bereft of an essential stairway to heaven? Had Plato and the philosophers, even common men, no access to redeeming grace and power from the sheer fact that they lived some centuries before the Galilean had come?

When the fact of the developing Christhood in one and all men is framed in its proper place and relationship in and to the whole scheme of human evolution, it is at once seen that the narrow view that confines the idea of the Advent of deific mind to its unique manifestation in only one man is untenable, since it neglects the race that is to be transformed by a power that can do its work from nowhere but within each individual. This treatment almost absurdly belabors a point that should be fully clear on first view. But it has to have this excessive reiteration because of the obdurate blindness to it that has afflicted one-third of the human race with dementia and horror over nearly two thousand years.

The concluding word could be that the human effort to bring its inherent deity to conscious function and lordship of life has stood para-

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lyzed into inanity by the Christian legend that the race is to be apotheosized by Divinity once resident in Judea. Not again will Western man take up seriously the task of consummating his deification until he realizes of a certainty that the work must be done by the function of divinity in the Western lands, not in Judea. The redeeming Christ he has been taught to look to for his salvation must be relocated, transferred from Palestine to where he lives in the West, and finally from any outward location geographically to its final location spiritually within the area of present human consciousness. The redemption of Occidental civilization depends upon this reorientation in Christian theology.

Yet, the religious romanticism of untrained, uncritical minds, combined with the stodgy inflexibility of ideas held by the masses, has written its record across the history of twenty centuries in such revolting script that the darksome pages have to be hidden from general sight, since the reading bends down the human spirit with shame and humiliation past endurance. The annals of the one true and glorious religion that was to emancipate the human mind from the blindness of heathen error should make joyous reading, from the heralded birth of the Luciferian messenger to the latest paean of churchly halleluiah. This work is aimed to tell the reason at last why, on the contrary, they make the most harrowing story in history.

Lecky descants most forcefully upon the deadly inertia, the indolence and sluggishness of the common human mind which is the immediate parent of nearly all human ills and woes. Intellectual incompetence and sheer idleness and inertia generate the moral error and delinquency that breed every evil. The human mind, not nourished by its food of truth, reason and understanding, becomes a sick mind. A sick mind bred Christianity.

Rufinus accused Jerome of a change and interpolation in a manuscript. Says Farrar:

"The anecdote, however, has its value, for it shows us the prevalence of forgery and puts us on our guard against heretical interpolations in the works of the Fathers."

This Jerome it is who frankly writes of those who visited and then left him in his desert retreat:

"Lo, they desire to depart--nay, they do depart, saying that it is better to live among wild beasts than with such Christians."

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The full force of this fling of Jerome's pen will be caught when a chapter of treatment is given to the item of Christian asceticism and monachism. It, however, offers a foretaste of the low, almost inhuman condition to which Christians were reduced by their obsession with the legend of a historical Christ whom Paul either never heard of, though he visited with his brother, or hearing of him, resolved never to mention his existence.

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CHAPTER XVI

GREAT PAN IS DEAD

The exigencies of the study demand that notice be taken of that great cry that has gone up in Christian books in their exultation over the displacement of the ancient Pagan religions by Christianity: Great Pan is dead! It is supposed to imply that the end of Paganism and the beginning of a new world era of sane and rational human understanding had been brought to pass under the benign influence of Christian truth. In its underlying implications the cry, swelling out over the world with the death of naturalism and the advent of a supernatural or divine age for humanity, is supposed to have announced the end of a period, as it were, of the world's infancy, in which it had naively believed that Nature was the God that ruled the universe under the natural law, with no place for the interposition of the benevolent will of Divine Intelligence to effect its personal work of Paternal Love.

Pantheism predicated the presence of God in all things, and thus drew the mind of man outward to reckon with him in all his works. Opponents argue that this was to demean the Supreme by making him coequal in stature with his creation. God was no greater than his works; God was in fact his world, which carried his full expression and was the garment of his being. The ancient man could worship God without lifting his eyes above the earth, its grass and trees; for nature was the living manifestation of God, embodying his life and energies. God was resident in every oak, pine, flower, bush, hill, spring and vale, in the sunshine and the rain. The Pagan needed to look no farther off than the visible world of earth, sea and sky, for God was omnipresent in all these. Therefore there was no spirituality, no metaphysical conceptuality, in the Pagan systems. Paganism, worshipping Pan as its God, worshipped the material universe.

With the coming of the divine Babe in Bethlehem a new era of human conception was ushered in, so Christianity has asserted. The

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advent of Jesus and the spread of the new dispensation heralded by him, changed the whole mood, mode and frame of human thinking. It shifted the focus of mankind's interest and its reliance from the God in external nature to the Supreme God in the holy of holies of spiritual realizations. It destroyed at last the superstitious beliefs in the existence of naiads, oreads, dryads, nereids, giants, ogres, demons, heroes, dragons, serpents and such creations of Pagan fancy and delusion, whose whimsies had to be placated by offerings and eccentric rites, and substituted for them the rule of a Divine Father, whose will was the moral and spiritual law, motivated by cosmic beneficence. For the law of nature administered by the presiding genii of the woods and mountains, Christianity substituted the rulership of Divine Love. The governance of life passed from the hands of the nature-gods into those of the God of all, with a mind that could understand man's problems, a heart that could sympathize with him in his tragic moments and finally a love that could enfold him in unremitting providential care.

In the language of Milman (History, p. 33):

"The mental childhood of the human race was passing away; at last it had become wearied of its old toys."

Before engaging in dissertation on this remarkable pronouncement it will be well to present the larger picture that Milman paints of the momentous juncture of affairs at this age of the world's life. He portrays the Pagan religions on their popular side as having run into a dead end street. The masses had been overfed on the myths and allegories of the gods and finally had found this provender nothing but husks and empty shells. Nature went on in her invariable course, turning neither right nor left to lend an ear to man's prayers and special pleadings, solicitations or offerings. The old faiths were weakening, the edifice was crumbling. And Milman asks what remained for minds enlightened beyond the poetic faith of their ancestors, yet not ripe for philosophy. How was the craving for religious excitement to be appeased when minds had turned with dissatisfaction or disgust from the old accustomed nutriment? Here, he says, "is the secret of the remarkable union between the highest reason and the most abject superstition which characterized the age of Imperial Rome."

The turning away from old lifeless forms opened the way for the entry of all sorts of new religious adventures. Rome opened its arms to Jewish, Phrygian, Isiac, Serapic, Mithraic, Neoplatonic, Pythagorean cults. Anything that was imposing, or secret, or unique, or mystical

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was welcomed, though the very multitude and variety of these cults rendered the general mind after a time indifferent to or palled by their presentations. Astrology and witchcraft, he avers, led captive many minds which boasted their emancipation from the popular tyranny of the old faith in the gods and nature spirits. The venerable oracles were silent, but the voices of astrologers and soothsayers were voluble, dispensing the secrets of futurity for inquisitive minds--and a compensation. Pompey, Crassus and Caesar all consulted the Chaldeans, to be told what the planets revealed of their fortunes. These hawkers of prophetic knowledge were driven out by the exertions of the state officials, but returned and, favored by popular support, defied the authorities.

The death of the god Pan was thus followed by a burgeoning forth of a whole scale of religious or semi-religious superstitions before the air was magically charged and cleared by the coming of the Gospel of incarnate Love in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

The interim of transition from dead Pagan nature fetishism over to the full enlightenment of a historicized Christology was filled with astrological superstition and mantric divination of many kinds. With the propagation of Christianity would come the master light of a heavenly philosophy and a divine revelation buttressed, as never before in all the life of mankind, by an epiphany of actual deific power in person. This last stage would complete the historic process of ending the world's childhood and inaugurating it into its puberty and final adulthood development, as the one sole religion of eternal truth crowned the cycle of growth for the whole human race. Great Pan was dead; the Babe of Bethlehem had displaced him on the throne of the world.

So proclaim the voices of Christian oracles, and so believe the trusting devotees of the faith. But a searching critique discloses that every aspect and item of this legend is both analytically fallacious and factually untrue. Or if it at points chances to coincide with data, it still is conceived in a warped and unsound rationale.

As has been intimated at an earlier place herein, yes, great Pan, alas, was dead. He had been suffered to languish and die through the failure of human understanding and balanced wisdom. The instinctive human faith that nature administers the laws of beneficence with which it is man's duty to harmonize his life in a beautiful accord, was destroyed by the gradual recession of esoteric interest and dimming of esoteric insight, preparing the ground for the implanting of the idea

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of a personal Savior. Pan was dead; and there died with him the priceless knowledge of the necessity of man's coordination of his life with that of nature. Pan was dead; and no longer would the Mediterranean civilization stand with its feet on solid reality. Pan was dead; and the mind of Western humanity was laid open to the sweep of every wild mystical and emotional excess that can overflood it when its defenses of critical judgment based ultimately on natural law are toppled by irrational tempests. Pan was slain; and buried with him for dreary ages lay the ancient science of nature symbolism, the final reliance of all human thinking and one true guide in the criterion of truth. Gone was Pan; and gone with him the master knowledge that all perfection can be won only through the intermarriage of the two elements of man's constitution within him, the spiritual and the natural. And flown with him, too, was the knowledge that nature is the mirror of all truth, since she reflects in her modes and processes the very mind of God. Gone with the sylvan deity was the one anchorage provided by Omniscience by which alone man can tie his life and his mind to the level of balance between the two worlds of subjectivity and objectivity, on the sharp boundary between which his evolution must proceed. Gone was Pan; and with his disappearance went the hope of any chance to realize more than a modicum of psychological benefit from even the false belief that a Savior-Messiah had come. Gone was Pan; and with him vanished every possibility of normal evolution of the human genius for two thousand years.

For the counsels of folly that rushed to take charge in his place decreed that the last word of universal truth had been uttered once and for all by an untutored Galilean peasant, and that therefore the need of all further thinking was ended. With that usurpation of the thought power of the Western area by upstart presumption, man's greatest birthright in existence, his power to search the world and his own soul for the living founts of truth, was abrogated at one stroke by the most monstrous tyranny that ever clamped its iron clutch upon the life of the race: he was forbidden to think! Swept away from him for ages was all that prerogative which is his by virtue of his incarnation on earth, to reflect upon the world without and his experience with it, and let his mind report the wealth of understanding that accrues to him for the adventure.

And gone with great Pan also was that intelligent conception of the nature and function of matter which had until the age of Christian degeneracy steadied the philosophies of wise men in an intellectual

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poise that immeasurably sweetened the daily tasks of life for the creature man. The history of the despoliation of human sanity and happiness by the persistent vogue of the doctrine of the essentially evil nature of matter in religious conception is yet to be adequately written. Its horrendous results in the devastation of human weal are beyond tabulation. It has spread its blighting shadow across the minds and deadened the happiness of millions. Had great Pan not been dethroned and outcast, never could that plague of idiotic delusion about the sinful nature of the human body and its procreative powers, which fell like a blight upon the conscience of Christian populations and sickened all the existence of soul in body for close to ten centuries, have gained its fearsome power to warp natural instinct into a nauseating morbidity.

Yes, great Pan was dead; and human delight was dead with it. A miasma of sin-sense settled down upon the imagination of the Western millions, striking dead with its pestilential thought-poison every wholesome impulse of natural man. Matter was evil; the body innately bound in sin; to give it its pleasure would drag the spirit-pure soul down into hell. The flesh, with its goads and temptations, must be mortified, crucified. The only merit was in crushing down its appetencies. The saint was he who tortured his body most hideously.

Pan was dead; but he was dead only in the diseased minds of hallucinated simpletons. He could still exert his kingship in minds unaffected by psychopathic disorders. And he could also bide his time of exile, knowing that his day of return and triumph would come. And in the fourteenth century it came. His restoration came with the Renaissance in Italy, which foreshadowed the Reformation in Germany and the North. His reed pipes were heard once again in rustic dales and leafy bowers, as the ostracized human spirit released itself to partake of delight in nature's largesse of beauty without the haunt of a morbid consciousness of sin. And poetry, art, romance, love and beauty could once more lift mortal sense to heights of sweetness and purity.

And perhaps Pan could be laughing his satyr whinny in anticipation of the day, now realized in the giddy whirl of the cycles, when his power, scorned and vilified by priestly curse and philosophic stigma, could be demonstrated in such fearful fashion as to send his traducers, the pious religionists, reeling from the impact of the discovery of how to release his terrible swift sword of secret might buried in the atom of his despised matter. Great Pan dead? Yes, dead to those whose native powers of perception and understanding had been killed by out-

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rageous parody of supposed knowledge; dead to a world in which the genius of divine light struggling to shine in the darkness of unintelligent moronism had been quenched by fear and madness; dead to a world that through the feebleness of human élan had stifled the wisdom that would have united Pan in blessed union with the rising vigor and sweet grace of the divine spirit growing in mankind.

But Pan was dead thus only to that segment of the collective mind that had succumbed to blind obsession of error. He was dead only for the world that with consummate folly had rebelled against his sovereignty and denied his beneficence. To them his death was a tragedy of loss, of befuddlement, of derationalization. And every century of his prolonged exile from his rightful place and office in human life and thought was an added century of a corroding canker at the core of human blessedness. And as the end of the dismal night of the Christian Dark Ages is heralded by the rising dawn of returning human sanity, perhaps the hirsute Satyr may again deign to haunt the arches of the wood and bring the sunlight of natural joy back into the sin-darkened chambers of the deluded religious consciousness.

It is necessary in this connection to deal with the repeated assertions of most publicists that Christianity came in by a natural movement of the mind of the age to supply a void in the religious life of the Roman world population produced by the failure and decay of the old Pagan cultism. It is generally argued that the new religion took hold because of the natural death of a religion that had been long imposed on a submissive world and then at last proved its insufficiency and left a people groping in an empty dusk.

It is not in the purview of our understanding to quarrel much with these broad hypotheses adduced to explain the state of things two thousand years ago. Our essay is not a brief for Pagan philosophy, but an effort to grasp and delineate the situation so that the world has the truth of it instead of wretched half-truth and outright falsity. It is not likely ever to fall within our purpose to vindicate any popular form of religion, for the excellent reason that popular religion is almost always and in all its manifestations a conglomerate of gross error and false conceptions, or at the best true doctrines atrociously warped into weird distortions. True religions are never the upgrowth of popular movement; they do not spring from the common soil. They are gifts of supernal truth and wisdom from evolved overlords of an evolution; they are handed down from the heights of vision and understanding,

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and are inevitably soiled, damaged and torn in pieces by the incompetent beneficiaries.

It is therefore not necessary to enter a defense, exoneration or laudation of the Pagan system of antiquity, so far as its consequences showed themselves upon the ranks of the populace and the run of history. It is not there we look for the excellence of any cultural system; except as the common ranks are affected by the cultured class above them. And on this ground it is permissible to affirm simply that if, as this work aims to show, it was under the Christian influence that the most abject vitiation of esoteric wisdom swept out to derange the mentality of a world, then the stultification of common intelligence could never have been so gross in former times under Pagan molds of thought. Also it would seem sufficient, if there must be controversy between Pagan and Christian claims, to say that if the Pagan religion reduced the mass mind to a state of rank depravity, the nadir of that downward cycle of degeneration, after five hundred years of gradual recession from the heights of Platonic glory, finally brought the cultural level to the point at which it produced Christianity. If we hold it legitimate to lay the blame and stigma of condemnation upon religious and philosophical systems for what in reality is purely human failure, which in most cases the highest systems could not avert, then Pagan philosophy must bear the brunt of censure for the vast cultural debacle following Plato. But that the great decline after Plato was human failure and not the failure of high philosophy, ought to be finally and incontestably determined by the anomaly of attributing a great cultural decline to the admittedly sublimest thought effort in world history. The point of absolute verdict in this is that it is impossible for a true philosophy to fail man; but it is possible for man to fail a true philosophy. Christians have been both heroic and vile with the same Bible and the same sword of the Christ faith in their hands. Did the same Christianity make the one man heroic and the other vile? The kind of man that wielded the sword determined the beneficent or evil influence it released on history.

Yet in its extreme application this allows no formative influence to religions and philosophies; it makes all outcomes the product of the purely human factor. Do thought systems have no power to change human nature, to elevate culture? Here, then, is the median truth: systems of philosophy are to be historically gauged by the outcome of their practice when their basic principles have been assiduously studied, fully understood and given thorough application over a sufficiently

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long time to demonstrate their efficacy. A system should never be held accountable for results springing from a shallow knowledge, a defective comprehension and a blundering half-way application of its principles. Such a manifestation becomes a miscarriage; it furnishes no fair test. On this standard of measurement it may be said that both Paganism and true Christianity have, as Voltaire intimated, never had a fair trial. Before, during and since Plato's day a limited few exceptional souls have fairly comprehended and practiced, or at any rate suffused their minds with the high influences of the Pagan wisdom cultures; and in that area of its application Pagan philosophy has demonstrated beyond Christian cavil and slander its transcendently salutary influence. It has not failed humanity when humanity laid hold of it and embraced it fully. Since that same high Paganism was also at the same time the true Christianity, so then true Christianity has likewise not failed mankind. But mankind failed both high Paganism and true Christianity when, following the Golden Age of Greek wisdom, people, for reasons that might be brought to light by deep scrutiny, failed to cultivate, to cherish, to love, comprehend truly and embrace fully the great inspiring knowledge that moved men so deeply before. Greek philosophy was no less potent for high and heroic human stimulation in one century than in another; it is again lifting thousands to new and glorious heights of vision and goodness today. What happened was that the human incentive to gain so winsome a prize and human ardor for the boon of enlightenment faded out or burned low. The causes of this failure of the love of wisdom are the pivotal things for the study of objective history. But, for the argument, it is wrong to blame a philosophy for untoward and woeful developments in the course of history when its principles are in no sense being truly applied at all. Neither Paganism nor Christianity is to be held blamable for results when something not even remotely resembling their true character is masquerading in their stead and flaunting their names. And this is what has transpired in the case of both. Paganism is not to be blamed for the decline of high culture after Greece's bright day; likewise true Christianity is not to be blamed for the debacle of world sanity generated by the usurping force and movement that was only a false Christianism. But what needs to be inscribed indelibly upon the consciousness of humanity is that this degraded excrescence from the body of a primal true Christianity that we have called Christianism was, like an unnatural growth on a diseased part of a tree, the product of human cultural spirit at its lowest stage of feebleness and blindness.

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The common supposition in academic circles has been that Pagan religious conception had degenerated from Plato's time to a darkness profound and universal, and that Christianity then burst forth as a meteor of new light to break the heathen night. Nothing could be more erroneous. Christianity was the expression of that darkness at its deepest point. It was not a rebirth of light, but the eerie glow of the stirring among the buried embers of an extinguished blaze and the weird misshapen shadows dancing round about.

There is not a strand of evidence to indicate that a coterie of great new thinkers had arisen to give forth a gleaming new elucidation of truth superior to what had gone before. There is not a sign anywhere to show that a new system of understanding had been proclaimed. Christianity was a ferment of violent mental aberration engendered by a misconception of old forms of esoteric expression twisted into untruth. It was the upsurge of mingled passions bred out of a mental brew of great truths warped into ungainly deformity by crass ignorance.

Ah, but, say the faithful in the Christian tradition: a divine Messenger, a prophet sent from God, needing no schooling in Greek philosophy, came to earth and brought a light never seen on land or sea. Compared with this celestial message, philosophy was darkness. What could lame human lucubrations do in competition with the flashing glory of an empyreal revelation? What indeed had Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Virgil or Cicero to do with the Gospels? These outshone classical poetry as the sun outshines the candle.

Such at any rate is the notion that fills the heads of nearly all the commonalty of Christian people. The answer to it from the side of truth and fact is the positive affirmation that, if he lived at all--which is a possibility growing less plausible and less tenable all the time--he inculcated not one new preachment or principle of truth; and again, that the agitation allegedly produced by his messengership and ministry would have died out in a generation or two if it had not supplemented its meager spiritual capital by the appropriation of the very Greek philosophy with which it compares itself as the candle to the sun. Indeed the long-eclipsed truth has at length come to view; it was Christianity that reduced the sun of Pagan philosophical intelligence to the rush light of pitiable superstition.

The analysis of the situation then extant that yields true understanding is achieved through the view that sees an odd and somewhat perplexing phenomenon in human life and history: the coexistence

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side by side at the same time of the highest illumination of philosophy and the grossest darkness of ignorant superstition. This has been the case in known human history. An age is lauded as one of brilliant achievement, with a list of outstanding names of the greatest luster; yet at the very time there was virtual savagery in remote continents and mental depravity in the lower strata. So it was in the pre-Christian era, during the time of Christianity's inception and ever since. And along with this oddity, always the vested interests that are fostered by the traditional orthodoxies stand fast against the spread of a higher and freer philosophy that would subvert the fixed customs based half on error. Remembering always that esoteric truth is treasured only by a minority and never purveyed by the commonplace majority in its true form, we see how it was that while the sublimest wisdom was cherished in the cult of the Mysteries and the philosophical Academies, it was unknown or viciously garbled by the masses. The stumbling block that brought catastrophe was the insuperable tendency to mistake allegory for external truth. Such was the ineluctable cause of superstition then, the same as it is today and at every moment when ancient religious Scriptures have been elevated to a place of authority in the mental domain and their interpretation emerges filtered through the minds of unschooled people. Whenever these conditions provided the environment, the result has been a nightmare of undigested ideologies twisted away into deceptive phantoms.

Fisher envisages the Pagan world as breaking up through the spread of skepticism from the higher groups down and out among the masses. This has ever been the manifest phenomenon when the grip of higher minds on an elevated philosophy has grown lax or failed entirely. When vision fails at the top it is indeed a tragic time for the world. Most cultural recessions come through this channel. Darkened minds lay hold of the esoteric manuals of wisdom and misapply their abstruse knowledge to the utter ruination of all sound meaning.

Fisher delineates the minority at the top of society as disillusioned about the Pagan religions, emancipated from the illusions which those myths perpetuated and cynical about what the common people still took seriously. This skepticism finally permeated all ranks. And as the old beliefs went out, the void was filled, as before intimated, by the invasion of "magicians, sorcerers and necromancers" and cults of foreign origin from the East. These, while they excited and fed for a time the insatiate thirst for the interests of religion, could not permanently satisfy the deeper yearning of souls for spiritual food. The soul

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must have some contact with the supernatural, he says. Therefore, his conclusion is, when the humble fishermen presented the person of the Son of God in human flesh, the multitudes were ready to flock to their standard.

This is near enough to the truth to be accepted without quibble, if it is remembered always that Paganism would not have failed and produced skepticism if there had been common astuteness enough to see through the outer veil of myth to the supernal and eternal truths beneath the veil. The myths have failed to perpetuate human enlightenment because of the default of human intelligence to read them aright. That really covers the whole ground of historical explanation.

Fisher need not have elaborated an analytic background to account for the drift of the mob of the lower orders from Paganism over to Christianity. The masses follow like sheep the modes of thought that become conventionalized, as people follow dress fashions. The multitude did not reason its way across the abyss from Pagan darkness to Christian bliss. It followed an insensible drift, as esoteric wisdom faded to low glim and mass tendencies of reaction set in toward the things that Christianity was soon to formulate in a concreteness never dreamed of before.

Milman, like Fisher, has expatiated upon the flocking into Rome in Paganism's last days of the "empirics," the "traders in human credulity," astrologers, soothsayers, diviners of all brands, advertising their ability to foretell the future, cure disease and generally to insure health and prosperity. "All these circumstances," he says, "were manifest indications of the decay and the approaching dissolution of the old religion" of Paganism.

If Milman is correct in this analysis, a startling conclusion leaps to the mind as to the imminent danger that confronts Christianity in the world at this present. If the vogue of cult traders in human credulity is a sure sign of a dissolution of prevalent religion, then Christianity today faces quick obliteration, for there has hardly ever been a time when this trading in human gullibility and ignorance has been so voluminous and popular as at the moment of this writing. The ready acceptance of such traffic in religion and superstition today can hardly be less than it was in the Roman Empire. As much of it is secret by its very nature, the vast extent of its prevalence is not commonly known. Milman's formula at any rate worked out so precisely in the case of modern Germany that it seems to have been well founded. After the first World War the process of decay in the age-old Christi-

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anity of Germany was so far advanced that Hitler and his group decided to dismantle it entirely and replace it with Nordic Paganism. (Russia had already dismantled not only Christianity, but religion itself.) And now an astonishing datum comes to light and significance: preceding and during the time of Hitler's rise Germany, so careful reports authentically stated, was actually saturated with popular interest in all forms of the "occult," and esoteric study permeated all ranks. Astrology, psychism, clairvoyance, mediumship and all their ramifications were in almost universal vogue. And it was by no means confined to the lower orders. Unquestionably Hitler's own inner circle considered itself a select and divinely chosen esoteric group. It needs only to be recalled that every movement of Hitler's military strategy was dated to meet the time implications of the position of the planets on the astrological charts to realize the same forces that Milman classes with sorcery and necromancy, or psycho-spiritual charlatanism, are rampant in our world today. If they portend the doom of the currently predominant religion, then Christianity is soon to pass.

But what needs to be said is that these more conspicuous manifestations of religious interest in exceptional channels are by no means more violent aberrations from sane conception of religious values than is the ordinary run of orthodox Christian belief. If nothing else, they at least reveal a more vital interest in and concern with religious influences than orthodoxy ever does. They evidence a more vigorous play of religious motivation. To whatever extravagant lengths they may go, they really stem from forms of genuine mysticism and psychic potencies in the human constitution that give them a solid base of veritude. They manifest in much of their development the pure spirit of true Protestantism in the exercise of the freedom of the powers of the diviner potentialities in man's dual nature to express themselves apart from the rule of uniformity and conformity insisted on by ecclesiasticism. Therefore churchly power must frown them down, unless, as one organization has done, it is wise enough to reach out and embrace them in its own program and polity.

But they are indeed at this time a part of a great revolt against or away from Christianity, and, if the point is pressed, a trend back to Paganism. And whether it is to be decried as bad or welcomed as in a way a measure of advance for religion, depends quite definitely upon the degree of intelligence with which they are taken up, understood and employed. This is, of course, a criterion which holds for all religious evaluation, it might be interjected. Uncritical zealotry can

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make superstitious hash out of the sublimest spiritual truth. Ignorant belief can turn the very bread of life, mentally eaten, to poison. Ignorance always corrupts higher understanding to nonsense. Education is the only antidote. If Milman and others would recognize how vast and recondite is the study of religious psychology, with the faculties of universities themselves overwhelmed and baffled by the complexities of the phenomena and the problems involved, they would see the general populace is going to be unstable and fall into gullible acceptance or equally fallacious complete denial of the claims of the phenomena mongers.

And what they do not see likewise is that orthodox religion is itself the most direct generator of an inclination favorable to the vogue of all such things. It was orthodox Christianity that exalted the cult of miracle, of prayer, of the magical potency of physical objects, of special divine interposition, of witchcraft, necromancy, obsession of devils, demonology (turning the very gods of the Pagans into minor demons), relic worship, money favor and what not. The record of this aspect of Christianity is of proportions to fill volumes, and it should have a place in this work, as constituting palpable concrete evidence that the vogue of the thing we have called Christianism has borne its natural fruit in the derationalization of its victims. But the space is not available for the presentation of a minute fraction of the data. The sale of relics including tons of saint's bones, pieces of the wood from the cross on which the Savior died, bottles of the milk, not of human kindness, but from the breasts of Mary the mother of Jesus, mementoes picked up at "holy places" and a host of "sacred" objects of every imaginable sort were among the grounds of revolt which gave the Protestant reformers the courage to break loose from a soulless and conscienceless exploitation of the uncritical religious tendencies of mankind. It is a recital that should, if known, scald the eyes of the millions of still gullible dupes of it with tears of burning shame. The space the gruesome narrative would take is saved for more instructive exposition.

The extensive quotation featured in this volume is made necessary because the critique can be seen in its rationale only as it stands related to the claims and actual statements put forth by the proponents, the drum-beaters and horn-blowers for Christianity. The sedulously nourished traditional notions of the wholly immaculate character of all Christian history have left the general Christian populations sadly unprepared to believe the incredible truth of that history. The books re-

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vealing it are buried in libraries away from the laity. Unless the facts are recited anew and on the authority of Christian writers themselves, their presentation will be put down as the expression of mere spleen and vituperation. It is not desired that the truth be widely and fully known.

A claim that needs refutation is embodied in a passage from Milman's history. He voices the oft-repeated tradition that Christianity was the influence which elevated civilization from the level of Pagan barbarism to a higher humanitarianism and cultural status. He announces his object "to exhibit the reciprocal influence of civilization on Christianity, of Christianity on civilization."

"As Europe sank back into barbarism, the imaginative state of the human mind, the formation of a new poetic faith, a mythology and a complete system of symbolic worship; the interlocking of Christianity with barbarism, till they slowly grew into a kind of semi-barbarous heroic period, that of Christian chivalry; the gradual expansion of the system with the expansion of the human mind; and the slow, perhaps not yet complete, certainly not general, development of a rational and intellectual religion."

It is important to note the admissions which here are dropped almost as inconsequential incidentals, the grave significance of which would be subversive of the chief arguments if given due notice. Milman begins the statement with the admission that after Christianity came in Europe there was a relapse into barbarism! This devastating confession is made and passed over as if it did not itself negate the whole of the argument in which it falls as a mere trifling incident. But the main implication is that Christianity advanced into central Europe and made an amalgamation of its barbarism with Christianity's humanitarian fundamentals. The result was a hybrid brew, a sort of heroic semi-barbarism.

Then the thesis is advanced by Milman that in his opinion "at every period much more is to be attributed to the circumstances of the age, to the collective operation of certain principles which grew out of the events of the time, than to the internal or accidental influence of any individual or class of men." He is aiming to show that Christianity was gradually to lift Europe up to moral and spiritual heights it could not have attained without it. Yet he announces that the basic principle of critical evaluation of the uplifting influence is the general strength of the human spirit reacting naturally to the impact of the circumstances of the times, rather than the power of any specific preachment of an individual or sect, and inferentially a religious system.

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But this validates the argument we have in readiness to refute his claims for Christianity as the force that lifted Europe from barbarism to culture. It is our contention that the elevating force in the uplift was not Christianity, but the sheer strength of the human spirit, acting in response to events, which raised Europe to civilization, and that rather in despite of Christianity than with its help. His own further development of the case confirms the error of his "logic"; for he says (p. 37):

"Christianity, in short, may exist in a certain form in a nation of savages as well as in a nation of philosophers, yet its specific character will almost entirely depend upon the character of the people who are its votaries." (Abyssinia is cited in a note as a good example of this.) "It must be considered, therefore, in constant connection with that character: it will darken with the darkness and brighten with each succeeding century; in an ungenial time it will recede so far from its genuine and essential nature as scarcely to retain any sign of its Divine original: it will advance with the advancement of human nature, and keep up the moral to the utmost height of the intellectual culture of man."

Here is the entire plan of our critique and defense of our position handed to us gratis. It will not be necessary to contend against Milman on what Milman himself establishes. He practically admits our contention that Europe, with a long antecedent natural religion of Celtic, Teutonic, Nordic type behind it, struggled through the blighting effects of a rabidly irrational morbid religionism foisted forcibly upon it by Christian zealotry and impudence, to a final advance to "modern civilization" by the inherent force of human cultural aspiration, lifting Christianity up with it as it advanced. His own thesis states that Christianity invariably took the character of the influences that touched it. All general Christian claim is that it was the beacon light, the leader, the molder, the instigator of advance; Milman says it was rather the product, the thing molded and charactered by a power independent of it, the raw strength of the human soul struggling toward the light. Apparently he sees that he has conceded too much and hastens to retrench:

"While, however, Christianity necessarily submitted to all these modifications, I strongly protest against the opinion that the origin of the religion can be attributed, according to the theory adopted by many foreign writers [French and German] to the gradual and spontaneous development of the human mind. Christ is as much beyond his own age as his own age is beyond the darkest barbarism. The time, though fitted to receive, could not, by any combination of prevalent opinions, or by any conceivable course of moral improvement, have produced Christianity. The conception of the

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human character of Jesus, and the simple principles of the new religion, as they were in direct opposition to the predominant opinions and temper of his own countrymen, so they stand completely alone in the history of our race; and, as imaginary no less than as real, altogether transcend the powers of man's moral conception. Supposing the Gospel's purely fictitious, or that, like the 'Cyropaedia' of Xenophon, they imbody on a groundwork of fact the highest moral and religious notions to which man had attained, and show the utmost ideal perfection of the Divine and human nature, they can be accounted for, according to my judgment, on none of the ordinary principles of human nature. When we behold Christ standing in the midst of the wreck of old religious institutions and building, or, rather, at one word commanding to arise, the simple and harmonious structure of the new faith, which seem equally adapted for all ages--a temple to which nations in the highest degree of civilization may bring their offerings of pure hearts, virtuous dispositions, universal charity--our natural emotion is the recognition of the Divine goodness in the promulgation of this beneficent code of religion, and adoration of that Being in whom that Divine goodness is thus imbodied and made comprehensible to the faculties of man. In the language of the apostle, 'God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.'"

If apology is needed for the insertion of this long ebullition of turgid pious bombast, it is found in the actual need of the world today to know that this is one--and possibly the finest--of the hundreds of such egregious laudations of the Christian religion that have sprung out of the traditional assumptions obsessing the mind of Europe and America from those early days of obscurantism. It is worth our careful examination now, as it continues still to bind its millions of uninformed religionists in slavery to its glaring untruths. Modern man must remove from before him this false occlusion of his vision.

Already has been demonstrated herein the baseless claim as to the "simple and harmonious structure of the new faith," and the falsity of the assertion that the simple principles of the new religion "stand completely alone in the history of our race." These two magniloquent sallies of unctuous presumption are now found to be wholly baseless, flat untruth. The preachment of the Divine emissary included not one single new or higher principle, intellectual, moral, spiritual. All of his presentation was already in the Essene books. With brutal directness it must be asserted now that his message does not "stand alone in the history of our race," soaring mountain high above every other system in matchless purity, grandeur and edifying power. As fast as attention can be turned to the hundreds of identities between the Gospels and the arcane books of Egypt, so fast is the structure of assumption on

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which Milman's grandiose flourish of fervid delusion crumbling to ruins. For Christian writers since his day are forced to transfer, one after another, the Gospel "events" in the life of this Christ from asserted history back to legend and poetic embellishment. If ever a new Avatar of sane intelligence stood, as Milman represents Jesus as standing, in the wreckage of old religious institutions and building the temple of a nobler order of human understanding, that Avatar is now standing at such a point. He is witnessing the rapid demolition and collapse by piteously ignorant misconception.

After two thousand years of a course of sickening history perpetuated by beclouded intellects, he sees a climax of horrific madness in two titanic world holocausts generated in the life of the peoples dominated by this inhuman code; the final violent repudiation and abandonment of the unconscionable cult by at least two of the leading races long subjected to its tyranny, and the silent rejection of it by a large majority of the people even in countries where it still holds its superficial or nominal dominance. He sees almost universal lethargy toward its claims of unction even in its own temples; and he sees general uncertainty and questioning and challenge in the ranks of its own leaders and supporters. "This beneficent code of religion" is now being revealed as far from beneficent. It is true to say that it has sadly perplexed the mind of every catechumen that ever sat at the feet of a minister of its instruction and, as emancipated thousands now testify, warped their young eager minds awry into a persuasion of acceptance of unintelligible gibberish that could be swallowed only by a total silencing of the critical faculty and its dialectical urgings. People without number come forward now to say that the Sabbath School inculcations of its scheme of theology and the rendition of its Biblical supports as given out by Christian effort, have warped their minds through all the period of youth and wasted half their lives in futile incomprehension.

These multitudes say that it was not until they had seen enough of life and truth on their own account to enable them to throw off this yoke of mental enslavement that they began to gain some balanced sense of the meaning of the Scriptures and things in philosophy and religion. Gladly, then, they have turned away from this befogged center of illusion. Almost a complete roster of those children who come up through this pattern-mill of indoctrination and then go off to higher study, drop quickly everything they were taught. And almost all of

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them report having to go through the often severe process of tearing their minds loose from the psychological allegiances by which they were bound to the childhood faiths, when later study reveals the untenable nature of the early implantations. So, as a matter of sheer fact, here is a religion which is registering constant failure to hold even its own children the moment they can break away, study and think for themselves.

Yet in a way that Milman did not dream of and which should have struck him with humiliation and dismay, could he have realized it, the "simple religion" of Jesus (assuming again his historic existence) does "stand completely alone in the history of our race." But Milman would not like to hear us say how it has stood alone. It all too truly stands alone in that no other matches it for irrationality and unintelligibility of appreciable pertinence to the realities of the human problem. Certainly no other code of theological ideas in a civilized society has ever left its protégés so disastrously uninstructed on true meanings as has this simple system. It has from the start consisted of a set of persuasions foisted upon the acceptance of groups lacking the critical genius to challenge them. It was made up of a list of specific principles of faith pushed upon the attention of the lower orders, and since they lacked the acute discriminatory powers of educated minorities, accepted by them through mass hypnotism.

Milman admits much in saying that the character of Christianity advanced or receded pari passu with the vacillations and vicissitudes in the character of the populations among whom it was spread. Instead of reclaiming low-conditioned groups or ages to higher level, Christianity was itself transformed by the innate good sense of humanity to purer form. It seemed never able to rise higher than its human level. It did not come down as a gift from heaven to lift people up; people had to lift it up.

It is not true, therefore, to assert that no human conceptions could have produced Christianity. Not only was Christianity--meaning of course the counterfeit Christianism that Milman thinks was true Christianity--produced by human conceptions, but, as we assert and believe we have conclusively demonstrated, produced by the lowest and poorest of human conceptions. Better human conception produced other religions far superior to Christianity. The base Christianism, like most popular religionism, came from the bungling efforts of ignorant zealots to make something out of the debris of the wreckage of former high systems. The immemorial true Christianity that Augustine mentions

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was not of human conception; Milman is right if he is thinking of that Christianity. It was handed to early man by gods, demi-gods or humans developed to near divinity. But the Christianism that Milman is lauding to the skies was not this body of wisdom in its purity. It came to form entirely through the blundering efforts of purely human stupidity working over and utterly misshaping the former true religion. The Christianity of history, then, was indeed a human, all too human, product. It won the world--not of intelligence (it never has won that)--but of rabid mass emotionalism, by spreading a body of illusions aptly fitted to agitate the mediocre level of mentality.

Milman makes the point that the preachment of Christ was far beyond his own age. But what is there of notable significance in this? The high philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus are still far beyond the capabilities of the generality of men. Even after two thousand years of Christian illumination their marvelous revelations of consummate wisdom gather dust in library alcoves.

And one more gesture of emphasis is needed on the hackneyed theme of the characterization by such historians as Milman of the faith of Christianity as "simple." This pious assumption is so flagrant a misrepresentation of fact that its continuous flaunting by Christian pietists perpetuates popular delusion. It has often been declared so simple that any child can grasp it. Well then, the many Church Councils, especially those of the fourth century including the fateful one at Nicaea that turned the Christian world into a madhouse, should have been conducted by children, for the most learned of Christian theologians could reach no acceptable conclusions as to the basic doctrines of the faith, and the Arian controversy over the Trinity ran on with incredible rancor for two hundred years, and no one has ventured to pronounce the final judgment on it to this day. One hundred and thirty-seven delegates to a council that elected Pope Damasus were left dead after the battle over his election. And Gregory Nazianzen, when invited by Theodosius to attend a church Council, answered: "I will not sit in the seat of synods while geese and cranes confusedly wrangle." The "simplicity" of the Christian system was utterly unrecognized by the theological controversialists. Perhaps Milman and others mean that the turning of abstruse allegory and symbol into alleged "history" simplified understanding of what the Scriptures were descanting upon. If it is "simplification" to turn an abstract principle of truth into a man, then Christianity has "simplified" matters. But this one step has thrown the entire structure and pattern of true mean-

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ing completely out of focus and introduced inextricable confusion and irrationality into the system. This is the simplification that has resulted in eternal befuddlement. The greatest seminaries can not dispel the fog of bewilderment over the doctrinal meanings to this day.

Perhaps this is the fitting place to introduce the matter of the eternal attitude of reproach and contumely that the Christian Church has heaped endlessly upon the Roman Emperor Julian, nephew and successor of Constantine, upon whose head the Christian hostility has branded the stigma of enmity to the faith of Christ by fastening upon him the epithet of "the Apostate." In the minds of Christian children this monarch has been painted in the figure of a monstrous ogre, who savagely turned Christianity out after its victory and brought back the gods and idols of heathenism. A few writers, whom we shall quote, have taken a fair attitude toward this man, but on the whole the Church has not lifted a finger to correct a foul canard respecting this courageous and high-minded and gifted ruler of Rome. In few things has the narrow bigotry of Christian temper shown itself so viciously as in regard to this man and his effort to save even Christianity itself from the trend it was taking in the direction of supreme disaster.

The item can be introduced by the path that Farrar (Vol. I, 702) takes to open the discussion. He says it may be asked how it could be possible for a prince so able and so wise to have become so mastered at the age of twenty-four by a passion of hatred for such a faith as Christianity, and to undertake the "absurd" effort to bring back the temples and reinstitute the Pagan worship. (There are thousands of young college men and women today who have at the age of twenty-four developed a passion of hatred for Christianity; it was even easier for Julian in his day.) And Farrar supplies a not inconsiderable part of the answer when he says that it is not hard to see how little a man of his philosophical tastes would be attracted by the professed religion of such a man as his uncle, Constantine, through whose political conniving Christianity had been elevated to security and state sanction. For the record of this monarch had been blackened by the murder of the closest members of his family and a series of other crimes. Nor would Julian's acquaintance with Eusebius, Farrar adds, tend to inspire love for the new religion which that scheming prelate had so intrigued with Constantine to promote. Then Farrar ventures a mild exoneration of Julian by stating that "the character of Christianity had never been rightly presented to him." "The Christianity he had come to despise, the only Christianity he knew,--was mainly associated with

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a superstitious martyr-idolatry and a groveling relic-worship." (One might think that no further reason need be sought.) He quotes Julian as saying that the Galileans "abandon the worship of the gods to worship the moldering remains of the dead. They have filled everything with tombs and cenotaphs." "Bone-worshippers," he dubbed them. Eunapius had written: "These are the gods whom men worship nowadays, men called martyrs before whose bones, salted and pickled, the monks and the bishops lie groveling in the dust." The Christianity that Julian had to witness around him, Farrar continues, had already become degenerate. Its demoralization had kept pace with its prosperity. And, ever ready to whitewash Christianity and blacken Paganism, this great Christian authority has of course to transfer all blame back to Paganism: "Heathen influences had tainted its purity. It was infected with worldliness and corrupted by superstition." Julian, he says, despised the self-maceration of turbulent pretenders to saintliness, who in "proportion to their ignorance" were always convinced of their infallibility--the invariable picture.

"What especially disgusted him--the sin which then weakened and disgraced the Church, as it has weakened and disgraced it ever since--was the furious partisanship, the unscrupulous animosity, the savage hatred kindled among Christians by theologians and frequently by unimportant Christians. In vain he exhorted the Christians to tolerance and the mutually respected exercise of their religious freedom. He left it as his expression that 'the deadliest wild beasts are hardly so savage against human beings as most Christians are against each other.'"

But, fearing that he had damned Christianity too severely, the Canon has to redeem the situation by a renewed fling at Paganism,--still referring to Julian:

"He was not wise enough to see that Pagan women could not be like Christian women whom all admired, nor Pagan priests like the nobler portion of the Christian clergy, nor Pagan sophists like such men as Ambrose, Gregory and Basil. And thus he spoilt the whole meaning of his life by trying to overthrow the religion of eternity and to revive an idolatry so false, so empty and so deep that even in the grove of Daphne on the high festival of Apollo, in his most famous and enchanting shrine, no one was found to bring an offering to the God of Day except a single priest who brought a single goose."

Answer to this is that the thing that "spoilt the whole meaning of" Julian's life was an arrow shot into his chest no doubt by a Christian bigot while he was leading the Roman army heroically in battle, and

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which put an end to the young Emperor's magnificent effort to lift the Roman government out of foul political corruption by means of far-reaching and statesman-like reforms, by which he had already in the less than two years of his short reign made fine progress. Here would have been the world's supreme chance (even better than with the Stoic Marcus Aurelius) to try Plato's doctrine that the state should be ruled by philosophers. For Julian was a profound student and a genuine lover of the great Greek esoteric wisdom. Several works of his on philosophy sufficiently attest that.

The truth of this situation should be seen. Julian was not out to restore Pagan superstition; he was bent to restore philosophical understanding and end superstition, whether Pagan or Christian. He would naturally have been deeply grieved at the decay of the old religion through loss of competent understanding. He was well aware that the worship of the gods and the vogue of the myths had drifted lamentably far away from grasp of the lofty principles of true spiritual science and occult knowledge which alone can lend sound meaning to the rituals and symbolic representations of the old religion that Rome had inherited. How to revive not simply the outward forms and usages of the Pagan system, but to revitalize them with their deeper esoteric import to inspire educated worshippers, was unquestionably the heavy task and the earnest desire of this young Emperor-philosopher.

His death, instead of being fiendishly gloated over by Christians ever since and vengefully interpreted as the expression of the wrath of God against him for his apostasy from "the religion of eternity," should be sincerely mourned as indeed one of the most fatal losses in all history. His untimely death certainly was one of the most crucially decisive events in history, fully as critical as any of the ten great decisive battles, such as Marathon, Waterloo, Gettysburg and others. What can be said is that almost certainly Julian would have reestablished the Greek Academies, to reeducate an intelligentsia in the esoteric background of the Pagan religious rites and symbols, the annual festivals with their dramas. This would have restored, not Pagan idolatry, but the same true foundations of the primal Christianity that will now have to be restored if the system masquerading under the name of Christianity is to be redeemed to its true identity and made a power to benefit mankind. Julian was certainly saddened by the spectacle of the superstitious way in which the old Mystery dramas had been degraded to mechanical performance, devoid of the sanctity and cathartic power which the keen perception of the esoteric significance of every rite and symbol can

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alone impart to religious ceremonial. When Julian looked out from his throne and saw what was happening on both sides, the abject degradation of the old system into sheer bleak meaningless ritualism--the shell without the live kernel--and the frightful frenzy of the converts to the new wild cult of a personal Savior, he had to make a choice between the two and formulate a policy designed to bring the best results. Hope stirred in his mind of reenlightening the philosophical students first, then the upper ranks, and through them the populace, to the true meaning of the Pagan forms, to reform and respiritualize the great systems that he knew still held the germs of mighty truth. The rabid fury of unintelligent Christianity no doubt certified to him the hopelessness of gaining anything by compromise in that direction. Pagan deficiency might be corrected and redeemed; with Christian fanaticism nothing was possible but to try to stop it and let it die. He turned his hand to the salvation of the truth that lay obscured in Pagan religion.

It was beyond all argument the wisest, the only, course he could have taken, being the philosopher that he was. No one can say how well this noble effort would have succeeded if he could have held the Emperor's scepter for the seventy years of a normal life. It might have redeemed all subsequent history from a blackness that darkens the spirit merely to read it. But with a prescience born of dogmatic pomposity and self-preening arrogance, all Christian writers who have ventured a predication based on the possibilities of Julian's having lived to carry through his restoration of Paganism, have not hesitated to paint the consequences for the world in the most lowering and portentous colors. It would have been direful, they say, beyond anything imaginable.

One must ask how it could possibly have been as evil as the actual course of events that has been written in Thoth's eternal record of human action by the "victory" of a deformed, debased and debasing Christianism. We know that record; what the other might have been we can only speculate. A mind unbiased and equipped to speculate intelligently can hardly believe it could have been half so wicked as the history that Christianity wrote from the third to the twentieth century.

Driven surely by evidence of abuse and venality, Julian forbade the clergy to exercise their rights "which it must be confessed they had abused" (Farrar) of drawing up wills and receiving legacies. He would not allow Christian teachers to instruct children in the classical literature. He gave his reason as this:

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"To us belong eloquence, the arts of Greece, the worship of the Gods; to you nothing but ignorance and rusticity. Such is your wisdom."

Bishop Wordsworth said years ago that

"It was the worldliness, the pride, the ambition, the malignity, the craftiness and cruelty of some in high places in the Church which helped to make him an apostate."

And Farrar adds (I, 705):

"His chief hatred was concentrated, not upon the ordinary mass of Christians, but on their great leaders, such as Basil and Athanasius."

Niebuhr considered Julian's work Misapogon to be "one of the most elegant works which Greek literature produced in the period of its second life."

But Christian jealousy could not let Julian off with any ultimate judgment that would be fair and true. He had to be stigmatized and pigeon-holed in the category of enemies of the true faith and made to bear the slander. So Farrar says:

"He was brave, self-denying, indefatigable; except toward the Christians he behaved with clemency and justice."

"But the Christians could not forgive him for turning the world upside down in pursuit of a pestilential chimera."

This utterly blinks the actual fact that it was a combination of decaying Pagan intelligence and obliviousness to the meanings of their own formulations (which can be no worse than the failure of Christian mentality to understand their own creeds and doctrines and Scriptures even now) with the supreme violence of Christian bigots that had turned the world upside down and Julian was only aiming in the wisest way to set it right end up once more. For any one to designate his noble aim as the pursuit of a pestilential chimera is but to advertise ignorance.

"He wished to displace the religion which had brought into the world its holiest ideals and noblest progress and to bring it back to the worship of phantoms and demons who had been the patrons of every vice."

This again is pious bombast, utterly contradicted by the truth of history, if that can be given a hearing. But Farrar concludes:

"His unfortunate conception of substituting for Christianity a reformed Paganism, swathed in the illusionated mist of Neo-Platonic philosophy rendered unavailing alike his talents and his labors. Nothing could be achieved by that moonlight phantom."

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With a crude and fanatical Christianism now being sentenced with the verdict of two thousand years of ugly history, and a long-slandered Pagan philosophy, including principally this same Neo-Platonism, now once again being reconstituted in all its sublimity and splendor of luminous intelligence, perhaps it is a moot question which of the two will ultimately be declared the "moonlight phantom." Practically every honest and capable scholar who has made close acquaintance with both has given his verdict of superior excellence to the Pagan philosophies.

Gregory, the Church Father, remorselessly thrusts the soul of Julian into hell, while he summons from heaven the soul of the contemptible Constantius, "the most devout and Christ-loving of Emperors," to load him with praises. At Julian's death, over which all Christendom should be heavily ashamed,

"The theatres proclaimed the victory of the Cross amid their impure spectacles, and the churches and memorials of the martyrs were profaned by unseemly dances."

One must think that could Julian's spirit have witnessed this and commented upon it, his observation would likely have been: So they run true to form; they behave just like Christians.

Whether true or only another imaginative concoction of Christian vindictiveness, it is reported that Julian on his deathbed had uttered a prophecy that the Galilean would conquer, or that he had conquered. Fuller (History of Philosophy, 327) comments on this in connection with his statement that with the passing of Damascius and Simplicius Greek religion and philosophy died, and with its death the Judean fanaticism that so vexed him with its endless wranglings would go on unchecked, its only corrective having expired. If Julian uttered such a prophecy it can readily be seen as being the expression of the despair of his last moments in view of what would happen when his power to reform a world gone both degenerate and fanatical was withdrawn. Few champions of humanity in the line of history would have passed out so overwhelmed with the realization that their passing spelled infinite calamity to the world. He must have suffered the keenest anguish of regret that his end had come so prematurely. And Christian gloating over it ever since represents the base venting of the bigoted passions of mean souls wrought to hatred by distorted thinking. For true Christianity Julian's death was an infinite tragedy.