CHAPTER XIX

THEN IS OUR FAITH VAIN

The purpose of this work is to present evidence that the religion known as Christianity was based on fallacious foundations and then to trace the disastrous consequences of a faith so wrongly based. The material of the present chapter must be considered surely as constituting one of the most devastating exhibits of that evidence in the entire field. To the ordinary intelligent Christian devotee, with a mind resting confidently on the assurances provided in never-failing volume and certitude by the priests of orthodoxy, the data here adduced to undermine the historical authenticity and credibility of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth must come as indeed a most shattering explosion of the proverbial bombshell. For, as Paul says and theologians have seconded, the one final axis of support on which Christianity rests is the physical resurrection of the crucified Galilean from his hillside grave.

Of course, if the over-all contention is either admitted or demonstrated past controversy (as we claim it is) that the Gospels are what the vast body of evidence now flowing in from Egyptian research proves them to be, it is a labor of supererogation to disprove the historical authenticity of any "event" in the entire Gospel narrative, or in the "life" of Jesus. If he did not live at all, all such "events" are interdicted as history.

But the presentation now to be made of material pertaining to the alleged bodily resurrection of Jesus will be made on the basis of the assumed actuality of the man's existence. The matter can not be argued on any other basis. The point to be established is that even if he lived, his resurrection can by no means be accepted as having occurred in the way that common belief asserts that it did. Again it must be remarked that the testimony of a few scholars here presented can be only a minor fraction of what could be collated. Indeed it may not even be

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the strongest that might be available. But that which is given must be seen to be formidable in all conscience.

But the birth, the temptation, the baptism, the anointing, the election as Messiah, the exaltation to Logos status, the transfiguration, the crucifixion, the burial, resurrection and ascension are all involved in this conglomerate of data and resolution of their meaning. If one falls from history to drama, the rest fall with it. So it is important to note what Warschauer has to say as to the transfiguration (The Historical Life of Christ, p. 192.):

"But that core, the true character of what took place on that occasion, is hidden beneath thick layers of legendary and mythological matter, and it is only by patiently applying the solvent of cautious criticism that we shall arrive at what is historical, a most important result . . . unless we can accept this whole complex of miracles as fact, we shall have to try and explain what it is, other than fact, other than history."

This understanding and approach of Warschauer in this instance should have been the discerning, objective and working method of scholarship all along. His last sentence states the entire problem in a realm of fact and of history, the important business of the Christian system should have been, and must now be, to ascertain what they are other than fact, other than history. We have unfolded their other character in previous works and are continuing the revelation in this one. The everlasting difficulty and obstacle to success in this matter is the fact that not since Plato's day, or the days of ancient Egypt, perhaps, has any one been able to persuade the scholars that these hoary graphs and glyphs depicting the form and manner and meaning of all human history are themselves something other than history. They are the typal intimations of what all objective history deposits or builds into the human consciousness. They are the outward pictorial portrayals of all the mighty realizations, insights, knowings and understandings which take form in innermost awareness from man's total historical experience. They are this and nothing more. That scholarship has not seen and held them as such, but has mistaken them for only the mere ripple of action of a few humans, has been the supreme catastrophe of all the world, and the parent of unending evil and suffering. The obfuscation of the mind of half the world has been the cost-price of that failure of insight, that dearth of sagacity, that sloth of the herd instinct.

There is presented here exactly what Warschauer prescribes as the

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solvent of what to him seem like insuperable riddles,--"cautious criticism." As far as our reading has gone, this is the only instance in which we have noted the employment of criticism on the part of orthodoxy that is "cautious" enough to envisage a way out of confusion to land on sane ground. The critique we shall here introduce is not our own, but that of a scholar whom Conybeare in his own history of criticism rates as perhaps the greatest of modern theological critics and exegetists. He is the German Johannes Weiss and our excerpts are taken from his two volumes on The History of Primitive Christianity. We paraphrase Weiss' pages of text with the utmost care to give his conclusions with exactitude.

There is not a single trace, he writes, in St. Paul of the now common idea derived from the Gospels and the Book of Acts that through his resurrection Jesus returned to the conditions of earthly life, not one trace of the idea that he ate and drank with his disciples; or that he arose in and as the same body of flesh which he had occupied before the crucifixion. When Paul speaks of the resurrection he is not talking at all of a purely physical resuscitation, as of a drowned or deceased person returning to the same life in the same body. For the Apostle Jesus' resurrection carries the identical significance of his glorification and exaltation, which are processes of spiritual transfiguration in the inner consciousness, affecting the body by charging it with a higher dynamic, but in no wise taking it out of its sphere of existence in the area of natural law. His occasional reference to the resurrection without the remotest allusion to a physical resurgence of a deceased corpus points to this idea.

That the words translated "raised," "rose again," "made alive again" by act of God, "rose up," "stood up," "came forth from their graves" to return once more to life upon earth, carried in the general mind of antecedent time the connotation of a resurrection of the physical body after death, is clearly established by Weiss. This meaning, he says, is the essential feature in the popular notion of the resurrection. So the people who looked upon Jesus as John the Baptist risen from the dead, who had now resumed his work upon earth with renewed vigor (Mark 6:14). The popular conception was that a Messianic figure--even a Lazarus raised from the dead--having passed through the halls of death and overcome its power, would live and reign upon earth for a thousand years, as Revelation (20:4) states the idea. When this common concept of the resurrection was now likewise applied to Jesus, one might expect that it would be carried further to the idea that he

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should remain upon earth and here establish his Messianic kingdom.

Weiss then inserts in a note that if there ever was a pre-Christian Jewish doctrine of the death and resurrection of the Messiah, it can only have looked forward to some such continuation of his life upon earth--"but this was suppressed by the Christians in view of the historical facts," Jesus having tarried only forty days on earth after his translation to spiritual state. This indefinite continuation on earth after his exaltation, says Weiss, is just what did not happen. Jesus did not remain on earth. Hence the popular concept of the resurrection does not apply really to the case of Jesus. This is a momentous pronouncement put forth by an eminent Christian theologian. It is a telling blow straight at the heart of the Christian faith.

It is the Book of Acts which recognizes and removes this disharmony, Weiss continues, when it states (I:9 ƒ.) that after forty days of earthly life the Risen One ascended upon the clouds towards heaven. Thus a second miracle is added to that of the resurrection. It is certainly noticeable that Paul has heard nothing from the primitive community about the ascension as a special miracle in addition to the subjective consummation of the apotheosis of the human mind in its final union with the Divine. Indeed, says Weiss, "strictly taken, resurrection and exaltation are mutually exclusive ideas." To be sure they are, if "resurrection" is made to refer to a physical reanimation of a corpse, and "exaltation" is a psycho-spiritual regeneration. These two things are worlds apart. What Weiss is saying is that as Paul and Acts speak of them, they are not thus differentiated, but are in essence one and the same thing. Take "resurrection" in its obvious non-physical sense, and it reads "exaltation."

Weiss says it is significant that the resurrection narratives in the Gospels know nothing about an ascension; only John (20:17) states that the risen Lord had not yet gone up to the Father, though even here nothing is said of this final exaltation. On the contrary, a conception is reflected in the stories of Matthew, Luke and John which is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of resurrection: Jesus appears as the one who is already exalted. In Matthew (28:20) and elsewhere Jesus' manifestations are described in terms which imply that he is no longer confined within space and time, but is a spirit free from the burdens of the physical, rather than merely a person who has returned to life. The implications are all metaphysical and none of them physical. He appears suddenly among his own, passes through

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closed doors, disappears as suddenly again; will not permit any one to touch him, and breathes upon his disciples like a bodiless spirit. In these features of the narrative is reflected the early idea that Jesus "appeared" to his disciples as the Heavenly One, visible only for brief instants.

A footnote here calls attention to the fact that in the oldest texts it reads simply that "he parted from them," whereas in later texts there have been added the words "and was carried up into heaven." Weiss adds in another note that the Passion and Resurrection narratives in Luke have been more "touched up" and "revised" by harmonists than the earlier chapters have been. Here is seen the work of those Christian hands that had to scratch about in a hurry to make allegory read like history. It is important to note this. The evidence of this literary skulduggery is hidden, of course, but Weiss, like Conybeare, here testifies to it. The manipulation can be traced in thousands of deletions, interpolations, changes, twisted translations.

Then the learned German scholar recalls the passages in which the disciples, Thomas especially, are convinced of Jesus' actual corporeality. In explanation of this apparent contradiction with the indications of his purely spirit-form status, he adduces that these passages were "probably added by the redactor." Peter's sermon (Acts 10:40 ƒ.) emphasizes the complete restoration of his former corporeality; "these are properly the resurrection narratives, whose motive is to defend the disciples against the charge of having seen a 'ghost.'"

The first group of narratives, Weiss conceives, spoke out spontaneously and exuberantly the reaction of the disciples and the women to the marvel and miracle of what they had borne witness to. A second group, however, reflected a sober prosaic "second thought" about it all, and endeavored to put it all back on a footing of positive actuality. So Weiss is forced to say that the great question is precisely whether or not the "appearances" proved what they were supposed to do.

Popular ideology about the spirits of the departed would credit the disciples with having witnessed a series of phantom apparitions of their deceased Master. Therefore, Weiss thinks, the writers of the resurrection narrative set themselves to refute these interpretations that would prevail roundabout; and so they placed special emphasis upon the items accentuating Jesus' physical realness. Hence Weiss characterizes the resurrection recitals as apologetic survivals of the controversy over the question whether or not a miracle like the resuscitation of a dead person was possible. It was a play to add to the great reputation of

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Jesus as a miracle-worker by the climactic miracle of effecting his own return from the grave. The Jews would not have regarded it as extraordinary or unnatural for the spirit of Jesus to have reincarnated; but for the Hellenistic populations this explanation would have been difficult, says Weiss, and Acts (17:31 ƒ.) expresses this difficulty. "Accordingly these massive resurrection stories must first have originated upon Hellenic soil, for the purpose of missionary apologetics," is the great scholar's conclusion.

Then he argues the point that the failure of the women to report to the disciples what the angel sitting in the empty tomb had told them--"He is not here; he is risen"--constitutes a datum of weighty significance, as it indicates the existence of a faith in the resurrection of Jesus "without any reference whatever to the empty grave."

The likelihood that the disciples could come and steal the body of Jesus from the tomb while it was guarded by the Roman sentries is discounted by Weiss. He credits this story to outright "tampering with facts." The story, he says, was expanded as a legend in the spirit of the times, and accretions were gradually made to the original narrative. A long account taken from the Gospel of Peter, going into detail as to a very different series of events at the resurrection, is given by Weiss. His conclusion is that the whole story in Matthew is one of an overworked imagination, sweeping traditional imaginative embellishments up to a veritable paroxysm of fanciful elaboration. He says it is the creation of unfettered fancy, with a specific apologetic motive. Even though, he argues, it may be true that some experience of the excited women, particularly Mary Magdalene, gave the first impetus to this further development--the empty tomb--"it is nevertheless clear that we are here dealing with a legendary and unreliable tradition." These are momentous words to come from a leading Christian commentator. They put all Christianity in jeopardy.

He then builds a new and different thesis of the resurrection upon a quite possible and plausible interpretation of the word "risen." We have now seen, he expounds, that from the "appearances" it by no means follows that the "Jesus is risen" cry of the angel in the tomb has to refer to the revivification and disappearance of the physical body. It can, and far more probably does, refer to his exaltation to spiritual heavens, which Paul would make equivalent to the ascension. It bespoke his transfiguration, his glorification in a world of transcendent being.

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Then, says Weiss, and very pertinently, a further and final conclusion forced upon us is that the doctrinal statement, "on the third day he rose again," does not rest upon fact, but reflects a theory which was originally simply added on to the fact of the appearances. Where did it come from, he inquires. And the statement itself gives clear answer: "according to the Scriptures" Jesus must have risen on the third day. Now that Jesus had appeared to his disciples, they recalled the various Old Testament "prophetic texts," which said that the Messianic redeemer would arise from death on the third day. For a long time now it has been suspected, declares Weiss, that this phrase "on the third day," instead of being derived from facts of experience, really rested upon entirely different considerations, chiefly upon the general expectation, based on immemorial mythical tradition, that a resurrection would naturally take place on the third day. (That Weiss is completely correct in this reasoning is incontestably established by volumes of scholarly testimony, but most of all by a great work dealing with ancient festivals, The Day of Yahweh, by William A. Heidel.) The instant a veritable survival or reappearance of a figure believed to be the Messiah seemed to be asserted or at any rate bruited about as a fact, it would be taken as dogmatic certainty that it was a fulfilment of the ancient prophecy, and the third day would inevitably be made the time of his arising. And so it came about that this time period was included in the earliest creed, even though it did not strictly accord with the experience of the disciples, the time being in the assumed historical case of Jesus only two days. "That we have to do with a doctrinal statement rather than an incontestable matter of fact is evident from" this "third day" phrase in the story.

Why was the inclusion of this phrase so imperative that it was applied to Jesus, "even though properly it did not relate to him at all?" Weiss again asks.

"For not only did he not 'rise again' in the real sense, i.e., to take up earthly life once more, nor did this take place either 'on the third day' or 'after three days.' Where did it originate? Since everything took place according to the Scriptures, as St. Paul says, it is to the Scriptures that we must turn."

And then he cites its location in Hosea 6:I ƒ.

It can be added here that the phrase not only is found in the Hebrew Old Testament, but that it was extant in the general field of ancient religion and always in an allegorical reference.

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Accordingly, Weiss continues, some writers have supposed that the early Christians were following a popular tradition, not found in the Old Testament, but perhaps in some Apocryphal writings or merely in oral traditions (why not in both?), and thence read it into the passage in Hosea. The same scholars have pointed out that in the neighborhood of Palestine at the time of Jesus there was a widespread cult and myth of a dying and rising god known among the Babylonians as Tammuz, among the Phoenicians as Adonis, among the Egyptians as Osiris and among the Romans as the Phrygian Attis. Weiss ventures the daring suggestion that "it is really an extraordinary parallel that according to Plutarch (De Iside et Osiride, 13:39) the day commemorating the death of Osiris was the seventeenth of Athyr, the day of the recovery the nineteenth--that is, the third day; and that the Roman observance of the death of Attis came on the twenty-second of March, his restoration on the twenty-fifth (three days). These parallels and their congruity with the passage from Hosea,--and also with the earliest Christian creed--are scarcely accidental.

(We pause to say that here, from a Christian writer, is the full answer to Conybeare's challenge as to how a Pagan god-cult could have influenced early Christianity. Further evidences of a similar nature are to be found everywhere. Coming from a fellow-Christian critic, it should have weight.)

The simplest explanation, Weiss goes on, is that in all these references the three days merely designate the briefest possible period of time. This matches in childish naiveté and ignorance the many other guessing evasions of Christian writers as to the meaning of the several numbers repeated in the Bible. For the sake of exhibiting the utter imbecility of even the best Christian scholarship in regard to Pagan systematism, especially in their employment of numbers to designate the most basic cosmic processes and relations, it is well to cite Weiss' sentences in which he glaringly advertises his lack of all true understanding:

"Accordingly the three days were never more nor less than a popular expression for a very brief interval of time, only during which the resurrection could take place; and if the same period is presupposed in the myths of Attis and Osiris (perhaps once likewise in that of Adonis?) it was for exactly the same reason."

This is the most astonishing absurdity, and coming from nearly the most eminent of Christian scholars, it reveals what the effort to re-

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build true conceptions has to combat. As before briefly hinted, the three days in the tomb of "death" are the Pagan mythicization of the period during which the sparks of divine consciousness are buried in a condition termed "death" in and under the limiting deadening thraldom of matter, inhibiting while giving implementation to its higher diviner powers and faculties. The Scriptures state that God sends down to death and he raises up again, and that he does this in three days. Could Weiss have been unmindful of such a passage as this one?--"As Jonas was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the bowels of the earth." The three "days" really in cosmic reference allude to the three long aeons spent by the soul of life in peregrinating upward through the mineral, the vegetable and the animal kingdoms, the fourth bringing it to the human in man. Is it too much to ask that eminent Christian thinkers should give some rational evidence that they know the simplest rudiments of the true interpretation of their own Scriptures?

Weiss is so far "liberal" in his mood that he thinks the Galilean disciples of Jesus could even have known something of the Adonis or the Osiris cults!

"Hellenistic cults of this sort--for example in Byblus, where a center of the Adonis cult was to be found--lay, so to speak, before the very doors of Galilee. But it is doubtful if they would have had sufficient interest in these cults and in the ideas they enshrined to use them in explaining their own faith. It is much more likely that they would have gone out of their way to avoid such analogies."

We have no way of knowing how rabidly a group of ignorant peasants in Galilee might by this time have reacted to the mythical-mystical forms of Pagan expressions of lofty cosmic and human truth, which it can safely be presumed had long ago been turned by popular stupidity into outlandish literal fol-de-rol. But that they could have been standing almost entirely detached from and untouched by the cult representations and cult systems that, instead of being sporadic and occasional, were quite universal (esoterically) in those days, is another of the follies that obsess Christian minds. But Weiss continues:

"Now that Jesus was dead and had appeared to his followers, the teaching was transferred to him, its fulfillment was recognized in his career, and as a consequence the whole tradition of the empty tomb took form. But rather than assume the existence of this hypothetical secret tradition,

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it would seem wiser to suppose that the early Christians found in the passage from Hosea a prediction of the death and resurrection of the Messiah, and then spun out from this the whole doctrine of the resurrection."

This singular mélange of partial truth and clinging mistaken view practically admits the basic premises of our work. Such authors as Weiss and others representing Christian views are cited in quantity in these pages, not so much for what they know as for what they admit, what slips out from them in unwary moments. For us to print herein the blank bald statement that the early Christians concocted, fabricated the story of the resurrection out of elements of ancient Pagan tradition, and that indeed there was no physical resurrection at all, that the entire legend was the product of the excited fancy of some Galilean peasants who, witnessing some spiritistic phenomena, to save face in the community then wove the narrative of a supernatural event that was to electrify sixty generations of world life, would bring down upon us the virulent condemnation of the orthodox Christian world. But what will that Christian world do when it finds this very same statement pronounced by one of its own leading expositors? Such products of modern liberated criticism catch the Christian system on the two horns of the great dilemma: it must either repudiate its own grounds and supports, or repudiate its best spokesmen. And in either case it stands weakened, if not mortally wounded.

Concluding the case Weiss says that whatever view one may hold of the source of the phrase, it is of first importance to recognize that "raised again on the third day" was not the original language of the Christian faith, nor did it rest upon historical facts, but was afterwards added to the earlier accounts of the appearances, and then in time produced the whole series of Easter stories.

So we have out of the mouths of Christianity's own most studious commentators at last an admission of what must now be seen to be the truth, that the very corner stone of the edifice of this great religious persuasion is a tale as empty of historical reality as the tomb it invented for the story, a fantastic fiction "spun" out of material wholly imaginative and never based on fact. And even the fabrication of the canard is admitted to have been perpetrated with fraudulent intent and for purposes of deception. So at last we may know that the alleged crowning event in all history, the world-transfiguring miracle of Easter, stands revealed in all its naked poverty as a shrewdly concocted miracle designed to hypnotize the credulous minds of ignorant millions.

Weiss' final conclusion as to the true character of the "appearances"

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of Jesus after the "return from the grave" must not be omitted. Put in brief form, it is that the disciples and the women saw not any actually rearisen physical body of the Lord, but the wraith of his spiritual body. We have the testimony and often the evidence of both Spiritualists and non-Spiritualists to the effect that in thousands of instances the spirit-form of deceased people, in dress, feature and action fully like the persons while in life, appeared to them, talking and even revealing facts of vital importance known only to them but proved true by eventualities, and appearing through closed doors and as miraculously vanishing.

In March of 1942 there appeared in the daily issue of the Atlanta (Georgia) Constitution a brief news item stating that a citizen of that town had been murdered; that no clues could be located; but that a week or so after the event the little eight-year-old daughter of the murdered man came down to her mother in the morning saying, "Mother, Daddy came and stood by my bed last night and told me who killed him." She revealed the names of two men only slightly known to the family; the police called them in and upon grilling they confessed and implicated a third man. This obviously true event can be matched by thousands.

If Weiss is correct in his elucidation of what he conceives to be true in the resurrection story in the Gospels, then there occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, on a March morning in 1942 an event fully as important and as momentous for all human history as the alleged first Easter miracle of the year--unknown. For this modern event and that ancient one were completely identical. Some people back there reported they saw a spirit-form of a recently deceased person; the Atlanta girl reported the same thing, and, moreover, adduced evidence which under test corroborated the reality of her vision! In this respect her experience stands as even more veridical and trustworthy than that in ancient Galilee. Weiss has spent much of a lifetime trying to find proofs of the reality of the Judean report, and apparently came off rather discomfited.

In the finale, the mountain of exuberant Christian faith which labored to bring forth the consummative event in all human history, ended by producing a mouse in the shape of just another commonplace instance of a phenomenon repeated almost daily in the seances of the semi-despised Spiritualism. A dozen magazines over the last century have been filled every month with generally well-attested cases of the same kind. Camille Flammarion, some forty years ago the

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world's leading astronomer, spent over fifty years of his life in collecting data now contained in three volumes of authentic cases of the utmost remarkable character in this field. The upshot of the matter is that the Gospels, the rock of the Christian faith, are left with no more reality to them than appertains to a wraith. They become the ghost of an alleged salvation.

His investigations, honest if somewhat distorted in points, evidently shook Weiss' own confidence as a Christian. For he sees the possibility of a fearful realization that our own resurrection may go out with that of Jesus! "But does not our own resurrection depend upon the Easter miracle? According to the belief of Paul and the early Christians it does." Jesus' rising again ended for us the fearsome power of death (Col. 2:15).

"For the first time one went down to the realm of Hades who could not be held there (Acts 2:31); henceforth his power was broken and would be forever destroyed at the end of the age (I Cor. 15:26)."

(All this of course is to be seen in revised light if the spiritual-body view of the resurrection is taken instead of the corporeal one. If, as Paul says, the soul is "sown" in a natural body and raised in and as a spiritual body, resurrection thus rationally understood is a certainty for all, and no one need be alarmed about what happened or did not happen back in Palestine in the long ago. But we must stay with Weiss on the ground he works from.)

So he hedged from the view of Christian gullibility and erroneous imagination to a sane retrenchment of his own faith in the meaning of Easter:

"But as for ourselves we must admit we can no longer think in such terms. To be exact, the majority of Christians at the present time do not really believe in a resurrection of the flesh on the last day. . . ."

This is astounding, for its utterance points to a Christianity that faces the decline and fall of its sway in this world. Christianity, as constituted for seventeen hundred years, stands or falls with the resurrection, and that conceived in the special sense of the corporeal re-arising from death of a man, Jesus, on a given morning about the year eight, or ten or twelve B.C. Now, as Warschauer did for so many of the Gospel incidents, Weiss comes along and wipes away the resurrection in precisely that special sense, its corporeal reality. He reduces it to the category of what can be ordinarily seen to occur in a vast run of phenomena following death--the visible appearance of the spirit-

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body. If, then, Christianity is to survive, it must do so by conforming its basic phenomena and claims to that which is normal, dropping that which is abnormal, miraculous, supernatural. But this again is just what Weiss affirms it can not do. For he says:

"Once more, however, the old objection arises: we must avoid placing the eternal life of Jesus on a level with that of other departed souls. He can not be thought of as one among many." [Yet how effusively, to nausea sometimes, the writers play up the divine Master's being so wonderfully "human," so like unto us in all respects, save sin!]

"For him, some one will say, there must be reserved a special place. Had we no other evidence of his victory over death than that of our own departed, the whole thing would fall into uncertainty. This objection really touches the essential point. If his immortality is no different from ours, it can scarcely be used any longer as proof of our hope for the life to come. The situation must in fact be reversed: if and in so far as we believe that we shall live after death, though we, too, like him must die, then and to that extent we can believe in his continued existence. And this, for many persons, is simply not enough. They demand objective irrefutable proof that there is an eternal life. Hence they go back to the old view, that the tangible irrefutable miracle of the physical resurrection of Jesus provides the indispensable support both of their own faith and that of Christendom generally. Unfortunately it is to be feared that this support will never again appear as firm and immovable as it did to our forefathers. In some form or other, even among the most ardent believers, doubt has begun to undermine the narratives of the Gospels. And when we are admonished that we must 'believe' these narratives, the admonition lacks sense and meaning today. The word 'believe' is misused in such a connection. It is simply misapplied to a fact in the past. Either a fact is established beyond all doubt--in which case there is no need to 'believe' it; or else it is uncertain--in which case to believe it, that is, to suppress and silence doubt, would be dishonorable. In this case it would be especially perverse to attempt to base a conviction of one's own eternal life upon a 'faith' in certain facts, when, although faith had been wrested from doubt, the facts seemed forever insecure. Alas, how easily the structure may collapse and how frail it really is, even for many who think they hold the true faith. Our belief in life to come, if it is to have permanence, must have other foundations than some narrative of events full of contradictions and impossibilities. But even were the Gospel narratives far less contradictory and far more reliable than they are, our faith could not be based on such a foundation. For in so serious a question as this, one can decide and believe only upon the basis of his own experience and conviction, not upon that of the strange and--so far as we are concerned--unexaminable experiences of others long ago. What St. Paul and the Gospels really tell us, in the end, is only this: That the disciples were certain that the Lord was still alive; and that their experiences were so overwhelming and convincing that they based their whole lives henceforth upon them."

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(Yet thousands of people today, just as sincere and in general far more intelligent than those hypothetical or mythical Galilean fishermen, testify to experiences of the identical sort that are just as overwhelming and convincing to them, and orthodox Christianity puts them down as crack-brained enthusiasts and denounces them in a thousand sermons and books.)

And then, if we can take Weiss' words for what they logically connote, we see him tearing down not only the supports of the resurrection, but those of the two other events that are of equal significance to Christian schematism, the crucifixion and the birth itself. For he says that, although the many divergences or contradictions found in the stories in the Gospels may be explained as perfectly natural and characteristic of human testimony in general, it may be worth noting that in quantity, range and variety "there is more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than for his death--not to mention his birth." Having shown how meager in fact is the evidence for the resurrection, how much less substantial must then be the credibility of the birth and the death stories!

Further disenchantment of the whole fairy belief in the resurrection arises from his conclusion on the statement that at the same time certain ideas reflected in the Gospels, as for example that of St. Luke (24:39), where Jesus asked the disciples to behold his hands and his feet, "for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have" (unless, Weiss adds, in a note, this is one more interpolation!), "will have to be simply abandoned. The defenders of the traditional ecclesiastical view have no alternative but to choose one or the other of these two conceptions, for there is no unity whatsoever in the Biblical teaching on this point," i.e. whether Jesus rose in the flesh or only in spirit.

That there is indeed no unity whatsoever in the Biblical teaching is amply evident if one reads Weiss' own listing of the discrepancies, divergences, contradictions and inconsistencies in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. We cite some of these for the sake of opening the eyes of readers--or rather of non-readers--of the Bible to the unreliability of the resurrection story as given to certify the alleged climactic event in world history. Weiss writes that the reader

"will therefore scarcely recognize the contradictions between narratives--e.g. that according to John, Mary Magdalene alone came to the grave, and that according to the other Gospels there were three women present; or that according to Mark the women made no report to the disciples, while according to John, Peter and the beloved disciple ran to the grave

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as soon as they were called; or that according to Luke the disciples did not believe, while according to Matthew they did just as they were bidden by the women; or that according to Luke and John, they remained in Jerusalem, according to Matthew they returned to Galilee; or that the presence of a watch at the grave, related in detail by Matthew, is simply excluded by Mark, Luke and John; or that the angel is absent in John, while Luke has two of them--and so on."

"The risen Lord appears in one passage as completely incorporeal, though not invisible, while in another he is represented as eating and drinking; and then once more he becomes spirit-like again, untouchable, emerging suddenly out of invisibility and as swiftly disappearing"--

precisely as all wraiths of deceased persons do at the conventional seances of Spiritualists, or as in the well-established case of the deceased wife of the eminent Dr. Russell H. Conwell, founder of the Baptist Temple and Temple University in Philadelphia, who saw and conversed with his departed but very present wife Sarah every morning for six months in succession, the apparition revealing to him in two instances the whereabouts of his Civil War discharge papers and his gold pen which he had had another person hide in a place unknown to him, to test her.

It is submitted here that this array of contradictions in the stories of four narrators seriously invalidates the authenticity of the event basic for Christianity's existence. What credence can be put in a recital of alleged facts as jumbled as this? A great Christian expositor gives up in despair.

We hold that the general intelligence and accuracy of the critique of this eminent Christian exegetist virtually rings the death knell of a Christianism that is build on a thousand untenable conceptions. He undermines the one uniquely vital and essential foundation of the Christian system. The one thing it claimed to offer humanity that no other system ventured to hold forth was the historical reality of God who had himself come in the person of his only Son to demonstrate and certify to mankind the conquest of death, in all its physical realness, through his rising again bodily out of the grave. On this platform of asserted veridical demonstration the Christian faith was founded and has drawn the allegiance of untold millions over twenty centuries. Now a keen-minded scholar, himself of the faith, looks discreetly over the evidence and finds that, in the form so long claimed and asseverated, this demonstration never occurred! Unless this great German scholar's piercing determinations can be overruled and shown to be erroneous, the result of his searchings means nothing less than the end

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of any claims to uniqueness by Christianity among religions. It logically means the end of Christianism, known as Christianity.

But in one sense, ironically enough, the resurrection stories in the Gospels do prove the uniqueness of Christianity, indeed its very exceptional uniqueness. It was catastrophically unique in that it alone of religions translated the universal ancient allegorization of the rising again of the soul that was represented, like the seed in the earth, as going to its death in its incarnation in the grave or tomb of the body and rising to a new cycle of life in its springtime, in the unthinkably stupid sense of the physical arising of the human fleshly body after death from a rock-hewn grave on a Judean hillside. This is the uniqueness of Christianity that earned for it the sublime contempt of every man of rational intelligence when it was propagated among the dull-minded rabble of the Roman Empire. This is the uniqueness of a Christianism that could survive only by virtue of the hypnotic inculcations of a designing priestcraft in the uncritical minds of the millions down through the Dark Ages. And it is the uniqueness of a Christianity that, as light is born again and intelligence can be asserted to dominate the public mind, will be most heartily ashamed of its galling notoriety for having fallen into the most fatal of all blunders in history. Christianity is the one unique religion of all time, the only one to mistake the Christ's exaltation and transfiguration in inner consciousness for a physical resurrection and ascension.

It must be indeed insufferable to Christian "pride" and presumption that Weiss has the bluntness of honesty to stand forth and say, in the finale, that "if only one could see into the hearts of men, and if every one did his best to get his ideas fully clarified, it would probably turn out that no one really" believes in the physical resurrection of the personalized Christ anyway. And so it eventuates that the world, according to hundreds of Christian books, has been saved from Pagan heathenism, from Stygian spiritual darkness and from a welter of moral depravity by the power of a doctrine, based on alleged historical reality, which turns out to have been an unfounded hoax from beginning to end. This is the picture of history, as claimed by Christian zealotry on the one side and then analyzed by Christian mentality and honest scholarship on the other. Christian thinkers, using the liberty of conscientious criticism that was itself wrested from tyrannous ecclesiasticism at the cost of oceans of blood, have now come along and knocked down the structures of ignorant assumption set up by purblind zealots toying with a truth they could not understand. At

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no time has this arrogant impostor, Christianism, been consistent or harmonious with itself. It has ever been a welter of elements diverse and discordant, and has lived only by the suppression of its discrepancies, its inconsistencies and its falsities.

If we were asked to point out an aspect of Weiss' presentation that displays in most flagrant form the weakest element in the Christian conceptions he deals with, perhaps the central weakness in all Christian theory, we would point to the sentences in which he says that the Christian can hardly stomach the acceptance of the appearances of the risen Jesus as "on a level with that of other departed souls." His survival and visible appearance from the grave "can not be thought of as only one among many." For him there must be reserved a special place and a special and unique form of immortality, which common man does not share. Other souls of deceased people have come back to talk with those left behind. But this will not do for the Christian, whose only satisfaction must be nourished and fed upon the unchallenged uniqueness and superiority of his system, and its Christ, over all others. The Christian must see his belief and its demonstrations declared and acknowledged the paragon, the one alone crowned with complete perfection. Jesus must stand as the nonpareil among Messiahs and his resurrection must be nonpareil among phenomena.

To our mind nothing so baldly reveals the essential smallness and basic error of Christian attitudes and set of mind as this blindness in regard to such a central dogma as the resurrection. To us it advertises the total unbalance and eccentricity of the fundamental postulates on which it rests. When a cult philosophy leads its followers for many centuries so far off the track of normal understanding as to indoctrinate or hypnotize them with the idea that a scheme of elucidation designed to enlighten and exalt mankind loses all its virile and beneficent power because it brings and applies its meaning-references within the range and sphere of phenomena attainable or demonstrable in man's own normal area of accomplishment, that teaching, it is submitted, has twisted the human mind awry to follow an errant trail. Again, a religion that conditions the minds of its hallucinated devotees to the idea that for a demonstration to command the awe and reverence and obedience of mankind, it must manifest a power to work miracles whole worlds removed above the level of human achievement, that it degrades itself in human estimation by deploying these powers on the level on which man lives his common life, must be convicted of an erroneous principium of both psychology and practical theology at

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one stroke. It is a question of the localization of pragmatic values, whether an exemplary demonstration of miraculous, or at any rate divine power is made operable on the level of man's experience and attainment, or raised to inaccessible dimensions above his reach.

Christianity has felt that it has had to keep its unique Son of God so much a paragon, so far above the level of humanity, that to speak of man's being on the same plane with it is to besmirch and blaspheme the holy majesty of it. Morbid and maudlin psychologizations from the start, habitually reanimated in every generation of Christian manipulation, have saturated the Christian mind with the thought that if the personal Christ demonstrated only what man can himself demonstrate, all the romantic halo of heroic glory is at one fell stroke disenchanted in a deflation of the Gospels to just common experience we all have or may have. Right here, if we can grasp and hold it, is the nub of the great crucial question of the historical blessing or scourge of the Christian system. The crucial point lies right in the discernment that the psychological blessedness of the system, or any system, inheres in its indoctrinating the mind with the idea that the supreme excellence of a divine exemplar resided in its demonstration or exemplification of the very thing that was attainable or demonstrable by man! A divine Savior who came to dazzle man with the demonstration of supernal powers and excellence far beyond man's possible reach left man standing agape with awe, but hopeless. To show him the glorious unattainable is to tease him with the proof of his own inferiority. The religion that will grip and arouse him to hopeful achievement is that which will present to him for his emulation an idea of beauty and splendor as his own attainable goal. Weiss could not see, as the others could not see, that the supreme utility and beneficence of the Christian system would be enormously enhanced in the world if any historical certitude could be adduced to support the Gospel narrative that the actual spirit-form or spiritual body (which St. Paul says we all have) of the crucified Jesus appeared to the disciples and to Paul in absolute living demonstration of the survival and reality of his soul from out the tomb of annihilation. And they can not see that the glory and the worth of this proof would lie directly in the fact that it took place not in any super-cosmic or supernatural fashion, but precisely in the way that it could be expected to occur to all of us. Weiss thinks its power over the human imagination would lie in its total and utter uniqueness as of a thing far above the experience of ordinary humans. The truth is that its dynamic weight for humanity would in-

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here precisely in its promise of identity with our own attainable experience. Man will be allured to higher life by the revelation and demonstration of the glory that is open to him; he will gape coldly at the glory of the unattainable. Christianity robbed him of his birthright all through. It gave all to Jesus, leaving common mortals standing in poverty. This false religion took the path of immeasurable calamity for the West when it instilled the general idea that the resurrection, as also the transfiguration and the exaltation, was anything other than the survival in elevated ranges of consciousness of the divine soul, the Christ, that till death inhabits the mortal body of every son of earth. It opened the path to this calamity when it took that mode of interpretation of its Scriptures which made the allegories of experience, universal to all men, referable to only one historical figure. This blunder made the experience, dramatized in all old Scriptures, Judean and isolated, not universal and ecumenical. It must be put down in the most forthright terms that, beyond any other religion on earth Christianity has afflicted its devotees with the direst poverty of spirit, of lively incentive and of cheering hope, by stealing from the consciousness of its people the one ideological factor of supreme value,--the knowledge that the Christ demonstrated for us not his life as infinitely remote from ours, but our life lived by him in its finished perfection. When Weiss and all Christians can come to see that the glorious truth of the original truly Christian resurrection lies in the fact that the glory of Easter is precisely the same glory that we shall demonstrate in the continuity of the soul's life out of the body, clothed in its shining vesture of spiritual light, then will a transfiguring motive begin to exercise its beneficent sweetness through the offices of a regenerated Christianity. The strength and living dynamism of the Easter allegory will only begin to work as the spiritual leaven in the lives of humans when it is again seen, as the ancients saw it, that the dramatized Christ resurrection was typal of the divine resurrection of the soul of every man. Humanity will begin to reinaugurate its Golden Age when it is realized that the essential crucial point of all present history is not whether Christ was resurrected in ancient Judea, but whether he is being resurrected in human consciousness today, in humanity collectively. Christianity of today misses the point and focus, or the locale, of vital reference by some two thousand years. Its power will stream forth again to irrigate the conscious desert of mortal life when it is known factually, empirically that the Jesus resurrection was exactly the model set by sage dramatic art to quicken our understanding of

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that very mode of resurrection and return to the Fatherland of a higher kingdom which we will experience following bodily demise. It supreme magnificence of inspiring meaning must be found precisely in the fact that Jesus' resurrection was right on the level of our own prospective experiences. Thus only can it have exhilarating, thrilling significance--for us.

In II Timothy Paul warns the brethren to beware of false teachers, especially Hymenaeus and Philetus, "who concerning the truth have erred greatly, saying that the resurrection is past already." Here was Christianity's clue in its own Scriptures to the truth of the resurrection doctrine, could it have thrown off the bondage of old traditional falsities and warped ideations long ingrained in theology. Paul's statement repudiates the historicity of the Gospel resurrection, as Weiss also has done. The Apostle says it is wrong to think that whatever may have happened on the first Easter morn fulfills the meaning of the doctrine of the resurrection. For humanity in the mass the resurrection is an aeonial transformation, a veritable transfiguration of the soul; and it is not past, but tragically still to come. The demonstration of any Ensampler is to awaken man to the realization of what he has still to consummate within his own history. It is a gross mistake to think of the resurrection as past; it is still to come. How world history would be changed if it was in any measurable degree near its attainment! Weiss--and Paul--are right: the historical view of the resurrection in Christian doctrinism is practically meaningless.

Only the new view, reoriented on the lines of the ancient Pagan allegorical understanding and representation, will avail to hasten the time when the world may in sober earnestness turn its hand, as Voltaire suggested, to the serious business of resurrecting its long and still crucified Christ.

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CHAPTER XX

DEMENTIA IN EXCELSIS

It was intimated at the outset that the movement of so-called Christianity perverted the stream of ancient spiritual teaching that flowed onward among the esoteric groups by flinging it out openly to the masses, for whose narrow range of mystic sensibilities and intellectual comprehension the allegorical representations had to be exotericized into ostensible factuality and thus reduced to literal nonsense. It was also indicated that the study would undertake to show how such an obscuration or perversion of the truth that alone liberates the human mind from bondage to blind superstition had resulted in the implantation in the Western consciousness of ideas and conceptions in the field of theology and Bible meaning twisted far askew from sane significance, and finally had operated over the centuries to distort the mentality of Europe into weird and frightful extravagances of dementia. This portion of the assignment is now approached, but with grave misgivings as to the possibility of dealing in any more than sketchy fashion with what again would demand a whole book for any treatment that pretended thoroughness. Only a few of the more glaring features of Christian dementia can be examined in the limited space remaining. These are chosen with the hope that they may prove suggestively illustrative of a larger range of kindred aberrations in the human narrative of Christianity's influence.

Voltaire has been cited as saying that men's hearts are cruel because their minds are dark and that they will continue to commit atrocities as long as they continue to believe absurdities. The same observation applies also to the commission of abnormalities and eccentricities, unnatural and inhuman practices that do not quite fall into the class of atrocities in the more barbaric sense. The inevitable consequences of its corrupted philosophies and theological absurdities came to open manifestation in most flagrant and most repulsive form in one great lamentable chapter of Christianity's history, running from as early as

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the third century on down almost to the present twentieth century, and indeed still casting its morbid shadow athwart the sunshine of this modern day. This outburst of twisted Christian theory into ungainly practice can be denominated by the general term of Christian asceticism. All in all, it pictures an exhibition of human action under the mental lash of atrociously misconceived canons of spiritual morality that falls little short of matching the fiendish cruelties inflicted in the Inquisition. An odd difference between the two enormities lies in the fact that while the slaughters of the Inquisition were wreaked upon the enemies of the Church, the singular barbarities of asceticism were vented by the Christians upon themselves.

It is a chapter of idiosyncrasy little known to either the Christian or the non-Christian public and, like so much else needing to be recorded, next to unbelievable. How such a vicious malpractice, driving its victims, the holy monks, by the thousands into the self-infliction of sadistic tortures won its dominance in Christian thought, will be the pressing inquiry of all readers. How such a quixotic enormity arose and swept to wide prevalence in the religion proclaimed to have dispensed the blessing of divine benignance and sanity to mankind is indeed a question needing a lucid answer at this time.

Many historians have given the nub of the answer, since it is not hard to locate. In so far as it is still in some measure considered virtuous and in continuing vogue, it is ascribed directly to the moralistic principles of the Christian faith. But when its outrageous excesses and unrestrained profligacies of conduct demand that it be held up to condemnation, its rise and spread are attributed to the influence of Oriental, Persian and Hindu religious philosophies that crept in and sadly corrupted the pure Christian faith with exotic tendencies.

Milman, von Mosheim, Farrar and indeed most Christian scholars speak at length of the adulteration early in Christian history of the pure stream of Christian teaching by the influx of Oriental doctrinism with its emphasis on certain elements of religious psychology. Especially did the Persian Zoroastrian doctrine of the dualism of all life, pitting the two polar forces of light and darkness, or spirit and matter against each other in a struggle for the aeonial mastery of the world and man, infiltrate into Christian thought. The Hellenic, the Alexandrian, the Jewish, the Chaldean, the Egyptian all more or less directly represented the world as the battle-ground between these two forces, and Christianity could not help but imbibe the influences of so wide-spread a doctrinism. The less was it able to do so when,

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after the second century the writings of St. Paul had become well known in the pale of the Church. For these Epistles, too, accentuate the war between the law of the flesh and the law of the mind of Christ in man. When he wrote that he felt a law of his members warring against the law of his mind, and seeking to drag him away from the love of Christ, he cried out in despair of being saved from "the body of this death," which he says consists of being carnally minded and subject to the lusts of the flesh. There was ample text in the Scriptures themselves to start the drive toward the crucifixion of the flesh on behalf of the salvation of the soul. Early and with full vehemence, nay with fanatic abandon, the madness was on. The plunge of Christianity into ascetic morbidity to endure many centuries was taken. History can but record the lugubrious chronicle. The annals of the wrestling of the human mind with the philosophical problem of the duality of the life force constitute one of the most intriguing, yet withal one of the most pathetic chapters in all the history of thought. It is inextricably intwined with the still more engrossing problem of the origin of "evil." For, in briefest possible form of exposition, evil arose from the opposition exerted by matter, the negative pole of the duality, against spirit, the positive pole. Spirit was haloed with all the attributes and characteristics of "good," while matter was loaded with all the obloquy of "evil." Spirit, divine mind planned and worked to lift creatural life to the level of pure conceptuality of reason and the good; matter opposed, blocked, thwarted and defiled this effort, hence was evil.

Milman in his analysis of the influence of Oriental religionism upon Christianity again and again reverts to the phrase, "the malignity of matter." This sets the idea in bold outline. It sharply defines the philosophical ground-source of asceticism. Matter is conceived as being hostile to spirit. It is the enemy, the evil power, the devil. As the Christian Science creedology expounds the same idea today, "matter is the parent of all evil." Annihilate the concept of matter from human thought and you will rid the world of evil. Its power is only in your (erroneous) thought; your belief in its reality alone gives it power to afflict you. Destroy your thought of it and you have destroyed its power.

To this thesis the answer is that matter has a way of demonstrating its real existence whether minds deny it or not. You can think yourself into veritable hypnotism and utterly annihilate your concept of matter. But you awake and matter is still there, performing its divine

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function. It was here before you came and will be here when you, the asserted creator of it, are gone. It mocks you while you are thinking it out of existence. It proves to be real, sure enough. It does not depend for existence upon your hypostatization of it. It is by no means commensurable with your thought of it. If Christian Science was right, matter would come into and go out of existence with every affirmation or denial of its being. But it remains obstinately and calmly the same.

It is as real as spirit, and real because spirit is real, for it is spirit itself, but spirit concretized by what might be called a reduction of cosmic or divine "temperature." To argue that spirit is alone real, matter utterly unreal, is to contend that water vapor, or water itself is real, but ice unreal. For matter is but the iced form of spirit. Modern physical science has at last destroyed the delusions of wrong philosophical thinking about matter. It has found that under the terrific force of electric energies matter can be "melted" or dissolved back into spirit, as under heat ice can be melted back to water and water into invisible vapor. Matter is just the visible crystallization of invisible spirit. And in every language spirit has been designated by the very words for breath, wind, vapor, air. Spirit and matter are but the forms taken by the ultimate essence of being under high or low temperatures or pressure states of cosmic energy.

But calamitous consequences have flowed from the failure of this knowledge in human thinking. False conceptualism arose out of the inability of thought to make the necessary distinction between the idea of polar opposition in the duality of spirit and matter, and that of the ethical character of that opposition. The opposition of polarity, positive against negative or vice versa, was misconstrued into the opposition of good against evil and evil against good. The disaster of thought came from the false characterization of spirit as solely good and of matter as absolutely evil. It was a question of taking relative values for absolute ones. Only in a relative sense are the two ends of the polarity to be characterized as either good or evil. In the final or absolute sense both are good, or perhaps, as Nietzsche put it, beyond good and evil. This may seem to be a profitless abstraction, too remote to influence human happiness. Far from it; it is a concept of such tremendous practicality and constant relevance to all human thought that it becomes at last the philosophical determinant of most human happiness or failure of it. It assuredly makes a world of difference in this human life of ours whether we are deluded into conceiving that the world itself--the matter of it--is against our felicity or amicable

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to it. The one alternative in the dual possibility can make us think and act as wretched creatures being plagued with "the malignity of matter"; the other can bless us with the assurance that all things, including matter, body, sense, work together for good to those that love the Lord's visible creation, and cease despising the visible to gain promised bliss in the invisible worlds.

It was just this misconception that has afflicted countless millions of victims of bad philosophical logic, who were beaten down to the low state of counting themselves wretched creatures being tortured by the devil of matter. Spirit, having become enshrined in unbalanced theory as alone good, centuries of mesmerized intellection of millions finally so stamped its thought-deformity upon the very body of man that the responsive effort of fanatic Christian zeal to combat and beat down the detested flesh carried this expression of a simple error of conception to the most frightful excesses ever known in the world of the West. The manifestations even overmatched, if that were possible, the similar excesses in India, where the exaltation of spirit over matter had been a vicious development from the same egregious misconstructions of philosophy.

The body of man is to his soul as the horse is to the rider. It is never, to be sure, to be permitted to dominate and drive the rider against his sane wishes and purposes. It must be subdued if fractious and made docile, obedient and serviceable. But--and here is the abyss of difference that well analogizes the nub of the entire philosophical problem--by no means is this horse to be beaten into helplessness, abused, injured, crippled, nay, even mentally despised and flouted. He is to be maintained indeed in the fullest vigor of his bodily powers and kept as lusty as his nature gives him the right to be. This simple and sane recognition, the application of this analogy to the problem of the "evil" of matter and the body, could have beautified a brutal and ugly Christian European history. And Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter might not have had to be written,--though to lose it would have been an inconsolable misfortune. Puritanism could have relaxed its social sternness,--as it has had to do since.

The ascetic Christian attitude toward the body stands as one of the supreme cultural afflictions and miscarriages of all time. The evil psychological consequences which it generated have been and still are incalculably vast and iniquitous. It has brooded like a blight or a plague over the collective consciousness of Western mankind, injecting the insidious poison of its erroneous ideation into the body of social

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life at all times. It has leavened the social consciousness with a thought chemicalization that induces a general sickliness into all human life. It has eaten like a canker into the core of all human happiness, engendering unhealthy conditions in the very blood of human nature. And from the vitiation of the inner life stream every sort of abnormality, the sores and boils of corrupted life currents, has erupted upon the surface of the common life of the individual and the mass. At long last, what we call modern science has unearthed the subterranean lair of this insidious corrosion, and a new science is born. Little as it is yet known, and erroneous as are some aspects of its technique, the Freudian discovery of the critical role played by the traditional obsession of the concept of the inherent evil nature of man's sexual functions is one of the greatest findings in world history. It is not a wholly new discovery, for the ancients had knowledge of it; and one of the worst of the defections of Christianity from high Pagan truth was that which turned from the wholesome and salutary Pagan regard for the human body to the ruinous misconception of the body's evil character. That change and its consequences are the theme of this chapter.

Through new clarification of vision a new phase of the historical clash between Christianism and Paganism is destined now to transpire. Oddly enough, as one of the acts of what the Greeks called Fate or Nemesis, we shall now witness, indeed are now witnessing, the vindication of Paganism over Christianity in the turn of the tide in civilization's arrival at a greater sanity, as the result of the development of the new science of Psychoanalysis. Through the findings of this study the world has now of necessity to repudiate Christian attitudes and return once more to the saner and loftier moralities of Pagan wisdom. Christianity must now repudiate its own philosophy of the body's "evil" nature and reinstate the noble concepts of that Greek philosophy which, instead of befouling the flesh with dishonor and sin, rendered it beautiful beyond the attainment of any other people in the earth. This brings the reflection that in a word Christianity so mentally disfigured the physical body of man that a physical disfigurement came to actuality as the result. It is that which cometh out from within that defileth the man. Philosophical condemnation of the body in Christian ideation finally emerged as bodily ugliness. The Greeks substituted a mentally lovely concept of the body and out to the surface came physical beauty. But Christianity, poisoned at the mental core, even held it a sin to have a beautiful body, or to delight in it. This is true. Love of beauty

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came to be held a deadly Christian sin; and some shadows of this terrible debasement of mind still linger in certain recesses of both Catholic and Protestant teaching.

The age-long prevalence of Christian attitudes has finally resulted in giving to the word "pagan" the special meaning of that which takes a friendly or glorified view of the body, its fleshly instincts and its sense pleasures or expressions. To practice a "pagan" philosophy is considered in Christian thinking to be the devotion of primary interest to the life of the body, as in many ways contradistinguished from the life of the spirit. It is a loud modern cry from religious circles that modern life is reverting to pagan status, because so large a portion of time and concern is being expended upon purely physical outlets of energy, to the exclusion of devotion to spiritual interests. This specific secondary connotation has been fastened upon the word because it has been used so generally in connections and contexts which throw upon it the implication that Paganism, as a religious system, is thus charged with having limited its central drive to the gross concerns of the body, while Christianity rose immeasurably above that low engrossment to center primary interest upon the holier life of the spirit. Naturally this impression can easily be given, if a propaganda which decries the body as irremediably evil holds up to criticism a system which gives the body its due and rightful place of importance and rank in true understanding of anthropology. To say anything good about the body becomes a criterion of baseness to a cult that considers the body the devil's foul creation. Who can estimate what this terrible error of judgment has cost the Western world?

It would seem to be a proposition standing before the open mind of rational men as worthy of unreserved approbation that if man would hold his body in higher esteem, he would indubitably be inclined to treat it with the greater consideration. This is simply to say that if he honors it in his mind, he will honor it with better treatment. At any rate an intelligent Paganism paid it higher honor, and the result was seen in its still thrilling beautification. The body's beauty faded out under Christian conceptualism and treatment.

The verdict of centuries of history is in; that judgment is recorded in incontestable factuality. Christian ideologies stamped themselves upon history, and the imprint, ugly or beautiful, stands like fossil remains, shaped in solid fact. We are pointing unobservant eyes to those indelible prints where ugliness writes the judgment of time, the actual reality of error generating deformity in the world. The calmer

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clearer judgment of later times can now profit by the longer view in retrospect and discern the arrant error of unenlightened pietistic violence. And Christianity must face its record fossilized in history. And that record shows the words "tragic error" written over most of the specific features, claims and institutes of the religion called Christianity.

The practice of asceticism covered the long period in Christian history from the third century nearly to the present. It was in the early centuries, however, that it was exploited in its most invidious forms. The testimony of one or two of the leading Christian historians must be called in to place the enormity of this unseemly excrescence upon the body of Christianity in its full light of actual truth.

Kershner (Pioneers of Christian Thought, p. 87) writes that it was the persuasion of young women in the Christian communion that by retiring to a convent and remaining aloof from the world of humanity, they would become the brides of Christ; and equally it was the belief of young men, founded on many promises, that they would be given to enjoy the unspeakable beatitude of Paradise as reward for their voluntary crucifixion of all human pleasures and desires. Kershner denominates this "a singularly abnormal philosophy."

One of the greatest practitioners of asceticism in the fourth century was Martin of Tours. He instituted a whole school or movement that drew hundreds to enlist in his regime of austerities and mortifications of the flesh to glorify the spirit. Farrar, in speaking of this feature, says that we read with sorrow the story of their self-maceration. It shows, he points out, the danger and evil of a false ideal even when it is followed with perfect sincerity. "The monks of Martin were swept away by the tide of triumphant superstition, and helped swell its overwhelming violence." The biography of the saint became the most popular book of the day. At Rome the booksellers made fortunes by it, and amanuenses could not copy it fast enough for the demand. In Africa also among the monks of the desert and in great cities like Carthage it was in all men's hands; and at Alexandria, so the author himself tells us, nearly all the people had it by heart. The miracles in which it abounded constituted its chief appeal to the multitude of readers, and they were so generously supplied as to include no less than three instances of raising men from the dead. The monks of Marmontier pressed Severus not to omit the narrative of even one prodigy, although he admits that some of them were too absurd even for their strong credulity. "May the opinion never prevail in the Church of Christ," wrote Julius Africanus, "that any false thing can be fabricated for

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Christ's glory." (Staid historians, as we have seen, have shown how the entire structure was erected on fictions and forgeries fabricated for Christ's glory.) In Vol. II (p. 220) of his Lives of the Fathers, Farrar stigmatizes asceticism in such fashion as this:

"It taught the world the infinite value of the individual soul. [This can be challenged as very questionable.] But the errors on which the whole theory was based produced a crop of terrible evils. Nature avenged herself on those who violated her laws. The indolence of morbid speculation; the perpetual sickness of self-introspection undisturbed by the paltry industry of weaving palm leaves into baskets; the glorification of dirt; the confusion of sanctity with abhorrent self-mortifications; the daring disruption of natural and sacred ties; the violation of the innocent laws of human intercourse; the expansion of selfishness to infinitude,--these were prolific of disastrous consequences. God branded the ambitious attempt with sterility and failure. Men who aimed at making their life better than that which Christ had taught, or the Apostles preached, sank into a condition which was often worse than that of the beasts which perish. . . . The self-degraded body reacted on the enfeebled mind. No faith became too revolting, no maceration too frightful, no contradiction of the natural affections too violently extreme. It is impossible to read without pity and horror of the foul condition to which the stylites and grazing monks reduced the image of God, as though Christ were to be pleased by the wildest exaggerations of the Phariseeism which he so burningly denounced. . . . The impulse which filled the deserts of Egypt with anchorites and monks and nuns became in time an unmixed evil. The motives which led to it were not only mistaken, but even in many cases cowardly and insincere. . . . It seemed an easier thing to fly from the world than to face its perils and miseries. . . . It was one of the evils of desert monasticism that it filled the pure atmosphere of Christianity with a miasma of gross superstition, which was fed with a crop of lying legends. . . . It darkened the lives and consciences of millions, who, living in the world, were taught to believe that they were only aiming at an inferior sanctity, and would only receive a second-rate or dubious reward. It altered the perspective and center of gravity of the Christian life. Macarius prayed one hundred times a day; Paul the Simple three hundred times, which he counted by pebbles; and he was greatly distressed to hear of a virgin who prayed seven hundred times a day. A spectator once saw Simon Stylites make twelve hundred and forty-four genuflexions--and then stopped counting."

We are not surprised, he adds, to learn that conditions so unnatural produced shipwreck of mind as well as of body. The weakened brains of the hermits were disturbed by visions of hellish monsters and their sleepless nights were affrighted by hideous sights and sounds. All too frequently they found that their desertion of the common life of men only ended in a state of demoniacal possession. They often imagined

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that they worked prodigious miracles. Many were turned virtually into hypochondriacs. We learn from stories in Cassian that monks and hermits sometimes committed the most terrible crimes which, under the influence of demoniac delusion they took for heroic acts of virtue. Nilus and Pachomius, unexceptionable witnesses, testify that many monks ended their careers in lunacy and suicide, which took the form of ripping themselves open and hurling themselves over precipitous rocks or into wells. Ambrose says that many drowned themselves, and Gregory Nazianzen speaks also of deaths by hanging. Heathens even gave to Christians the taunting name of Biothanatoi (self-murderers).

But the saddest fact of all, says Farrar, is that even those monks and solitaries who were sincere increased instead of diminishing the moral difficulties which they sought to avoid. The effects of compulsory celibacy of the clergy proved in countless instances to have resulted disastrously. This is substantiated by a volume of testimony of which every item may be derived, not from Reformers or Latitudinarians, but from Popes, Bishops, monks and canonized saints of the early and Medieval church. From the first it led to the gross scandals connected with the spiritual sisters (Agapetae, Adelphai, Suzugoi, Suneisaktai, Subintroductae) against which so many Fathers gave their warning and so many canons of Councils were passed in vain. The biographies of monks and hermits show decisively that their temptations to sloth, pride and impurity were sorer and more continuous than those which ever occur amid the beneficent and well-regulated activities of a Christian life lived in accordance with Christ's example and God's demands.

George Hodges (The Early Church, p. 151) paints a lurid picture of the ascetic fever:

"The philosophical reason for monasticism was drawn from the theory that the body corrupts the soul. Matter being essentially evil, and the body being the source of all sin, our proper procedure is to make the body weak. Only by the ascetic practices may we attain the victory of the spirit. The idea first appeared as heresy, being the doctrine of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, but it took possession of the general mind. Especially in the East it poisoned the souls of the saints. At its worst it brought into being the mad monks--the grazing saints, who went about on their hands and knees and ate grass; the pillar saints, like Simon Stylites; the chained saints, so fastened together that when one lay down to sleep the other was pulled up to pray. At its best it made religion morbid, defying nature, contradicting the revelation of God in the body of man, and glorifying hunger and thirst, rags and celibacy and dirt, driving the saints into the desert."

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The sainted Jerome, writing to a prominent Christian woman convert by name of Eustochium, adjured her to "let your companions be women pale and thin with fasting." The historians cite this same Jerome's unblushing confession of the burning lusts of the mind amid the burning heat of the desert. This great Father is cited as saying:

"I then who from fear of hell had condemned myself to such a prison, a comrade only of scorpions and wild beasts, was in imagination among dances of girls. My face was pale with fasting, yet my mind was heaving with desires in my frigid body, and before a man already prematurely dead in the flesh, the fires of concupiscence alone were bursting forth."

So he used to lie at Jesus' feet, watered them with his tears, wiped them with his hair and "subdued my resisting flesh with a seven-days fast."

(Farrar suggests that some at least of the passages referring to fasts in the New Testament are interpolations due to the ascetic predilections of the early scribes.)

Farrar's further descriptions can not be omitted (Vol. II, p. 232):

"Grossly ignorant, hopelessly superstitious, brutally fanatical, the monks of Egypt became as a body the vilest instruments of the worst character in ecclesiastical history."

Heading the list of such monsters was the Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria. The infamies of the Council of Robbers were chiefly due to the turbulent opinionativeness of these outrageous incendiaries. Monks murdered Hypatia and supported the notorious Cyril in his ambitious terrorism. Monks worried and vexed the official life of Basil. Monks attacked the refuge of Chrysostom, troubled his sickness and assailed his life. Their morose pride, impenetrable ignorance and sullen bigotry made them a terror to the civil government, to which they paid no tax and rendered no service.

"Mariolatry, saint-worship, relic-worship, terrors of demons, dream divinations, lying legends, invented miracles and every form of crude superstition acquired strength from their support. The ever-increasing multitude of vagrants and bigots, whose squalid virtues were repaid by a sort of adoration, denuded the Empire of its natural defenders and left it a prey to the barbarians. Valens was more than half right in rescinding the immunity from military service which constituted for so many the temptation to monasticism and in sweeping thousands of these sturdy idlers from Egyptian deserts into the ranks of his army. He called them without any circumlocution 'the followers of laziness' (ignaviae sectatores). Synesius

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speaks of them as barbarous, indolent, brutal. Salvian shows how much the monks were hated, and the fury with which Pagans like Libanius, Eunapius, Zosimus and Rutilius speak of them is explained, if it be not excused, by the scathing pictures drawn by all the greatest of the Fathers of the Remoboth, the Massalians, the Gyrovagi and other classes of criminals and hypocrites who lived under the shelter of the monk's cowl. Hermits, monks and even nuns lived in a state of revolting dirt, which they regarded as one proof of their piety. They left a most unfavorable opinion on the cultivated heathen. Eunapius speaks of their 'swinish life,' their tyrannous self-assertion, their neglect of public decency, their filth and nakedness."

Were there space, it would be informative to introduce the whole story of Melania, a Christian convert, daughter of the consul Marcellinus. Her companion and spiritual advisor was none other than Jerome. So floridly and garishly were the sanctities of the Holy Land, where Christ had walked and talked, healed and suffered, died and risen again, painted in the imaginations and fancies of the Christians at Rome that all were stricken with the unconquerable yearning to visit those scenes on pilgrimage. Jerome persuaded the infatuated Melania, reluctant to leave her little son behind even for so holy a purpose, to undertake the trip, even though it meant turning over the child to the precarious custodianship of the city praetor.

And this Jerome wrote to Heliodorus, a priest, when a question arose as to sacrificing the sacred ties of kinship and love for the sake of Christ:

"Lo, the adversary in thy breast endeavors to slay Christ. . . . Though thy little nephew should hang about thy neck; though with hair dishevelled and rent garments thy mother should show thee the breasts with which she nurtured thee; though thy father should lie on the threshold, trample over his body with dry eyes and fly to the standard of the Cross. On a matter like this, to be cruel is the only true filial affection."

Comments Farrar:

"This extraordinary rhetoric had an immense fascination for the ladies of Rome. Fabiola, many years afterwards, could repeat the letter of Jerome by heart, and such exhortations induced the noblest matrons to fling away every human affection with unnatural callowness and to abandon the duties to which God had called them, for others at once less necessary and less blessed."

Farrar (Vol. II, 255 ƒƒ.) describes the luxury, pomp, aloofness, superciliousness, coldness and dress of the clergy. "They appeared abroad in magnificent apparel and worldly pomp, lolling in lofty chariots."

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"The heathen must have secretly exulted as they watched the scandals" of the Church.

Milman, Farrar, Guignebert, Fisher, Kershner and others speak out flatly as to the corruption, deception, dishonesty, venality and immorality of the priests and bishops in almost every age. It is purposeless to load up our treatise with the multiplied testimony on this doleful theme with which the Christian histories abound. It is there in endless quantity and lurid color, if the reader wishes to add further verification. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia does not dissemble or cloak the true facts in this field.

It is, however, worth a paragraph to emphasize the by no means fantastic theory that Christianity was a materially contributory force to the undermining of the Roman Empire, leading to its fall. In his great volume Gibbon gives over four hundred pages to the influence of Christianity on the fortunes of the great world empire. Farrar speculates on the theme also. He says it has often been a question whether Christianity must be reckoned among the causes which overthrew the Latin strength.

"That such was the case can hardly be doubted. It exercised on the sway and the institutions of Paganism a benumbing and disintegrating force. Men who had once felt confident in the protection of Mavors (Mars) and Romulus and Victory were now profoundly disheartened. The anchor of their old polytheism was rudely torn up and they drifted on the open sea of doubt. The general indifference to all things earthly caused by too predominant and exclusive a love for the world beyond the grave, tending ever to multiply the inert masses of monks and solitaries, was another weakening influence."

Farrar's comment on Augustine's City of God includes the statement that it reveals how the Christian fixation of primary interest upon the anticipated rhapsodies of bliss in the community of heaven undermined all their virtues as citizens of the Empire. These subjective interests and proclivities, entirely superseded their interests in the welfare of the mundane state. So Farrar says that "all the moral energy which remained in the civilized world was turned towards pious contemplation, and yielded the Empire to the barbarians."

For the sake of what it may mean in the direction of a correction of common notions of Christian people as to the sanity, purity and lofty moral fineness of the early Christians, it is worth citing what Farrar gives us in a quotation from the fourth-century Basil, one of the leading Fathers:

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"Every one walks by the will of his own heart; wickedness is immeasurable; the people are lawless; their religious leaders have no boldness of speech."

And speaking of Gregory of Nyssa, Farrar writes:

"He does not attempt to conceal the fact that the self-delusion and pride of monkish 'virgins' had become an open scandal. . . ." Certain things named "reveal the error in which he and most of the Fathers of that age were disastrously entangled."

Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the Christians of Babylon in terms of utter disgust and despair, dwelling especially upon their brutality, barbarism and their habitual lying. As to Jerusalem even Cyril was unable to cope either with the heresy or the gross immorality of the holy city. Then, as in so many ages, it was a sink of wickedness, and that wickedness was increased by the demoralization which ran riot among the bands of promiscuous pilgrims. The citizens of Jerusalem were like wild beasts thirsting for blood. So writes Gregory after his visit there.

Farrar does not spare vehement language in saying at one place that "such is the purblind fury and mendacity of party zeal, even when it assumes the championship of the most stainless Christianity."

In tracing the sad consequences of false conceptions upon Christian conduct it is imperative to notice--all too briefly--the attitude of the Christians of early and Medieval times toward woman. Much has been said about the pompous claim of the religion that it was the first and only one to establish the worth and dignity of the individual. Certainly not true on any intrinsic basis, it is a screaming farce or travesty of truth when it applies to women individually, or even to woman as woman. For the position to which the early and later Church demeaned women belies every assertion ever put forth on this subject. By Christian philosophy women were degraded to the lowest rating in the scale of acknowledged value to which it is possible to reduce any creature. They were regarded as the evil seducers of men from the life of the spirit and the monks fled from them as from a plague. In his History of European Morals Lecky presents the features of this picture in glaring colors.

The beauty of woman was a thorn in the flesh of the monks aspiring to sainthood, a torture of temptation which they could only escape by fleeing to the solitude of the desert. Even there the apparitions of the Eve temptress haunted the monkish imagination, as Jerome has etched it for us. We forbear to quote the slanderous frothings of hypocritical

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contempt in which the harassed priests and anchorites of God affected to condemn womanhood for embodying the lure of love which attracts the male human to his mate for purposes far holier than any served by monachial pietism.

Our essay is designed to prove the falsity of Christian principles by pointing in such particulars to the historical consequences which these principles precipitated in many centuries of actual operation. Certainly here is another in the long list of abnormal influences let loose in the moral life of millions over ages. Need greater evidence of outrageous error of doctrine be adduced than this testimony which certifies the eventuation of philosophical dogma--in this case the evil of matter and the human flesh--in such a distortion of sanity as the persuasion that womanhood is evil per se, because it lures male man to parenthood, and incidentally to the highest expression of his real spiritual nature? What must be the verdict against a set of moral principles which turned one sex of the human duality in frightened flight from the other, or arrayed itself theoretically on the side of the good, while consigning its opposite pole to the category of Satanic evil? No little measure of the inferior secondary position in human and legal rights in even the freest of democratic countries which women have had to occupy in helpless submission and privation is unquestionably due to the degraded moral rating which an absurdly contorted philosophy of the evil nature of the body--and especially a beautiful feminine body--in Christian hands had fastened upon them. Not even Protestant churches will honor them with a place in the pulpit. Yet without their adherence in a wondrous spirit of almost blind devotion, the Church they support could hardly have maintained its existence.

In this connection the morbidity of Christian attitude toward wholesome delight in life is not to be forgotten. Probably taking their cue from the fact that there is no record of Jesus' having laughed, but heavy emphasis on his having wept, merriment, enjoyment, gaiety, happiness itself was taboo. With lightsomeness went beauty also. Romance and love were sin. In the Middle Ages Bernard of Clairvaux was scandalized by the love affair of Abelard. He suppressed his own sinful tendency in this direction by plunging into an icy pond, and later crushed and wrecked Abelard.

What a world of hidden significance underlies the statement of Farrar (Vol. II, 222) that "mistaken views of duty and a mistaken estimate of sin were an intolerable and needless burden to the indi-

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vidual, and in many instances tended to hinder rather than promote the spiritual life!"

This chapter calls for a summary survey of the disastrous consequences of the horrid misconception of the Christian doctrine of "sin." Christianity has made of this dogma the veritable Frankenstein monster of mental torment for the whole body of Christians for ages. Out of a principle of the moral life which could have been represented in its lawful place of beneficent influence in the normal understanding of human action, if envisaged with sound balanced philosophical judgment, this Christianism made a monstrosity of psychological entification, turning it mentally into a haunting spirit of remorseless malignity. If any sin in the psychological realm is unpardonable, it is that of stamping upon the helpless mind of childhood the frightening presence of a personified force such as the Christian concept of sin and its personal embodiment have been made into. The embellishment of the idea of divine punishment with every sort of the most lurid and darksome frightfulness, and the citation of misapprehended Scripture of equally dire portent for human dereliction, has accomplished a blighting of natural wholesomeness of mind in the West that stands unparalleled anywhere on earth. It has killed the natural instinct of the human part of man to exult in the boundless gift of life itself. For millions of sensitive but unintelligent souls it has turned what might have been a life of joyousness into a nightmare of dread and delusion. And of Christian history it has made a jagged horror of murder and torture. It has darkened and harried the minds of millions with the haunting fear of post-mortem hell and purgatorial fires, all of which an intelligent Paganism understood rightly was an allegorical picturization of the live lived here.

Speaking of the first murders committed by the Church in the very first century in which the sword of persecution had been lifted from the necks of Christians---the slaughter of the Priscillianists (for holding some independent views on the canon, and for practicing the same austerities as those of St. Martin!)--Farrar gives us a felicitous passage to emphasize the recital:

"And for the first time the axe of the executioner was reddened with the blood of Christians, shed by Christians to avenge a difference of opinion. That bloodshed, like the beginning of sin, was indeed as a letting out of water, and the crimson stream was destined in after ages to roll for many a furlong, bridle deep."

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And lest the modern man assume too confidently and complacently that all this is past history, and that the reddened snowball of human madness has well melted down and is no longer a threat to roll ahead again to perilous proportions, let us glance at the sober statement of a modern like Aldous Huxley, in re the claim of Christianity to have abolished slavery:

"We have witnessed, first of all, the wholesale revival of slavery in its worst and most inhuman forms--slavery imposed upon political heretics living under the various dictatorships, slavery imposed upon whole classes of conquered populations, slavery imposed upon prisoners of war. Next, we note the increasing indiscriminateness of slaughter during wartime. Area bombing, saturation bombing, rocket bombing, bombing by atomic missiles--the indiscriminateness has steadily increased throughout the Second World War, until now no nation makes a pretence of observing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, innocent and guilty, but all devote themselves methodically and scientifically to general massacre and wholesale destruction."

The temptation is strong to comment on Huxley's last sentence. The extension of war from formal and uniformed combatants to promiscuous populations, if viewed in the light of the Greek conception of Fate and Nemesis, or the Hindu principle of Karma (essentially the same thing), it can well be argued that this development must be in harmony with the divine law of righteousness and the decree of Providence. For it brings the penalty of wrong action, or failure to act, back upon those responsible for the wars in the first place. Young men can always ask, and are asking more vehemently, why they must be singled out to bear the horrid brunt of war, while the lazy and inert populations of their elders can remain in security at home. It is beyond argument that wars are caused by the inertia, the greed, the unheroic conservative immobility and base complacency of whole populations. The male youth must be heroic in war in order that non-combatant millions may live most unheroically in so-called "peace." It need not be the spleen and rancor of a vindictive temper, but indeed the calm expression of a justly judging humanitarian view, that as long as whole peoples--those lolling in luxurious ease, comfort and self-indulgence in many vices--will so conduct themselves as to incite the wars, it is but right that they should have the legitimate consequences come home to them. Perhaps this late horrendous development of barbarism in the Christian countries of the world is needed to awaken whole citizenries, or democracies, to their need to live with such justice as

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will not require the periodic heroism of the male youth to preserve the privilege of sheathing the sword of righteousness during those periods when the causes of wars are smoldering and selfishness or folly precludes the will to adjust incipient hatreds before they burst into open fires of war.

The folly that smothered the beneficent influence of the ancient Pagan esotericism and drenched later Western generations with rivers of blood can have its evil consequences brought to an end only by the rectification of the incredible philosophical or theological blunder in misconceiving the interrelation of soul and body in the cosmic duality of all life as expressed in man's constitution. A relation misconceived as enmity must be envisaged as one of utmost beneficence. As husband and wife stand opposite to each other, but surely are not hostile, opposite poles but wedded for life and blessedness; so soul and body stand related in opposite polarity, but are to be wedded for felicity. Here is the resolution of the deplorable conflict in the human brain, fought in wretched ignorance through Christian stupidity. Says John Dewey: "The antagonism between the actual and the ideal, the spiritual and the natural, is the source of the deepest and most injurious of all enmities."

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