Confessions of an old priest

BR 125 .M28 1922
McConnell, S. D. 1845-1939.
Confessions of an old priest

CONFESSIONS OF
AN OLD PRIEST

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CONFESSIONS
OF AN OLD PRIEST

y BY

S. D. McCONT^ELL, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
* 1922

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PKINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEBICA

COPYTUGHT, 1922,

Bt the macmillan company.

Set up and printed. Published October, 1922.

Press of

J. J. Little & Ives Company

New York. U. S, A.

Later on, — My creed has melted away, but I
believe in good, in the moral order, and in salva-
tion; religion is for me to live and die in God, in
complete abandonment to the holy will which is at
root of nature and destiny. I believe in the Gos-
pel, the Good News, that is to say, faith in the
love of a pardoning "Father/^

Amiels Journal.

CONFESSIONS
OF AN OLD PRIEST

CHAPTER I

FIFTY YEAES AGO

I HAVE been for fifty years a minister in tlie cliurcli. I
entered its ministry with enthusiasm, believing as I did
that the church was the one organization in the world of
divine institution, that it owes its origin to Jesus Christ,
and that he was the unique Son of God. I have been
reluctantly forced to ask myself whether any of these
things is true.

So far I have been silent and have retained the commis-
sion which I accepted in good faith. I have done so for
what seemed to me good and valid reasons. In the first
place, I wanted to be sure. Fifty years is surely long
enough for consideration. INow, having gone over the
ground again and again I am sure. But I knew that an
open avowal of my convictions would distress many souls,
some of them very dear to me. In the second place, situ-
ated as I am, I am under no compulsion to teach or preach.
I have served my full complement of years and have been
honorably retired. When I do preach there is matter
aplenty to furnish forth many sermons in the common
impulse and motives of men outside all dogma.

1

2 Confessions of an Old Priest

Beside that, and for what the consideration may be
worth, I am in no way dependent upon the priestly office
for my daily bread. I do not need to take my turn in
the temple service for sake of a share in the meat of the
sacrifice.

So, it is open to me to remain silent and go on perform-
ing such ministerial functions as I honorably can, or I
can openly avow my convictions and leave it to the Church
to do with me as it sees fit. I have decided upon the latter
course. But I confess I have done so with the hope that
after I have a said all I have to say the Church may de-
cide that I and such as I have a place in her ministry.

An easier and simpler way would be for me to ask for
my dismissal and quietly withdraw. The average man
would probably pronounce this to be the honorable way.
Those who give this judgment would do so from the pre-
vailing notion that office, or even membership, in the
church involves something of the nature of a contract.
The condition of admission is the public declaration of a
belief. To this engagement the church and the individual
are parties. Unless the church officially changes its belief
the member once admitted has no right to withdraw. If
the member loses his belief he forfeits his membership.
This is the ground upon which all heresy trials proceed.
The question at issue is not of the truth or falsity of the
beliefs, but whether or not a contract has been broken.
Convinced as I am that the church acts ultra vires in mak-
ing subscription to a creed a condition of office or member-
ship I do not feel morally constrained by a contract the
terms of which I have come to believe null and void. I do
not need to say more at this point inasmuch as the question
must be considered at length later on. I have elected to
state my beliefs from within the Ministry and not from
outside. What follows is a statement of the grounds upon

Fifty Years Ago 3

which mj decision rests. I set forth the steps and stages
through which I have come to the place where I stand, the
more willingly because I am sure that many another priest
has passed through the same phases of faith to its collapse
■ — and has kept silent, as I have done.

I was born and reared, like the first great protagonist of
Christianity, "after the most straitest sect a Pharisee,''
in the Scotch Presbyterian Church. Not only were the
basic articles of the creed unquestioned, the Incarnation,
the Divinity of Jesus, his supernatural birth, his resurrec-
tion, his Ascension and eternal reign in the universe, the
Sacraments necessary to salvation, but equally unques-
tioned the inferential dogmas, even to the literal inspira-
tion of the Bible and the creation of the world in the year
4004 B.C. I know of course that during the fifty years past
many dogmas have been abandoned or been silently shelved.
Many an orthodox Christian has now only a smile for
Jonah and his whale or Eve's too seductive serpent, and is
not disturbed by the discovery that the whole historic fab-
ric of the Old Testament is a pious forgery and adaptation
at the hands of Ezra and his associates. Indeed they are
not unwilling to allow that the whole "Infancy" portion of
the Gospels with its virgin birth and accompanying prodi-
gies might be excised without fatal consequences. Many
feel a sense of relief at the result of this process of lighten-
ing ship. They think that there are two categories of
Christian doctrine, one fundamental and essential and the
other nonessential, and that they rest upon different and in-
dependent foundations. They fancy that any one of a hun-
dred dogmas might be dropped without effect upon those
remaining. But they do not consider the fact that since
all dogmas rest upon the same authority the infraction of
any one of them breaks the binding force of the authority
itself.

4: Confessions of an Old Priest

WHether it be an infallible pope, an infallible general
council, or the general agreement of the church the effect
is the same. The sanction is equal for all dogmas alike, no
more, no less. For a long while I deluded myseK forget-
ting this fact. As I felt the skirting walls of the doc-
trinal foundation crumbling under my feet, I reassured
myself that I could at any time retreat and find myself
safe within the walls of the main building. Or I was like
the holder of a large and irregular estate, which I had
inherited from my fathers. It had never occurred to me
to examine the title deeds or to trace its origin. It was
enough to know that my forbears had been in quiet pos-
session for centuries. When question was first raised about
certain outlying portions of it my first feeling was one of
half-amused annoyance. I pointed out how long it had
been unchallenged, how every portion of it was necessary
to the symmetry of the whole, and chiefly contended that
the Overlord from whom the estate had originally come
had granted it in just that shape and no other. It was all
of no avail. I found that the critics and historians had
been searching the titles with the result that at least cer-
tain portions of my claims were altogether indefensible.
But, like many others, I rested secure, confident that the
main body of my holding stood upon a different kind of
title.

But can any portion of the accepted ^^ Christian Faith''
be rejected without rendering it all insecure? Does the
Divinity of Christ, for instance, rest on any different foun-
dation from the Inspiration of the Bible? the dogma of
the Trinity from that of a Personal Devil? the Kesur-
rection of Jesus from the speaking with tongues at Pen-
tecost ? I had received it all and all alike, as an inheritance
and tradition. Was this a valid ground on which to stand ?
The question reduced itself to, Why am I a Christian?

Fifty Years Ago 5

Of course I might be content with the pragmatic reason
that the exalted ideal of life which it presents is so noble
and inspiring that it vindicates its truth by its results.
But this reply is unsatisfactory for many reasons. In the
first place, it may well be questioned whether this ideal
has been the product of Christianity, or whether it has
been gathered into it from the steady moral evolution and
development of the race through the centuries, whether, in
a word, the Christian ideal has been a cause or effect. The
habit of crediting all the moral gains achieved through
the ages to Christianity and debiting unregenerate human
nature with all its losses is unwarranted. Moreover, these
ideals were in the world in one form or another ages before
Jesus was born.

But in any case these ideals are not the differentia of
Christianity. That is, it is, in its essential quality, some-
thing entirely different. Its distinctive quality is not the
possession of these ideals, but the sanction which it pro-
vides for them. This sanction arises out of a set of alleged
concrete facts occurring in time and space. If we were not
dulled by familiarity with the claims of Christianity we
would be amazed at their mere presentation. They are in
substance these, — that about the year Y52 a.u.c. a child of
a virgin mother was born in a remote district of Asia and
was named Jesus. Of the first thirty years of his life
nothing is known. At about that age he appeared as a
peripatetic rabbi. He claimed to be in an unique fashion
the Son of God. He declared that the eternal destiny of
every human soul would be determined by whether or not
it accepted him at his own valuation. He spoke with a
divine authority which allowed no contradiction. He as-
serted that any one looking on him saw God. He wrought
innumerable miracles, curing men by a word of palsy
and leprosy, transmuted water into wine, walked dry-

6 Confessions of an Old Priest

shod on the waves of the sea, restored life to a friend who
had been four days dead and buried, was put to death as
a disturber of the peace, his body was sealed in a rock-
hewn sepulcher, three days later he rose from the dead, a
month later he was caught up to heaven in a cloud, and
announced that in like manner he would come again to
judge the quick and the dead.

The differentia of Christianity is the historical Christ.
That aggregate of organization, institutions, doctrines,
sacraments, ritual and ethics includes a thousand things
besides the above enumerated concrete facts, but without
these facts admitted it is not Christianity, and its obliga-
tion disappears. 'Now, it would surely seem that a set of
alleged facts upon which such stupendous consequences
depend must rest upon a foundation of impregnable evi-
dence. What is the evidence? I do not remember pre-
cisely when these questions first awoke and startled me,
nor what was the immediate cause. Probably it was due
to the Zeitgeist. For most people such questions do not
arise at all. In the religious, as in every other, sphere of
life people accept the beliefs current in the world into
which they are born. Propositions which would appear
preposterous if presented to one when mangrown are but
matters of course and commonplace if he has lived with
them from childhood. In this unthinking way the be-
liefs of Christianity were accepted for many ages. It was
not until near the middle of the last century that any
widespread uneasiness in their presence began to be felt.
Of course there have been in all ages those who doubted
or rejected them, but in the ages of faith the doubter is
silent or silenced. But all Christian claims are now sub-
ject to challenge and examination. Most of this popular-
izing of criticism has occurred within the fifty years of
my ministry. Such new dissolvent influences as Strauss'

Fifty Years Ago 7

*^Life of Christ" and Darwin's ^^Origin of Species" had
been doing their work for some time before, and of course
I was aware of their existence, but I dismissed them, the
one as another blasphemy and the other as an additional
instance of "science falsely so called." The fortunes of
my profession led me before many years to minister to a
congregation composed chiefly of educated and professional
men and women. I found that the challenge to traditional
belief must be faced. Strauss and his kind really seemed
to me blasphemers and Darwin and his ilk grotesque the-
orists. For twenty years the "warfare of religion and
science" raged and I became a not undistinguished cham-
pion of the creeds. I exposed the self -destructive charac-
ter of evolution, denounced the higher criticism, hailed
Gladstone as the triumphant victor over Professor Huxley,
felt confident that his "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scrip-
ture" could not be shaken, and that Bishop EUicott had
stopped the mouth of the critics of the Bible.

But when the controversy died down I had the uneasy
feeling that though my side was victorious the enemy
seemed strangely unconcerned about it all. I felt like one
who had been working strenuously to dam back an in-
vading river; the dam was complete and appeared to be
adequate, but when finished the river had disappeared
from above it and was flowing in around and below. I
began to realize that Cardinal E'ewman had been right
when he said, "My quarrel was with liberalism, and by
liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic spirit and its develop-
ment. It is not now a party, it is the whole educated
world."

At this time I chanced to be closely associated with one
of the bishops who took a leading part in the prosecution
of the great Bishop Colenso for heresy. He was tried, de-
posed and excommunicated for questioning the arithmeti-

8 Confessions of an Old Priest

cal accuracy of the number of goats and cattle as reported
in the book of Exodus to have followed the Israelites in
their forty years wanderings in the wilderness. This
deposition was by the practically unanimous vote of the
Anglican Episcopate, and with the approval of the Chris-
tian world. It seems incredible to me now that I should
not have discerned the folly and wickedness of this last
great outburst of intolerance and ignorance. Practically
all intelligent men, clergy and laity alike, now accept as
obvious truth the things for which the Bishop of Natal
suffered fifty years ago. And no gesture of even regret
has been made by the Episcopate which persecuted him.
Since that time new avenues have been opened up in the
fields of natural science and critical inquiries of the
dogmas and faiths of the world and philosophical explana-
tions of these. Both avenues are thronged by eager
crowds, the learned and the unlearned, as well as by people
of plain intelligence. Traditional thought, dogma and
devotion have been brought down from their inaccessible
constellations in the firmament on high into the ration-
alized arena of earth. '^Men no longer oppose Christi-
anity, they explain it.''

CHAPTER II

OBSTINATE QUESTIONINGS

As soon as I had fairly realized the situation I ceased to
teach and preach as the advocate of the creeds and con-
fined myself to "righteousness, temperance and judgment
to come." Meanwhile the question haunted me, Is Chris-
tianity true after all ? I mean true, not as a definite and
coherent body of propositions, but will the alleged facts on
which it rests stand up under a fearless and candid ex-
amination ? I determined that I must undertake such an
examination, and I do not think I underrated the magni-
tude and difficulty of the undertaking. What we call
Christianity is so stupendous a thing that no matter what
one's temper may be he cannot approach it lightly. It
is a history of twenty centuries of devotion, an organiza-
tion embracing more members than any secular empire, a
literature probably as voluminous as all other literatures
together, a body of rites and ceremonies hallowed by tra-
dition, and around which gather the hopes, the memories,
the affections of countless myriads. Apostles, warriors,
scholars, missionaries, and plain folk have lived for it and
died for it. In the face of all this how could it be
otherwise than true? If it be not true, how to account
for its existence? If it be not founded on miracle, is it
not then the outstanding miracle ? This last consideration
held me at bay. But in the end another overrode it, —
though it be true for all the world it avails nothing, it
must be true for me.

9

10 Confessions of an Old Priest

At this point my devout friend the Mystic spoke to me
and said, ^^ You can find sufficient witness of its truth within
you if you will. Only open your soul expectantly and
you may hear the whisper of Jesus bearing consistent
witness with your own spirit of the truth as it is in him.
Then you will join that coimtless and blessed com-
pany in all ages who need no further argument or evi-
dence."

To this I could only reply that this kind of testimony
availed nothing to my need. In the first place, it is a kind
of experience in no wise confined to the religion of Christ.
It is as old as the ages, and common to all religions. The
nympholept and the enthusiast are always sure of their
possession. It is possible for certain persons everywhere
to shut out thought and sound of the world and hear
voices and see visions. I would not deny or belittle these
religious experiences, but I know enough of human psy-
chology to understand how valueless they are as evidence
of objective realities. And what was more important
for me was the fact that in the earnest longing to hold
fast the faith which was mine I had tried to find this same
experimental proof, had sought it with prayers and tears.
But I could not attain to it. In the very nature of the
case this kind of evidence is sufficient only for him to
whom it comes. It is not transferable. One may sin-
cerely envy it, as a tone-deaf man may envy his friend's
delight in music. He does not question the reality of the
music, but the reality must be shown him by other means.
And here I may say that the open and blatant exposure
of these experiences, especially in hymns and public wor-
ship, now offend me as much as they once discouraged me.
In a word, religion as an emotion and religion as an or-
ganized system of history and doctrine belong in different
spheres. The attempt so commonly made to carry over

Obstinate Questionings 11

the experiences in the one realm and use them as evi-
dence in the other is futile when it is not dishonest.

The situation of one who has been reared within a reli-
gion is very different from that of one who may b&
supposed to confront it for the first time and be asked his
assent, an intelligent Japanese for instance. The latter
simply asks, ^'What is it? What is the evidence for it?"
It is objective and he is detached. But with the former
it is far otherwise. All his associations, his affections, his
memories, his habits of thought are entangled with it.
It has become part of himself. The invasion of doubt
causes a schism in his own personality. Determined as he
may be to find the truth and to follow it where it may
lead, it is far harder for him to disbelieve than to be-
lieve. To be honest with himself he must do violence to
himself. He is therefore doubly exposed to the solicita-
tions of his emotions. At any rate, this "inner witness'^
which the mystic commended to me refused to speak to
me. A hundred times I have watched with envious eyes
the Salvation Army lads and lasses. They are sure.
They know. Their simple souls keep step with their
clanging cymbals and exultant drum. Once long ago I
walked weary miles to a camp meeting in the hope that
by placing myself in the midst of revivalistic heat what
I thought to be the recalcitrant crust of my soul might be
melted. I knelt, watched, waited, and prayed. But noth-
ing happened. Never was a soul more earnest in its long-
ing for spiritual testimony. Despondent and discouraged,
I plodded home, saying to myself that there must be in me
some strange congenital defect, that as some unfortunate
men are born tone-deaf or color-blind, some similar lack
must be in my spiritual make-up. But in the end I came
to see that the thing which inhibited me was the fact that
I could not deceive myself. It was my understanding

12 Confessions of an Old Priest

whicli demanded satisfaction and refused to accept it at
the hands of my emotions. Though the people of a whole
continent should march in triumphal procession proclaim-
ing themselves to have the witness of the spirit, what bear-
ing would it have upon the question of fact as to whether
Jesus walked upon the water, or raised Lazarus from the
dead, or rose from the dead himself? The attempt to
establish an alleged fact by a spiritual experience is as
futile as to solve a problem in geometry by a concerto on
the violin. The mystic has always been worse than useless
as an apologist. He belongs to an innumerable company
in all ages and in all religions. The omphaloi who sit
gazing at their navels, see visions, the medicine man who
chants his incantations till he falls down in an ecstasy, the
Quaker with his inward voices, the convert in the midst of
revival frenzy, Paul when he could not tell whether he
was in the body or out of the body, the Salvation Army
soldiers with shining faces shouting hallelujahs, all these
and all alike have their place in phenomena which are real
and deserve fitting study, but they cannot touch the objec-
tive truth of the religion of Paul or Buddha or Manitou
or Mithra or Christ.

Nevertheless, when I considered the stupendous mag-
nitude of Christianity, its millions on millions of ad-
herents, its material fabric of churches, cathedrals, hos-
pitals, and schools, its literature like the leaves of the
forest, its activities multiform and world-wide, the superior
intelligence of its followers, I asked myself. Is it con-
ceivable that it could thus exist if its foundations were
not made of impregnable fact? If it does not rest upon
miracle, it is itself the supreme miracle. This short and
easy answer has silenced many a questioning mind. For
a long time it appeared to me not satisfying but insuper-
able. Tennyson in the tragedy makes Cranmer cry out,
"What am I, Cranmer, against the ages?"

CHAPTER III

WHO WAS JESUS 5

It must be always borne in mind that the mighty and
complicated structure which we call Christianity does rest
upon the Creeds. The continued existence of its fabric has
been and is due to the stubborn steadfastness of orthodoxy.
There be many who please themselves with the fancy that
the catholic Creeds only represent the insubstantial specu-
lations of a long forgotten age, that they may be more or
less respectfully laid away while the "substance" of Chris-
tianity will remain. But though this substance of which
they speak may well be the religion of Jesus, it is not
Christianity. N'o; the catholic instinct of orthodoxy has
been a true one ; it is the instinct of self-preservation. The
alleged facts are the foundation upon which it is founded ;
— that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of a
virgin, died and was buried and rose again and ascended
into heaven from whence he rules the universe. If these
be not factual realities belief in the Incarnation, the Atone-
ment, the Judgment by the Son of Man are but silly imag-
inings. When I first began to be uneasy in the presence
of these dogmas, when I began to realize that they were
out of all relation to intellectual integrity, to ethical
values, to the facts of human experience, I consoled myself
with the thought that they were illegitimate conclusions
from the accepted life and teachings of Christ. Farther
reflection convinced me that if the Jesus ot the 'New Testa-

13

14 Confessions of an Old Priest

ment was, and did and said tlie things he is represented
to have done the dogmatic conclusions are not only legiti-
mate but inevitable. They are the only interpretations
possible of such a life. I^o phenomena in the whole his-
tory of the race or conceivable by the mind of man can
equal these facts if they be facts. They transcend all
events, all discoveries. We are dulled to their significance
by their constant iteration. Is it a fact that in the whole
history of the race one man child and one only named
Jesus was bom of a virgin mother? Did he speak words
of such supernal knowledge as would be impossible for
any man ? Did he by a word heal lepers, restore palsied
limbs, give sight to those born blind? Did he raise
dead men from the grave? Did he rise again from
the tomb himself? Did he? Unless these be veritable
occurrences, in the same sense as the assassination of
Julius Caesar, the overwhelming of Pompeii or the con-
quests of Alexander, the sanction and obligation of Chris-
tianity disappears. If, on the other hand, they be real
historical events, then all the claims and conclusions of
theological dogma and all the statements of the Creeds are
too little rather than too much. In that case, exaggera-
tion is impossible. If the facts are so the Trisagion and
Te Deum are all too feeble. But devotion and worship
must wait in silence until the question of fact is deter-
mined. Surely phenomena of such transcendent import
demand commensurate evidence. Just what is the evi-
dence for the statements concerning Jesus Christ contained
in the Creeds ?

To answer the question, I set about a fresh study of
the life of Christ. The task looked simple and easy. I
had only to approach it with the aid of those modem
scholars who had devoted their lives to it. The bulky
volumes of Strauss and Renan and Keim, Edersheim and

Who Was Jesus? 15

Farrar, as well as a score of others were at my service.
Some were critical, some devotional, some fanciful, but
surely among them all no scrap of evidence could remain
ungathered and unexamined. I was amazed to find how
few facts there were of the kind I needed. The ^^Lives"
were swollen with more or less reliable history and de-
scriptions of the times, of oriental manners and customs,
of Jewish theology and tradition, of attempts to harmon-
ize the Gospels, together with a mountainous mass of
questionable sentimentality, but of material for a biogra-
phy I found almost nothing. This forced me to ask. Just
what do we really know about Jesus?

Of his actual life we know very little. When we seek
information about any personality in the past we first
of all inquire of his contemporaries. In this way we
learn what we know about Socrates or Csesar, or Constan-
tine or Mahomet. It is a surprise and a disappointment,
therefore, when we realize that for Jesus there is no con-
temporary witness whatever. Few periods in the past are
so well known as the time of Augustus and Tiberius. Its
literature is abundant above that of any other epoch. But
the name of Jesus is not to be found in it. JSTo contem-
porary writer knows of his existence. Later on, a spuri-
ous passage in Josephus, a questionable reference by Sue-
tonius, and the mention by Tacitus of a name which may
be his, — and that is all.

The first time his name appears in any surviving writ-
ing is in a letter written about a.d. 50 by a Jew named
Saul to a little group of followers whom he had collected
some years earlier in Thessaly. These had not yet begun
to call themselves Christians. Among all the names men-
tioned in the jN'ew Testament as apostles, friends or ene-
mies, in the entourage of Jesus, only two give a vivid im-
pression of living, concrete persons, Paul and Pontius

16 Confessions of an Old Priest

Pilate. The others are more or less shadowy, remote, in-
tangible. But when Paul is called upon as a witness to
the facts in the life of Jesus he proves anything but satis-
factory. He does know something of the life, but appar-
ently not much, and what is more strange he seems to at-
tach little importance to it. He says that his knowledge
concerning him did not come from men or by men but
through "revelation.'' The "Christ'' with which he is
concerned is a transcendental being, to some extent, indeed,
associated with Jesus, but in a way difficult to determine.
When I looked for a qualified witness to the mighty works
of Jesus I found Paul unavailable. He never alludes to
them. He is apparently unaware of the wonderful words.
He never quotes them but once, and then in a saying which
is not found elsewhere in the New Testament. He never
used the dicta of Jesus to enforce duty or as an authority
for belief. He depends upon reasons and arguments in
places where it would have been far more easy and more
conclusive to appeal to the words of the Master. He
knows nothing of the Beatitudes or of the Sermon on the
Mount. The ethic which he habitually urges is pitched in
quite a different key. It is not of the resist-not-evil,
blessed-are-the-poor, love-your-enemies type. It is the plain
universal morality of human experience, — be diligent in
business ; honor the king ; husbands, love your wives ; chil-
dren, obey your parents ; pay your debts ; if a man will not
work neither shall he eat. The transcendental morality ac-
credited to Jesus seems to be unknown to him.

I turned away, therefore, from the Epistles disap-
pointed. Thus the nearest approach to contemporary tes-
timony failed me. I turned to the Gospels. All my life,
like other people, I had thought of them as veritable biogra-
phies, or at any rate four separate biographies, each the
complement of the others and all true. But I began to

Who Was Jesus? 17

realize tliat although I had read them and studied them
and knew them literally by heart I had never asked myself
what they really were and what were their place and func-
tion in Christianity. I^ow that I was determined to
get to the bottom of the facts and to the bottom of my
belief, I said to myself: here is the record and the
only record of the life of Jesus, what is its historical
value ?

The authors are unknown, therefore their characters
could not be called upon to support the intrinsic credi-
bility of the story. Moreover, they were written from
fifty to a hundred years after the death of the subject of
the biography. What authorities they used is unknown.
Thus it was plain that the only way to estimate their truth
was to weigh the verisimilitude of the story. I do not
spend time to consider the figment of ^^inspiration'' to re-
veal truth to them or to preserve them from mistake.
It is too late in the day for such trifling. Sincerely trying
to put aside all preconception, I opened the earliest of
them, the Gospel of Mark. But I was arrested and brought
to a standstill at the first page. I was there confronted
with the story of an amazing miracle. This brought up
into my consciousness with a shock that I had ceased to
believe in the possibility of miracles. I did accept them
once as a matter of course ; I do not believe them now. I
closed the book and cast back in my mind to discover when
and why I had lost the belief. I could not tell. The
Zeitgeist had molded me unconsciously. But I found
myself convinced that miracles were not only intellectually
incredible but that the belief in them was ethically de-
bauching. But although I cannot tell when my belief
in them faded and disappeared, it seems necessary for the
purpose before me to set down the reasons why I reject
them. It is not possible to arrange one's beliefs in the

18 Confessions of an Old Priest

chronological order of their arrival. It often happens that
a process which has been going on long in one's subcon-
sciousness unsuspected is the real origin of convictions
which he fancies he has reached bj logical means.

CHAPTER IV

THE ETHICS OF MIRACLES

Cheistianity moves in an atmosphere of miracles and
prodigies. It has linked its fortunes with the Bible, and
the Bible is a catalogue of miracles. Their actuality is
assumed by every writer. They range in importance from
causing an iron axhead to swim, to raising Lazarus from
the dead. For a generation or more multitudes of Chris-
tian people have been increasingly uneasy in their pres-
ence. They had been taught that it was a religious duty to
believe them. They are unwilling to lay this obligation
on their children. Shall they tell them ^'Bible stories" as
fairy tales? Or shall they tell them as veritable occur-
rences, with the risk of the children's resenting having
been deceived ? One large class of them is got rid of by
the assumption that they were only natural occurrences
which from one circumstance or another seemed marvelous
to the spectators, that these quite naturally referred them
to the presence of supernal power, and that legendary ac-
cretions gathered in time around the story. Others, espe-
cially those of healing, are relieved by pointing out the
well-known interaction of mind and body, and the ob-
served power of suggestion. But this minimizing pro-
cess is a dangerous one. Those who adopt it are likely to
lose their candor and intellectual honesty. When suc-
cessful, the result is worse than useless. The only reli-
gious value the prodigies can have is their value qiui

19

20 Confessions of an Old Priest

miracle. If this quality be eliminated they become not
worth contending about. It is futile to insist that they
have a necessary place in religion and at the same time
are not in any real sense miracles at all.

But after all is said, there remain the accounts of oc-
currences about which there is no possible ambiguity.
Either they occurred or the Scripture record is not true.
When this situation is realized by one who has lived in
the inherited faith it causes keen distress. He has been
taught to look upon miracles as of the very fabric of the
system and the ultimate proof of its truth, for "no man
could do these mighty works unless God be with him.''
To pick and choose among them is only trifling. Is the
principle of the miraculous to be accepted at all, or is it
to be rejected altogether? And in either case why?
One must have some solid ground to stand upon.

At this point it is apt to be assumed that it is all a
matter of evidence. One is reminded of Huxley's dec-
laration that he was not prepared to deny the possibility
of miracles, that he only waited for adequate proof in any
specific case. I am not much affected by this logic-chop-
ping about their possibility or their probability. No
doubt Hume was right: no amount or kind of evidence
can establish the fact of a miracle. The reason is simple ;
evidence itself is a process which can only function within
the regular course of nature. It is orderly and has its
fixed laws of procedure. Therefore it cannot deal at all
with a phenomenon which is by definition outside the
natural order. A thing to be proved must lie in the same
realm as the process of proof. Evidence, therefore, can
have nothing to say about a miracle, for or against.

I believe the record to be incredible in the strictest
meaning of the word. I have become convinced that
miracles do not happen, never have happened, and ought

The Ethics of Miracles 21

not to happen. The ground of my conviction is my idea
of God. To take an instance, — the twelfth chapter of the
Acts of the Apostles tells the story of Peter being de-
livered from prison by the miraculous interposition of an
angel, —

"When Herod was about to bring him forth Peter was
sleeping between two soldiers, bound with chains, and
guards before the door of the prison. And behold an
angel of the Lord stood by him and smote Peter on the
side, saying, Arise up quickly. And the chains fell from
his hands, and the angel said, follow me."

N"ow this is an occurrence which must be pronounced
miraculous, however widely the connotation of the term be
extended. Moreover, it is a typical one in that it assumes
the immediate interposition of supernatural power in the
interest of religion. It possesses all the differentia of a
miracle. Having been delivered Peter proceeded to the
house where the other disciples were at prayer for his
release, and was received with thanksgiving when he told
his story. Then, —

"When Herod had sought for him and found him not
he examined the guard and commanded that they should
be put to death."

It appears, therefore, that the miracle by which Peter
and the church profited was secured at the cost of the
lives of a dozen innocent soldiers who had never heard
the name of Peter or his Master. There is the story, do
I believe it ? I do not. But again, why ? I answer, not
because it is "impossible," or inconceivable, or because
evidence for its verity might not be produced to beat

22 Confessions of an Old Priest

down my reluctance. Por none of these reasons, but be-
cause my idea of God makes it impossible to believe that
he would act so. ^' Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right V' I cannot believe in a God who confers favors in
forgetfulness of their consequences.

The miraculous has been rejected on the ground that
it puts to confusion the idea of natural law. Every one
now realizes, for example, that for the sun to stand still
at Joshua's prayer would cause confusion and wreck
throughout the universe, beyond where old Bootes leads his
leash or Sagitarius draws his bow in the south. That
might be of small matter. If omnipotence could cause
physical disorder omnipotence might restore it again.
But a violation of the eternal ethics would be beyond
the resources of omnipotence to mend. In the case of
Peter's deliverance the cost of the divine interference had
to be paid by those who had no benefit from it. Could
the disciples who welcomed his return with thanksgiving
have done so if they had in mind the poor guards under
the executioner's ax? This obliviousness of the conse-
quences of the miracle is characteristic. In the Old Testa-
ment it may be said to be the rule. The servants of Jahveh
are rescued, protected, prospered, regardless of how many
Egyptian mothers have to mourn for their firstborn, how
many babes of Egypt die, how many Edomites perish, how
many foolish children are devoured by Elisha's shebears,
how many women and children were crushed under the
falling walls of Jericho. These old stories do not disturb
us much because we do not care much. We understand
now that the peoples at the stage of moral development
where they then were could well conceive of God as acting
so. We disregard the moral obtuseness of the annalist
for sake of the ideals of the prophet. But we ourselves
conceive God to be bound by moral considerations. No

The Ethics of Miracles 23

soft favoritism for a "chosen people" could make him
forget his other children. The Father-God whom the
intelligent world has come to revere is not the arbitrary
despot, killing and making alive, all to his own glory.

To an extent the stories of miracles in the I^Tew Testa-
ment are free from this taint of moral ohtuseness, hut the
principle which must control in consideration of them is
plain. That is, the interposition of God in the natural
order of things, at the solicitation of any man or men,
must of necessity involve wrong and inequity to other
men. If this principle be valid all stories of miracles must
be set aside. The record, however venerable and sacro-
sanct, must be rejected in the interest of the supreme moral
necessity to believe that God is good. One is reluctant to
credit anything less than truth to the narrative of events
in the Scriptures. There is no need to credit anything less
than sincerity. The writers said the things they believed
to be true. Upon what seeming evidence they accepted
them as facts can never be known. They are remote in
time and space, and the stories come to us through many
hands. The attempt to weigh and examine the evidence
would be futile. There is another, shorter, and more
available way.

As an example, we may select the story of the miracu-
lous draught of fishes. A fleet of fishing boats is at work
on the sea of Galilee. They are fishing for the market
at Bethsaida. The livelihood of the fishermen and their
families depends on their catch. They toil all night and
take nothing. But in the early morning two or three of
them are favored, — is not favored the word? — by di-
vine interposition and their nets are filled and boats
loaded. But what of the other boats and men of the
fleet? Had they ground to feel themselves unfairly dealt
with by the Lord of men and fishes? Of course if it

24 Confessions of an Old Priest

should appear in tbis case or any other that the purpose
.was "to show forth God," the favoritism to particular men
would be of small consequence. But this quality cannot
be allowed to the Gospel miracles. Jesus himself, ac-
cording to the account, again and again disavows and
deprecates it. He rejects or at least belittles the faith
which comes from "seeing many mighty works." In only
one case, that of the man bom blind, does he connect
God's manifestation with the prodigy, and that only in-
cidentally.

JSTow, if it be admitted, as it is by practically all modem
apologists, that the raison d'etre of miracles is not eviden-
tial, i.e., to show God to men who would not otherwise
discern him, a difficulty arises which the apologist has not
reckoned with. In that case the miracle becomes the
result of caprice or accident. Those who benefited by
them did so only because they happened to be in the way
at the time. One blind beggar happens to be sitting by
the wayside at the moment when Jesus is passing by, and
is healed. Another equally deserving — if desert has any
meaning in the case — sitting round the corner misses his
opportunity. One weeping widow has her dead brought
back to life because the funeral cortege chances to meet
Jesus in the street. If the widow of Nain has her son
restored to stanch her tears why should not the same com-
passionate and all-powerful word do as much for all weep-
ing mothers in Judea and in the world ? And so of all the
rest, — the one man with the withered hand, the one tor-
mented woman, the one paralytic — is it enough that these
were healed only because they were fortunate to happen
in the way? Does God's omnipotent and ever-present
compassion function only when accident or chance makes
a way for it ? Is He not the Lord of Chance also ? Here
we reach the root of the matter. If miraculous inter-

The Ethics of Miracles 25

ventions be admitted they introduce an element of incer-
titude, which would put all life to confusion. In so far
as they may be secured at the instance or petition of cer-
tain persons they admit a partiality of which all others
may complain. In the great school of life the Master will
not set aside the rules at the importunity of any favorite.
The whole ethical value of the school is dependent upon
the truth: "he knows no variableness nor shadow of
turning."

What then about Prayer? This principle is indeed
fatal to the vulgar and primitive notion concerning it.
The familiar exhortation to be instant in prayer in the
expectation that the petitions will be granted because
of much speaking forgets that granting the requests would
in so far forth import uncertainty to the lives of all men,
including the petitioners. J^o pupil may expect favors of
the Master. If any one can do so successfully all the
others may rightly complain. If all may do so at will the
rules of the school become nonexistent. The more the
Master is loved and trusted the less inclination will there
be to ask exceptions. It is significant that, for example,
the prayers for rain or for fair weather or for deliverance
from pestilence have largely fallen into disuse. Even
prayer for victory in war is proffered in a hesitating and
deprecatory spirit. Some will say that these have fallen
into desuetude not because men have experienced their fu-
tility but because of a general decline of the religious
spirit. No ; it is due to a deepening sense of their worth-
lessness. Men pray as much as they ever did. They will
always pray. But their prayers tend to become more and
more communion and less and less petition. It is the
doubt whether miracles would be good for men to-day
which causes the doubt that they occurred in other days.
It is not so much the modern sense of "the reign of law"

26 Confessions of an Old Priest

which dissolves away belief. ^^Nature" is an abstraction
and her so-called ^^laws" may be left to take care of them-
selves. But the moral distinction of right and wrong
can only survive in a universe in which moral person-
alities are assured that a personal God will always act
with uniformity and impartiality.

In his story of "Lourdes," Zola thus speculates upon
the consequences of the supreme miracle in the Gospel
record :

"One fancies Lazarus when led from the tomb, saying
to Jesus: Master, why have you awakened me to this
abominable life ? I slept so well ; I tasted at last so good
a repose. I had known all life's miseries, its dolors, its
defeats, its madness. I had paid to suffering the frightful
debt of living. Now you compel me to pay double, making
me to recommence my sentence. Have I then committed
some inexpiable fault that you punish me with a so cruel
chastisement ? To go through like again ! To feel myself
dying again day by day ! And it was ended. I had passed
through the terrifying gate of death, that moment the
thought of which empoisons existence. This anguish you
wish me to endure a second time. You wish me to die
twice that my misery may be beyond that of all other men.
Oh, Lord! let it be soon. I beg you do another great
miracle ; lay me to sleep again in such wise that the sweet
repose may not be broken again."

CHAPTEK V

THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

!N'ow, believing what I have written above to be true, is
it worth while to read any farther than the first page of
the Gospel where the alleged prodigy arrested me ? I did
read on. I read again and again, trying to do so as though
I had never seen it before. I was driven to the conviction
that, setting the miraculous element aside, the story was in
many regards incredible on account of its contradictions
and discrepancies. JSTo "Harmony'' of the Gospels is pos-
sible without such violence to the text as would not be
tolerated in the case of any other writers. The chronology,
the sequence of events, the reasons and occasions assigned
for the various incidents, the iteration that "thus it came
to pass in order that Scripture might be fulfilled" —
these and other considerations render the story valueless
as history or biography.

But it does leave on the mind of the reader, whether he
be willing or unwilling, the impression of reality. Here
are unquestionably memorahilia of a remarkable Person-
ality. I had always taken for granted also that here was
the account of the origin of Christianity, that this Person
was of such compelling authority that he was recognized
by those who could see as something different from the
sons of men, and that this power, grace and majesty suffi-
ciently explained the origin and growth of the church. But
inasmuch as I had become convinced by other reasons

27

28 Confessions of an Old Priest

that this origin and growth had a different explanation I
was free to evaluate independently this Personality. What
this other account of the beginnings of Christianity is
will be considered later; indeed its consideration is the
main purpose of this writing. Heretofore I had hesi-
tated before making a cool estimate of Jesus^ character as
he is portrayed in the Gospels by the fear of facing the
old dilemma, aut Deus aut nan honus, either he must be
God or not a good man. But I had come to see the ille-
gitimacy of this alternative. There are a thousand things
possible between a God and a scoundrel. I felt free to ask
again, Who and what was this man Jesus ?

Here I should say that for the purpose of this inquiry
I disregard entirely the Fourth Gospel. It is so evidently
a work of theological fiction and so hopelessly incom-
patible with the Synoptic Gospels that it cannot be legiti-
mately used in the attempt to discover historical values.
I do not think that the much-mooted question of its date is
of much consequence. It may be as late as the middle
of the second century, or it may be the earliest of all the
Gospels. There is a good deal of reason to think the latter
is the case. But being, as it is, a tour de force to identify
the Alexandrian ^'Logos'' with the "Messiah'^ of the
Jews in the person of Jesus, it is out of all relation to
history. If the words which it puts in the mouth of Jesus
had been really spoken by him one would indeed have to
face the dilemma, aut deus aut non homis.

Bearing in mind that they are by imknown authors,
written not less than fifty years after the death of the
subject of the memories, not based on any known written
authority but on floating verbal tradition, the task is to
gather from the Gospels some distinct and coherent pre-
sentment of their Subject I recalled a paragraph of
Professor Huxley's which I had read long before. At that

The Jesus of the Gospels 29

time it had repelled and offended me. But in the inter-
vening years I had moved far from my early preconcep-
tions. Now his words served very well to express my
feeling in presence of the baffling problem.

"There was something there, something which if I
could win assurance about it, might be one to mark an
epoch in the history of the earth. But study as I might
certainty eluded my grasp. Thus it has been with my
efforts to define the figure of Jesus as it lay in the primary
strata of Christian literature.

Is he the kind and peaceful Christ depicted in the Cata-
combs? Or is he the stern judge who frowns above the
altar of SS. Cosmas and Damianus ? Or can he be rightly
represented by the bleeding ascetic broken by physical
pain? Are we to accept the Jesus of the second or the
fourth Gospel? What did he really say and do? How
much that is attributed to him in speech and action is the
embroidery of his followers ?"

Of his actual life we know at best very little. A column
of a modern newspaper would contain all the record we
have. 'No story of a life has ever been so lovingly and
laboriously studied as his has been, but all the fact it
yields up is amazingly little. In a contemporary "Men
of the Times," if his name had appeared at all, it would
have been compiled something like this :

"A Hebrew reformer, born at Bethlehem or ITazareth
in Judea. Preached and taught one to three years. Gath-
ered a small company of adherents. Was antagonized by
the Jewish authorities who procured his arrest on the
charge of sedition. Was crucified under Pontius Pilate
the Procurator. His followers claimed that he had risen
from the dead."

Surely a meager foundation of fact from which to
construct a biography. There have survived, however, a

30 Confessions of an Old Priest

considerable collection of sayings and teachings attributed
to him. These are fragmentary and inconsecutive, chiefly
in the form of aphorisms, parables and mystical utter-
ances. They possess rare beauty and also, as we may be-
lieve, a rare insight into the nature and disposition of
God. As to just what he conceived himself to be and by
what authority he spoke and acted it is impossible to de-
termine. His Jewish kin had for many years held an
ideal of a strange character which they called the ^'Mes-
siah,'' the anointed one. Precisely what they conceived
this character to be and what role to play cannot be stated
with anything like definiteness. But essentially he was
to be a personality with a power and dignity beyond or-
dinary man. He was to put himself at the head of the
Jewish people, lead them out of political bondage, re-
establish the theocratic commonwealth and make his new
"kingdom" the nucleus of a kingdom of righteousness in
which the Hebrew people would hold the hegemony. Jesus
neither claimed nor disclaimed this role for himself. His
attitude toward it is ambiguous and perplexing. Whether
he half believed it and half doubted, whether he believed
it to be true but inexpedient to avow, or whether he be-
lieved himself to be the true Messiah but knew that the
title did not imply what his followers thought is quite im-
possible to determine from the Gospels. When he was
directly challenged to say by what authority he spoke and
acted \vith such confidence he was obliged apparently to
ask himself the same question. But his reply to the
challenge was ambiguous. From the Synoptic Gospels
it cannot be said certainly whether or not he claimed for
himself a nature different from other men. But nothing
can be more certain than that the personality sketched in
the first three Gospels could never have won the world.
The divine music which he chanted was in too unnatural

The Jesus of the Gospels 31

a key for ordinary human compass. Even tlie multitnde
which followed him for a little while in the heyday of his
popularity ^ Vent backward and walked no more with him."
Even the choice hand of the Twelve were only bound to
him by the charm of his winning presence. They loved
him, but their simple souls were perplexed and irritated
by his exalted speech. They loved him but never under-
stood him, nor is it clear that he understood himself. At
times he upbraided them for their blindness and slowness
of heart. At times he pleased himself by mystifying them
by paradoxes. In general, he treated them as a great
soul always does those he loves, allowing them to under-
stand what they can, prizing their love and faith more
than their intelligence. To all appearance his life was a
pathetic failure. He had mourned and men would not
weep, piped and they would not dance to his music.
Fifty miles from where he lived and died his name had
never been heard. During his brief career as a rabbi a
considerable number had been attracted to him, but when
all was done not a single human being had adopted his
"way." I asked myself, therefore. How comes it that this
obscure person, living his life in an obscure comer of the
world, has for ages engrossed the interest of the world
beyond all other men? — this man who wrote no book,
founded no institution, made no discovery, fought no
battle, did not a single one of the things which make men
famous. The orthodox answer does not satisfy — "he was
divine and men saw God in him." But his contem-
poraries did not see God in him. A few of his country-
men saw in him "Elijah" or "that prophet" or the "mes-
siah," but even they turned away disappointed and cha-
grined when they saw him die.

For a time I was disposed, as many have been of late,
to question whether there had really been any actual per-

82 Confessions of an Old Priest

son at all behind the traditionary words and wonders.
Was Jesus a real person at all ? Or was he but the ficti-
tious figure around which gathered the ideas and hopes of
a world seething as it probably has never done before or
since with religious longings ? Was he the King Arthur
of the world's religious round table ? As Legge has said,
"there has probably been no time in the history of man-
kind when all classes were so given up to thoughts of re-
ligion or when they strained so fervently after high ethical
ideals." Was it not possible that out of this universal fer-
ment there had been fashioned a Character to fit the long-
ings?— and which later on took a local habitation and a
name? This has been maintained by not a few compe-
tent and sober-minded scholars, and all the more confi-
dently by those who have made the most thorough study
of the times and the Gospels. Why is not a mythical Jesus
as possible as a mythical Buddha or a mythical Abraham
or Moses ? But this did not satisfy me. There is here a
verisimilitude which fiction could not produce. These are
surely the memorahUia of a real, living man. But what
kind of a man?

CHAPTER VI

WHAT KIND OF A MAN

I LEAVE aside the pseudo-concept of an "incarnation."
With such a character history could not deal at all. Such
a heing would be out of all relation to time and space and
thought. The simple question is, How is one to estimate
and appraise the person presented in the Gospels? Was
he good above all other men ? Was he wise above the ca-
pacity of man? Was his life admirable and worthy of
imitation? Did he make the claims for himself which
the Gospels state? If he did so was he justified by the
facts ? Or was he the subject of a delusion of a like kind
to which other men are subject? When these questions
forced themselves upon me I was shocked as though I had
been challenged to examine the virtue of my mother or
the honor of my father. But having arisen, they must
be faced and laid to rest.

First, as to his wisdom. To the great treasury of hu-
man knowledge it cannot be said that he added anything.
In science, literature, government, economics he seems
to have been upon the same level as the average unedu-
cated man of his time. He uncovered no secret of nature.
He gave no counsel as to the right ordering of human
affairs. He passed by unregarded the moral, social, and
economic evils of his time. He offers no cure or read-
justment.

Was he good? — that is, would his life as we have its

33

34 Confessions of an Old Priest

record in the Gospels serve as a perfect model and en-
sample for the lives of all men ? Here the distinction be-
tween an example and an ideal must be kept in mind. The
ideal of life which bears his name is the sum of all the
excellence as yet achieved by man. But as an example,
to copy, his manner of life will not serve. It does not
furnish the material. He had no experience of the multi-
form relations in which every human life must be spent.
The parent, the citizen, the father, the soldier, the man
of business, the craftsman find nothing in the actual con-
duct of his life either to copy or avoid. He lived aloof
from the actual world. He had nowhere to lay his head,
nor wanted any. When any concrete problem pressed him
closely he evaded it, as when asked for his opinion about
paying taxes to the heathen Emperor. That his person-
ality was gracious and engaging beyond that of ordinary
men appears on every page. But it was equally repel-
lent. Nor can it be said that he attracted the good alone
and repelled the bad. Among his most strenuous oppo-
nents were many as good as those who became his disciples.
Indeed it generally appears that those whom he offended
were those whose goodness was intelligent and well
ordered, while he drew to him those whose goodness was
emotional and instinctive.

His own life was controlled by two profound convic-
tions: first, that God is in very deed a loving Father to
all men who are literally his children, that this is to be
confidently believed and acted upon. He himself did so
without reservation. Second, that all men being brothers
must bear themselves with that affection which belongs
to brotherhood, that this love must control one's actions
without regard to good or evil deserving or to good or
evil return. As an illustration he points to the lilies of
the field and the fowls of the air and says, ^'Take no

What Kind of a Man 35

thouglit for the morrow, what ye shall eat or wherewithal
ye shall be clothed, for your Father in heaven knoweth
that ye have need of these things." He points to the
crowd and says, ^'Resist not evil ; love your enemies ; bless
them that curse you." These convictions of his may or
may not be Christianity, but they were the religion of
Jesus. He lived by them and perished on account of
them. Though they may now be evaded as being ^ ^coun-
sels of perfection," to him they were the working rule of
his life. 'Now the question pressed upon me. Do these
dicta represent ideals which may safely be adopted and
acted upon ? Can I, as a preacher, honestly urge men to
try to put them to the test of practice ? I could not. l^or
was I ready, as is the custom, to gloss them over, dilute
them, or destroy their plain meaning by interpretations.
God may be good, loving, full of compassion, tender-
hearted, wishing and willing well to all his creatures, but
the seemingly needless pain which attends upon all living
always raises obstinate questionings. If ^^Jesus is God,"
as the ultra orthodox are fond of asserting — quite un-
aware that they are uttering a heresy which even Athana-
sius repudiated — then his testimony would be final. But
we are dealing with the record to find out what he
was. One must not make use of a dogma to prove a fact.
"Except ye become as little children," he cries. True,
the preacher glosses this to make it mean childlike, lov-
able, trustful, affectionate. But this was not his mean-
ing. He lays it down as a rule of life, and predicates
it on the presupposition that if one will only trust God
he will deal with him as a parent does with a helpless child,
feeding it when it is hungry, clothing it when it is cold,
sheltering it when it is in danger. Christian teaching has
generally accepted this as true in theory, and a few de-
vout souls through the ages have acted upon it. The re-

36 Confessions of an Old Priest

suit has always been the same; they have either perished
after a starved and meager life, or they have become a
charge upon the mass of their fellows who have not fol-
lowed their way. How could I in the same breath preach
the duties of industry, thrift, foresight, and point my
hearers to the beatitudes? How could I commend my
hearers to the Sermon on the Mount and exhort them to
fight for the right in the World War ? It is true that use
and custom and the ingenuity of commentators have
blinded us to the incongruity. We so habitually keep our
religious ideals and our secular ones in separate inclosures
that they seldom confront each other, but when they do
we must choose and reject. Jesus himself was uncom-
promising. But with transparent honesty he warned his
possible disciples of what they must expect. They would
be despised and rejected even as he was. They would be
cast out of their synagogues, indeed they might not be
able to live at all. His ''way" and his ''cross" were the
same thing. The religion which we call by his name long
ago diluted and enfeebled his exigent demand. It pleases
itself by calling the few paltry restrictions which it lays
upon conduct its "cross" ! The Catholic Church under-
stands Jesus correctly when it calls "the religious" those
and only those who have turned their back upon and
abandoned the world. But these are, and always have
been, an insignificant percentage of those who call them-
selves Christians. The mendicant friar more nearly repro-
duces the life of Jesus than any other man living. He
toils not, neither does he spin, he takes no thought for the
morrow, for he declares God knows he has need of all
these things.

It is often assumed that if only all men everywhere were
to follow the precepts and example of Jesus all life's
problems would be solved, all anxieties removed, all haunt-

What Kind of a Man 37

ing apprehensions dismissed, all contrasts and envies of
rich and poor resolved. Would they? So far as we can
see, human life would simply come to a standstill. For all
the motives and impulses which control men would cease
to operate. Who would work if he were really assured
that God will provide? How would he shelter himself
after he had parted with his coat and his cloak to the first
lazy ruffian who asked for them ? What would become of
his family after he had given to every one that asked and
lent to every borrower ? So far as we can see, all life, if
it did not cease entirely, would become a continuous
miracle. It is very noteworthy that the foremost apostles
of Jesus appear to have been either ignorant or unmindful
of his precepts. Paul, instead of exhorting his converts to
take no thought of the morrow, bids them be diligent in
business, tells them sternly that if a man will not work,
neither shall he eat, and that he who provideth not for his
own, especially them of his own household, hath denied the
faith and is worse than an infidel. If it be objected that
all this is fighting a man of straw, that Jesus did not
mean these precepts to be taken literally, the answer is,
he did so mean them.

But after all, the great matter is, was Jesus' represen-
tation of God true ? I do not know. This is the eternal,
unanswered enigma of the Sphynx with her bountiful
breasts and cruel claws. When I interrogate nature and
experience I get but an equivocal reply. He may be well
disposed, or ill disposed, or serenely indifferent. The only
unhesitating answer is in the obiter dicta of Jesus. As-
suming for him an eternal preexistence in intimate spir-
itual union with God, his word would be conclusive. But
this presumption carries with it intellectual and meta-
physical difficulties which render it unthinkable. Even
so we must believe that he used human speech to express

38 Confessions of an Old Priest

the convictions of a human consciousness. What validity
had his personal conviction? Moreover, it can hardly be
doubted that in his tragic end he realized that his trustful
confidence had misled him. How else to interpret his
heartbroken cry, ^'My God ! My God ! why hast thou for-
saken me ?"

So also as to his teaching as to the attitude of each man
to his fellow men. "Eesist not evil" ; ^^if one smite you on
the one cheek turn to him the other" ; "if one take your
coat give him your cloak also" ; give to every beggar and
lend to every borrower. Tolstoi and his kind maintain
that in all this Jesus meant what he said. 'No doubt they
are right. But they go on to insist that the counsel is
intrinsically good and ought to be adopted as the rule of
life; and here they are surely wrong. At this point con-
ventional Christianity boggles and hesitates and distin-
guishes, afraid to follow and ashamed to turn away. The
result is a continual disingenuousness, a paltering with
honesty, a belief which is only simulated, an ideal which
instinct protests against being put to practice. It was in
the eighties, while the world was listening to Tolstoi, that
the question was forced upon me. With trembling I asked
myself. Is it possible that Jesus was wrong? I saw that
whether he was right or wrong my own attitude and that of
Christians generally was unsatisfactory. I was driven to
confess to myself that his teaching in these regards not only
could not, but ought not, to be followed. Its practical adop-
tion generally could not but dissolve human society. Here
and there and now and then there is a man or woman of
the sweet, lovable, trustful disposition of Jesus. They are
simple, affectionate, childlike, winning. Every one loves
them. By a sort of universal consent they are looked after,
shielded from the perils into which their trustfulness would
lead them. No one would wish them to be other than they

What Kind of a Man 39

are. But they are safe, indeed they can only exist at all
because they are exceptional. The communis sensus of
men recognizes that a world full of such would wreck itself
against the stern facts of life. I found, therefore, that
my love and admiration for the fair, gracious, lovable,
Nazarene was unaffected. When I examined my feeling
more carefully I found it a sort of tender, affectionate, re-
gretful sympathy when I saw the tragic consequence to
himself of the "way" which he followed and preached.
But to hold up his life as a practical model and example
I could not. The dilemma, si non Deus non bonus, did
not disturb me. Accepting the record as it stands, purged
only of its prodigies, there could be no question of his
goodness. But this only on the condition that he lived
in illusion. It appears clear from the Synoptic Gospels
that a sense of an unique personal relation with God pos-
sessed him from the time when he appeared on the bank
of Jordan until he hung on the cross at Calvary. At
first it seems to have been hesitant and transitory, but
later all doubtfulness ceases, until his confidence was
cruelly shattered at last, as was shown by his dying cry,
''Eloi, Eloi, lama sahachthanair

CHAPTER VII

JESUS AND CHEISTIANITY

What is tlie place and function of the historic Jesus in
that mighty complex which we call Christianity? Was
he its founder? Did it come into the world new with
him ? Do its creeds, its sacraments, its institutions derive
all their validity from him? What was his relation to
the primitive church ? If it did not originate with him
where did it come from?

To satisfy these inquiries I set myself for the first
time to really study the origins. A generation earlier the
attempt would have been hopeless. It is amazing how
little attention had been given to this fundamental ques-
tion. It was everywhere taken for granted that there was
no obscurity about it. The whole matter was perfectly
simple. To a world which knew not God and therefore had
no religion came a Person from without the universe
bringing a revelation of God, a system of truth, a rule of
life, gathered about him a group of men whom he com-
missioned to go out into the world and proclaim these
things. They went forth, gathered recruits, organized
them into societies; these scattered groups coalesced into
an ecumenical body which is the Church. The whole pro-
cess was furthered and indeed made possible by the ex-
hibition of innumerable miracles and prodigies. It vin-
dicated its supramundane origin by presenting a morality
so exalted by contrast with the universal degradation of

40

Jesus and Christianity 41

heathen society that it drew to itself as with a magnet
all who hungered and thirsted after righteousness.

In this belief I had grown up. Up to that time it had
not occurred to my mind that any other explanation of the
phenomena was possible. But now that I felt obliged to
eliminate from the history all the miraculous element it
became clear that the motive power which alone would
have made this course of events possible had disappeared,
and the historic phenomena must be otherwise accounted
for. When I seriously attempted to examine the begin-
nings of Christianity the first thing which arrested my
attention was the unaccountable rapidity of its spread.
This was so great that it appeared impossible. Of course
if supernatural impulse and guidance be assumed the sur-
prise will disappear. But to admit that is to remove the
whole matter from the realm of reasonable examination
altogether. The miraculous has no history. The more
closely I looked at the story the doubt deepened as to
whether the facts were as had been accepted.

The accepted date of the death of Jesus is about 35 a.d.
According to the E'ew Testament, at that time ^^the number
of the disciples together was about a hundred and twenty."
The accepted account is that, starting with this little
company of Jews Christianity spread over the whole earth.
The Acts of the Apostles, an anonymous tract written
about the year 65, gives some account of the first stage of
the movement. But the earliest information we possess
concerning it is in certain letters written by Paul. For
the first thirty years after the death of Jesus we have the
New Testament account. For the succeeding eighty years
we have practically no information at all. We have
therefore to estimate and explain the extent of the move-
ment as it shows itself at the end of that period.

First I tried to picture to myself the conditions and

42 Confessions of an Old Priest

the means of propagation existing at that time. It is im-
possible for us adequately to represent to ourselves a
world so unlike our own. The art of printing was un-
known. All communication at a distance between man
and man must be written with pen and ink. But paper
in our sense of the word was nonexistent. The material
used for the purpose was very scarce and very costly.,
Moreover, a very small percentage of the people — how
small we cannot know — were able to either read or write.
Any document written for circulation must be copied la-
boriously by hand, carried by hand, and read to the people
addressed. Facilities for travel were also nonexistent.
It is true there were a few great, paved highways leading
from Kome, east, north, and west, but these camince reale
were for military use, and there were no other roads.
Except along these great highways wheeled vehicles were
unknown. In Horace's account of his trip with Maecenas
from Rome to Brindisi he says it required fifteen days,
traveling day and night, and this with every advantage
which the highest official could command. Anthony's
messages from Syria to the capital required two months
or more for the journey. Caesar's dispatches from the
Strait of Dover to Rome required more than a month.
There were no accommodations for travelers on the way.
The missionary, like Paul, must literally face perils by
flood, by hunger, by robbers, by wild beasts, by ship-
wreck and cold.

Now, under these conditions, how rapidly and how far
was it possible for a new religious movement to spread
in a given period? But even within the brief period
covered by the Acts of the Apostles the number of '^Chris-
tians" is unaccountably large. There were "myriads" —
tens of thousands — in Judea alone. Within forty years
there were "churches" in Antioch, Damascus, Arabia,

Jesus and Christianity 43

Africa, Italy, Spain, Greece, and all over Koman Asia. In
the city of Kome, Tacitus says, there were "a huge multi-
tude.'' All this is supposed to have come about within a
space of not more than forty years. Think how short a
time this is, less than the time since the Franco-Prussian
War. And all this without a page of printed matter, with-
out means of travel beyond six miles an hour, in a popula-
tion where not one in a hundred could read, and where
barriers of race and langTiage were met at every turn.

Now here is the problem ; the fact of this great number
of "Christians" throughout the known world appears to be
beyond question. But the accepted explanation of the
fact seems to be utterly inadequate. The custom of
church historians has been to explain it by laying stress
upon the unity of the world in one empire ; the universal
peace prevailing at the epoch; the wide diffusion of the
Greek language; the great Roman roads as means of
rapid communication; together with the burning zeal of
the first disciples. But these altogether fail to explain.
The unity of the empire was only superficial, and in so
far as it existed as a sentiment of nationality was an ob-
stacle and not a help toward the propagation of a new
religion. The world was far from being at peace. One of
the most stubborn and dangerous wars Rome ever waged
was raging at the time. The Greek language was but a
lingua franca^ and was not understood by the generality.

Very little is known about the "churches" at the end
of the New Testament times. Their form of organiza-
tion, their manner of worship, their discipline, their litur-
gies and creeds are all obscure. They evidently varied
greatly among themselves. Certainly they did not con-
stitute that "one, undivided, primitive church" so fondly
imagined. Then a cloud of still more dense obscurity
closed over them and hid them from sight for well ni^

44 Confessions of an Old Priest

a hundred years. From the arrival of Paul at Rome till
the time of Irenseus the history of the church is a blank.
"There is hardly a thing for the archaeologist to register,
a mere handful of inscriptions, possibly the cenaculum at
Jerusalem, the house of Clement at Rome, a portion of the
Catacombs are all that we possess." A spurious para-
graph in Josephus, an incidental mention by Tacitus, an
ambiguous allusion by Suetonius, a letter from Pliny
when governor of Bithynia, and that is all. Toward the
end of the second century the obscurity is lightened by the
flames of persecution. From the appearance which the
church presented then we may gain a clew to account for
its surprising extent a century earlier. When we look
at it intently we will be amazed to find how exactly it
reproduces the appearance of institutions which had been
widespread in the world long before Jesus was born. We
are forced to ask, Is this only a resemblance? Or is it
identity? Is it possible that "Christianity'' has a far
longer history than we have been in the habit of suppos-
ing ? To believe that what we call by that name originated
with a little group of simple peasants in an obscure cor-
ner of Asia and within a space of forty years spread all
over the world is impossible. But if we frankly recognize
it for what it is, a Syncretism composed of and continued
from religious beliefs, institutions and customs in general
use within the pre-Christian world the difficulty disappears.
Like others, I had always taken it for granted that the
world before Christ was a dark moral wilderness, through
which meandered a single pure stream having its source
in Abraham. The old "Dispensation" of Judaism and the
new one of Christianity concluded the religious history of
the race. But having freed my mind from preconceptions,
I was able to see how naive and inadequate this conception
was. I was amazed to find how far from the truth my

Jesus and Christianity |i5

notions had been. Instead of a ^Tieathen" world lying
in moral darkness, I saw one alive with moral earnest-
ness. The second and first centuries before Christ were
probably the most religions epochs the world has ever
experienced. Instead of a ^'heathen" world lying in
moral darkness I saw one alive with moral earnestness.
Strangely enough this religious yearning and struggle lay
altogether outside of Judaism. Our religious ancestry
is not to be traced through the line of Abraham. While
the Hebrew race bestowed gifts through some of their
prophets and some of their poets their institutions and
their people remained throughout their whole history
untouched by prophet or psalmist. The religious con-
ceptions of the modem world derive from the Gentile
and not from the Jew. Judaism remained spiritually
stupid and morally sordid from first to last. Having
become possessed with its fantastic conceit of being "a
chosen people," it drew apart in arrogant seclusion
and perished in its own shell. Its prophets prophesied
in vain. Even in their most exalted passages there is a
strain of abnormality, if not madness. Jeremiah takes
a long journey to the Euphrates to hide his linen girdle
in a hole in a rock, and another long journey to fetch it
home again rotten. Hosea marries a prostitute, thinking
God had commanded him to do so. Ezekiel digs a hole in
the wall of his house and through it instead of the door
removes his household goods. Isaiah strips himself naked
and parades before the people.

CHAPTEK VIII

DEBTOR BOTH TO JEW AND GREEK

It is hard to say when and where began the habit of trac-
ing Eeligion to the Jew as we trace Beauty to the Greek
and Law to the Roman. But, like so many other com-
monplaces, it has become so fixed that one is surprised
when he finds that it has no foundation. Their ethical
ideals and their practical morals were in no way superior
to the Gentiles surrounding them.

"The general notion is that shortly before the coming
of Christ the pagans, tired of their old gods, and lost to
all sense of decency, had given themselves up to an un-
bridled immorality founded on atheistic ideas. Such a
view, founded perhaps on somewhat misty recollections
of the Roman satirists and a little second-hand knowledge
of early Christian writers, is almost the reverse of the
truth. There has probably been no time in the history of
mankind when all classes were more given up to thoughts
of religion, or when they strained more fervently after
high ethical ideals. The cause of this misconception is
clear enough. Half a century ago the world was without
leaders or guides in such matters, nor had it the material
upon which to found its opinions. Above all, what has
been called the catastrophic view of the Christian religion
was still in fashion. Although our spiritual pastors and
masters were never tired of telling us that God's ways are
not as our ways, they invariably talked and wrote as if
they were, and thought an omnipotent creator with

46

Debtor Both to Jew and Greek 47

eternity before him must needs behave like a scboolboy in
possession of gunpowder for the first time. Hence, the
remarkable victory which, in the words of Gibbon, the
Christian faith obtained over the established religions of
earth was, in the view of the orthodox, chiefly due to the
miraculous powers placed at the disposal of the primitive
church, and it was considered impious to look farther.^

"The- popular notion of the moral condition of the pre-
Christian world is chiefly derived from such witnesses as
Petronius, Juvenal, Martial, Ovid, and Paul. No doubt
their testimony concerning the circles in which they moved
is correct. But in every age there are many kinds of
society presenting every moral condition. Juvenal was
a soured and embittered man, who knew Roman life from
the gossip of the servants' halls. Martial wrote unblush-
ingly for the lovers of indecency. Petronius, the courtier,
went slumming with l^ero and wrote in his ^^Satiricon"
what he saw. Ovid, the debonair companion of the gilded
youths, made his verses for their delectation. And Paul,
believing himself to be one of those few who waited to be
caught up unto the heavens with the Lord, looked on all
the rest of the world alike as ready to perish. A human
society so sodden in bestiality as these picture it would
have perished in its own rottenness. But human nature
is never all bad. Even at the time when the city of Rome
was a cloaca of abominations there were multitudes, un-
touched by her vices, living pure, quiet, devout lives.
Even in the same circles which the satirists paint in such
black colors we find Seneca and Tacitus and Pliny
exhibiting and preaching as exalted a type of righteous
life as has been seen anywhere since. With all his sins,
Seneca was a better man than was Tertullian, even tried
by Christian standards. Pliny was incomparably a more
admirable man than Francis of Assisi. There was in
Italy and Gaul and Spain many a grand seigneur of hon-

* Legge, "Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity," Introduction.

48 Confessions of an Old Priest

est and regular life, like Pliny's uncle or Spurenus or
Vergilius Rufus. There were many wedded lives as pure
as those of Arria and Pietus or Pliny and Calpurnia.
There were homes like those at Frejus or Como or Brescia,
in which boys and girls were reared in severe simplicity.
Many a brief stone record remains which shows that even
in the world of slaves and freedmen there were always in
the darkest days humble people with honest, kindly ideals,
virtuous family affections, sustaining one another by help
and love." ^

The world was very evil ; the world always is. One who
looks for evil in the time of Augustus or Tiberius will find
it abundantly, but if he be candid he will allow that the
Christian world of Constantine was no better. Indeed
the religious world of Csesar had this advantage that it
was humbly and ardently seeking the truth, while that of
Constantine was busy with murderous controversies con-
cerning the truth which it believed itself to possess.

With our prepossessions it is startling to find that in the
widespread search for God which marked the two centu-
ries before Christ the Jews took no part. They did, in-
deed, within that period develop their notion of a Mes-
siah, but this, their very highest spiritual achievement,
arose from race-conceit and selfishness. They looked for
one who should "restore again the kingdom to Israel."
In the popular mind this aspiration was altogether without
what we would call religious significance. The conven-
tional notion fhat Israel alone knew the true God and
passed on the knowledge as a dying bequest to the world
is utterly without foundation. For after all any real
appraisement of a religion must be in terms of its ethical
effect. It only needs the reiterated testimony of the

* Bigg, "Roman Society in the Time of Nero/' p. 144.

Debtor Both to Jew and Greeh 49

prophets themselves to show how hopelessly Judaism failed
in this regard. They prophesied in vain. What need we
more than the witness of Jesus to the moral obstinacy of
tlie race? ^'Ye are the sons of them that slew the pro-
phets. I send you prophets and wise men, some of them
ye shall kill and crucify and scourge in your synagogues
and persecute from city to city, that upon you shall be all
the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of Abel
to the blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom ye
slew between the temple and the Altar.''

And yet we go on repeating parrotlike that "salvation
is of the Jews" — and this in face of the fact that
even their language was never the speech of Christianity.
The priest and the Levite and the scribe could never frame
to pronounce its shibboleth either in tongue or heart.

As I came to realize these things I became convinced
that Christianity must have some other, or some addi-
tional, source and origin than the one to which it is
traditionally referred. It did not originate in Judaism,
and if it began at that time it was physically impossible
for it to achieve the ecumenical extent to which it had
reached within forty years after Jesus' death. Could it
have been in existence in some form for a much longer
period? Tw^o questions arose, Was anything like it in
the world before Christ? and. Where, when, and how did
Jesus come into it? In other words, did Christianity
come into the world at a certain definite date, a unique
divine intrusion? Or did it arise out of the world con-
ditions then existing ? Was it an advent or an evolution ?

The orthodox mind, which tries to be scientific also,
attempts to combine the two conceptions. It emphasizes
the '^fullness of time," traces the process through the
"Old Dispensation," and links the old and the new to-
gether by a process which is neither or both natural and

50 Confessions of an Old Priest

supernatural. But it does not perceive that it is super-
natural throughout. That is to say, according to it all
the persons and forces concerned in it are but automata.
The issue does not spring naturally from the conditions,
but is the outcome of arbitrary guidance and manipulation
at every step. The fatal fault of the contention is that
it postulates an unworthy God. Except for the ^^chosen''
individuals and tribes it leaves all the rest of teeming
humanity outside the religious plans of the Creator,
leaves them to perish unenlightened in their darkness, al-
lows them to contribute nothing to the divine purpose, re-
gards them only as foils to his chosen peoples and plans.
Of course all these preconceptions lay deep in my own
consciousness. ISTothing is so difficult as to escape from
the control of beliefs which one has inherited and grown
up with. ]N'o matter that he has come to see that they are
erroneous or unworthy, they still lie in wait for him.
If he be for a moment off his guard they rise up and oc-
cupy their old places. To see the truth about the real
origin of Christianity one must first wrench himself free
from the grip of the Jew. So long as he looks for its
muniments in the Old Testament he will go astray. Later
on I will consider the problem of where and how Judaism
came into and gave its color to those streams of religious
movement which debouched into the broad river that we
call Christianity. To the development of this world-wide
ethical and spiritual ideal many peoples and many insti-
tutions contributed. But the beginnings of rational ethics
were not made among the Hebrews but among Baby-
lonians, Greeks, and Egyptians. As has been truly said,
"the controlling idea of Judaism made any real ethic im-
possible. A God of arbitrary and passionate will took
the place of both natural and moral law." It is true that a
few of the prophets and poets of Israel seem to voice our

Debtor Both to Jew and GreeJc 51

highest and deepest religious experiences, but it may well
be asked how much we read out of their words and how
much we read into them. In all ages Christians have
found solace and consolation in the Twenty-third Psalm.
If by chance the contribution of Euripides had become
equally familiar would not many souls have found com-
fort in his hymn as well ; —

No grudge hath He at the greatest,
No scorn of mean estate.
But to all that liveth His wine he giveth,
Griefless, immaculate.

And would not the hymn of the heathen Cleanthes stand
worthily beside the ^'Lead Kindly Light" of the Chris-
tian cardinal.

Lead thou me, O God, and thou O Fate,

Thy appointed will I wait;

Only lead me, I shall go

With no flagging step or slow;

Even though degenerate I be.

And consent reluctantly.

None the less I follow Thee.

At the time when Christianity emerged, the world was
in the throes of a religious revolution and eagerly in quest
of some fresh vision of the divine from whatever quarter
it might come. In Damascus and Carthage and Alexan-
dria and Athens and Kome the problems of man and God
were being agitated. But Judea was strangely untouched.
While the Gentile world, weary of its sins, skeptical and
doubtful of its cults, was yearning toward "The Unknown
God,'^ Israel, self-satisfied and supercilious, was busy with
mint and cummin, and framing those fantastic apocalypses
in which it saw itself with its feet on the neck of kings
and all their goods in its possession.

CHAPTEK IX

Iisr the midst of this religious ferment appears the move-
ment with which the ISTew Testament is occupied. All the
information we possess about it comes from two sources,
which are substantially one — Paul, a converted Jew, and
Luke, a converted heathen, who compiled the Acts of the
Apostles. Paul ignores everything except what comes
within his ovni plans and experiences. The Acts, after a
little space given to the very earliest days of the movement
of Jerusalem, has to do chiefly with the sayings and doings
of Paul. From both these sources it is easy to discern
that a large part of the movement antedated and lay quite
outside of their account. It is a pity we do not have the
story of other missionaries beside Paul, other and earlier
ones. The Acts purport to give an account of the few
days, or at most few weeks, immediately following the
death of Jesus. At that time it says that upward of three
thousand adherents were '^added" in a single day. In the
same sentence it states that they joined immediately in
the "liturgy" and "sacrament" — as though liturgy and sac-
rament were already well knovni and recognized institu-
tions. No doubt they were. But institutions of this kind
require a long time for their development. In the same con-
nection it says that "great multitudes of the priests"
accepted the faith. On another day five thousand at once
came in. Paul says that at his last visit to Jerusalem the
Jews who had become Christians could only be counted by

52

Paul's Christianity 63

"myriads," tliat is, tens of thousands. In this connection
it is important to note that all the names of converts men-
tioned are Greek. Even the deacons chosen were all
Greek — Stephen, Prochorus, Nicalos, Timon, Parmenas.
Again, Paul in his letter to the Galatians written ahout
54, twenty years after the crucifixion, speaks of incidents
which had occurred in his own life years before, and
mentions that he had even then been a Christian for
many years, so that by his account the movement must
have been in progress long before the accepted date of
the death of Jesus. In his letter to the Eomans he sends
greetings to his distinguished friends Andronicus and
Junius, and adds in parenthesis, ''who became Christians
before I did." In the Acts, Paul's conversion is placed
at the latest only a few months after the crucifij^ion, yet
in his second letter to Timothy he appeals to him to bear
in mind the Christian devotion of his mother Eunice and
his grandmother Lois, thus assuming the existence of the
church three generations before a.d. 60. These are but
samples of places in the 'New Testament where one catches
glimpses behind the lines of a church long antecedent.

It seems quite impossible to make the accepted account
of the beginning of the church to fit the facts. That ac-
count runs thus : Upon the death of Jesus his few friends
and followers, being disillusioned and disappointed, aban-
doned him and scattered. But within a few days or weeks
— the accounts in the Gospels are confused and contra-
dictory— ^hearing the story of his reappearance, drew to-
gether again in a little group in an upper chamber in
Jerusalem. Presently their number reached to a hundred
and twenty. They were all Jews, and their hopes and
plans were aU Judaistic. At the outset they had no
thought or wish to separate from their tribal cult. They
observed its ceremonies and frequented its temple. The

64 Confessions of an Old Priest

only thing whicli distinguished them from other Jews was
their belief that their "Messiah" had already come in the
person of Jesus. Of this they were able to convince other
Jews, chiefly from among those who lived outside of
Palestine, and admitted them to their company. This
went on for a period which is represented as very brief.
This is all there was of it at that stage. The conversion of
Paul seems to have occurred almost immediately follow-
ing the "forty days" after the death of Jesus. But Paul
the Hellenist, not satisfied with the narrow outlook of the
Jerusalem company, proposed to take in the Gentiles to
the society. The others bitterly opposed this and a con-
troversy arose which split the organization in two. The
church in Judea confined itself to Jewish membership
and after a generation or two dwindled away and disap-
peared. Thereafter the church became the church of Paul.
The rest of the story in the New Testament is concerned
entirely with his adventures and opinions. But within
twenty-five years after his conversion, as we discover from
both Christian and pagan sources, churches calling them-
selves Christian were literally all over the world. So the
account runs. This period is clearly far too short for
such a growth under the physical conditions then existing,
the lack of means of communication, and of a common
language. So swift and extended a spread of a new
religion is simply impossible. The extent of Christianity
at A.D. 70 must accounted for in some other way.

About the year 70 the idyllic church of the apostles
disappears from view. When the church reappears in
history four generations later it bears little resemblance
to that of apostolic times. But it does bear so close a
resemblance as to be practically undistinguishable from
a cult which prevailed all over the world two centuries
earlier. Even as late as the fifth century a.d. the church

PauVs Christianity 55

was far more pagan than it was Christian, after the fash-
ion of Paul's societies. IsTor do we find it bearing any
more likeness to Judaism. Its ideas, its cults, its phrase-
ology, its institutions and sacraments are all those which
had been in vogue for centuries in the pagan world. It is
true that the Christianity of Paul was "to the Greeks
foolishness,'^ but that was not the Christianity of Tertul-
lian and Jerome.

The essence of Paul's religion was the "Parousia," the
expected reappearance of Christ and the end of the seen.
When this expectation faded away in disappointment the
motive power of his evangel went with it. The ideas, the
motives, the discipline which belonged to it were no longer
possible after the disciples had stood for two generations
gazing up into the heavens in vain. The great movement,
within which this society was but an episode, went on its
way. It adopted and absorbed the "Christ" from the
society which bore his name. After four centuries during
which it was doubtful whether the movement would ulti-
mately bear the name of Isis or Mithra or Christ it has
since been called by the name it now bears. But there
was no sudden break or violent revolution. The worship
at St. Peter's or Canterbury or the silent waiting in the
Quaker meeting are all alike in a continuous line with
that of the sodalities of Tarsus, Alexandria, Antioch, and
Eome and the villages of Eoman Asia.

I am well aware how incredible and fantastic this may
appear to the average Christian. The accepted notion
concerning the origin and spread of Christianity is so
ingrained in the very structure of his mind. So it had
seemed to me until after long study of the facts of the
case. I had always thought of Christianity as "coming"
like lightning from heaven, shining into a dark world.
True, I had also accepted the incompatible notion that it

66 Confessions of an Old Priest

was a plant whicli sprang from Judaism, within which it
had grown and ripened, and that the Messiah was its
fruition. I had always conceived of heathenism as a black
background against which the drama of salvation had been
staged. How the Jew came to take possession of the stage,
impose his old libretto on th« drama, and gain the credit
for its production is a problem remaining unsolved until
more information is available concerning the blank his-
tory of the century and a half following Paul's disappear-
ance and before the Church emerged whose history since
it has been possible to follow.

The short-lived church of Paul and his companions
escaped from Judaism with a painful wrench, but even he
could not escape his instinct of racial superiority. Israel
is for him still the true vine and the Gentile is an inferior
stock grafted in and drawing its spiritual life from the
old stalk. One of the strangest things in life is the way
in which an idea having once got lodgment in the mind
of the multitude becomes part of its mental furniture.
Tho accepted connection of Christianity with Judaism is
one of such notions. In spite of the fact that of all the
contemporaries of Jesus the Hebrews were the least ad-
vanced in spiritual apprehension, that they were imper-
vious to his spirit, that their whole organization moved
to get rid of him, that the meager first fruits of Chris-
tianity quickly shriveled and perished in the inhospitable
soil of Palestine, that from the beginning the church grew
in heathen soil and gained its membership from those
reared in paganism — in spite of all this we accept as
religious truth the tribal boast of John that "salvation is
of the Jews" ! We hold as sacrosanct and read in worship
their falsified history, fill our hymns and prayers with
aspirations for the peace of Israel and sing Jerusalem the
Golden. We give highest honor to their far from ad-

PauVs Christianity 57

mirable heroes and teach our cliildreii about them ; we read
for edification the unintelligible rhapsodies of their
prophets; we identify Jesus with their incomprehensible
Messiah, even though we think of him under his Greek
attribute of the Christ. The explanation of the paradox
probably is that it served as a quasi-historical basis for
that artificial system of theology spun by the church in the
third and fourth centuries. Without it the "plan of sal-
vation'' would appear for what it is, a cunningly devised
fabric standing on no historic foundation. So it will no
doubt go on for long time to come. The force of inertia
acts in the religious as well as in the secular sphere.

CHAPTER X

THE CHRISTIAN AND THE WORLD

It is to be lamented that we know so little about tbat
period with which the Acts and the Epistles deal. It is
marked off from all that went before and all that followed
in religious history by two characteristics. All its move-
ments were about two foci, the Resurrection and the sec-
ond coming of Jesus. It is altogether other-worldly. Its
motto is ^'the friendship of the world is enmity to God."
This other-worldliness is the dark pigment with which it
was to discolor the great world stream of religion. It is
really all that survives in current thought of ^'primitive
Christianity.'' The accepted ethics of Christianity cannot
be understood at all unless we bear steadily in mind what
were the controlling beliefs of Paul and his contempo-
raries. They confidently expected the risen Christ to
come in his glory, and the end of the world. This was
not a theological speculation with them, as it has been at
sundry times since. They were perfectly persuaded that
within a few months, a few years at farthest, the world
as it is would be transfoiTaed by the Son of Man coming
to judge. If the Gospels report him correctly this was
unquestionably Jesus' own expectation. It is true he dis-
claims a precise knowledge of the day and hour of his
^'coming in the clouds with great power and glory," but
he certainly believed that it would be within a brief period.
He expected his work in the world to be catastrophic. He
spoke of the Kingdom as growing as a grain of mustard

58

The Christian and the World 59

seed, but he thought of the seed as having been planted
long ago and now ripening to pluck. The idea of being
a central power in the heavens, waiting while his apostles
should slowly convert the world, was foreign to his
thought. They "would not have gone through all the
cities of Judea till the Son of Man come." When he as-
sured his friends that for a little while they should see
him and again for a little while they would not see him,
both he and they understood him to mean what he said,
that is, it would only be for "a little while." "For the
Son of Man shall come with the glory of his Father with
the angels and then he shall reward every man according
to his works. Verily I say unto you there be some stand-
ing here who shall not see death till they see the Son of
Man come."

This conviction controlled the teaching and conduct of
the first generation of his followers. They did not think
of themselves as missionaries undertaking the long, slow
task of persuading the world. They were heralds sent
forth to announce a coronation. This is the burden of
their message. The very first of their writings which has
survived, the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, concerns
itself solely with this expectation. These people of Thes-
saly were waiting for his coming, but meanwhile some of
them had died. Would these therefore miss the glory of
the event ? Paul assured them they need not be alarmed,
for "these that have fallen asleep will God bring with him,
for we that are left until the coming of the Lord will not
precede them that are fallen asleep. For the Lord himself
shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of
the archangel and with the trump of God and the dead
in Christ shall rise first; then we which are alive shall
together with them be caught up in the clouds to meet the
Lord in the air." In the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians

60 Confessions of an Old Priest

Paul looks forward, not to being among them who shall
be "raised incorruptible," but among the living of whom
he says "we shall be changed." The whole ISTew Testa-
ment is dominated by this belief. The Coming for which
they waited was not that "far off, divine event, toward
which the whole creation moves" ; it was the great finale
which was to arrive while they lived. "The time is short" ;
by this they did not mean at all the shortness and uncer-
tainty of human life. They meant that the great round
world had but at most a few years to endure.

Now, a people who wholeheartedly held such a convic-
tion would of necessity conform their lives to it. The
ethics and economics fitted for a stable world would be
altogether unsuitable for one which was to perish to-
morrow. James says "the coming of the Lord draweth
nigh." Peter says, "The end of all things is at hand."
John says, "Children, it is the last times." Believing this,
how could they have any interest or concern mth the
things of common life? Nor did they. Their ceaseless
exhortation was to hold aloof from them. Even concern-
ing such a practical thing as marriage Paul counsels his
converts that they may marry or not as it pleases them,
but upon the whole he advises against it because the time
is short and their energies had better not be withdrawn
from the solemn waiting and preparation. He exhorts
them to postpone all their differences and disputes, to
judge nothing before the time, "until the Lord come."
Says Dr. Martineau:

"A natural and reasonable attitude toward a world and
the things of a world which had already run its course
and was waiting to have its affairs wound up would be
altogether unsuited to one in which life was meant to be
permanent and stable. All human occupations rest on
the assumption of permanence in the constitution of

The Christian and the World 61

things ; nor is it less true of a planet than of a farm that
mere tenants at will, unsecured by lease, and even served
already with notice to quit, will undertake no improve-
ments. What interest would attach to the administration
of law on behalf of a property which was not worth a
month's purchase? Who would sit down to study the
pharmacopoeia on board a sinking ship ? The fields would
scarce be tilled which the angel with the flaming sword
was about to reap. All the crafts of industry, all the
adventures of commerce are held together by a given
element of time, and when deprived of this fall into
inanity."

In the ISTew Testament all the relations of domestic
life and all the obligations of citizenship are either ignored
or presented on the passive side. The slave is advised
not to care about his liberty, on the express ground that
it is not worth while. It is better for every one to con-
tinue as he is and to regard himself as already dead to a
world which is itself under sentence. ^^If the apostles had
lived on till their mistake wore itself out and they had dis-
covered the permanence of the world, had they postponed
the writing of Scripture till the lesson of experience had
been learned, their scheme of applied morals would have
been very different." But they did not so live. Unfortu-
nately their precepts which were framed for life in a
world about to pass away have been carried forward and
imposed as an ideal ethic for the normal human life. This
inflicted upon Christianity that inward contradiction be-
tween what is ostensibly the ideal of moral conduct and
the everyday necessities of living. The Christian is told
on Sundays — and he tries to believe it — that "the friend-
ship of the world is enmity with God.'' All the other
days he lives with the world and for his very life must
be on friendly terms with it. I know, of course, the

62 Confessions of an Old Priest

glosses and interpretations by means of which the con-
tradiction is explained away. The world upon which
Paul and his associates turned their backs is made out to
be a very good world after all ; one has only to love it and
hate it at the same time ; to be a good citizen of the king-
dom of Satan and remember at the same time that ^liis
citizenship is in heaven." It is here that one meets the
difficulty when he attempts to proclaim what has lately
come to be called "the Social Message of Christianity."
According to the New Testament, it has no social message.
It is unsocial by its very nature. It is in the world as a
pilgrim and stranger who passes through it with his eyes
fixed on heaven. Its interest and solicitude are only for
the "brethren." The energetic Christian to-day who de-
plores the apathy of the church in the presence of social
and economic evils cudgels a dull ass. The bent of her
nature in this regard was fixed at the time when she looked
for the "coming" and cared not a whit about the world she
was about to leave.

This false estimate of the world which was formed while
waiting for the Parousia has persisted and has distorted
the life of Christianity. It is the black drop in the
Christian blood. It is a perpetual fear poisoning innocent
pleasure. It has been his skeleton at the feast of life, has
flung its shadow over the fair face of nature, has set him
in a false attitude toward himself and existence. If earth
were really what it is piously called, "this miserable and
naughty world," what is it but for him to touch it at as few
points as possible? Under this obsession the monk and
the anchorite flee to the cloister and the cave. Why not ?
The ordinary Christian entangled with the world in bonds
to wife and children and society must "live in the world
as not of it." He may go into the field or market place

The Christian and the World 63

to win his fortunes, but having garnered he must with-
draw. His aspiration is

Guide me O thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land.

The pilgrim and stranger can have no social message for
the land he passes through. It would be impossible to
estimate the mischief this false judgment of the world
has wrought. It confuses the conscience and stultifies the
judgment of the Christian every day. It produces the
Puritan, the nun, the Quaker and the hypocrite all alike.
Moreover, it does not derive from the Jesus of the Synop-
tic Gospels. To him the world was his Father's and was
very good. True, he bade men seek first the kingdom of
heaven, but he assures them that all good things would be
added thereto. He transmutes the waters of life into gen-
erous wine and not to bitter herbs. It is the evil in-
heritance from Pauline times.

CHAPTER XI

PKE-CHEISTIAN PIETY

Is it possible to recover and reconstruct any lifelike pic-
ture of the religious life of the world in the century before
Christ ? By the 'Svorld'' we mean substantially the people
within the Roman empire. Our own ancestors dwelt out-
side of it. They were drinking themselves drunk to the
honor of Woden and Friga in the forests of the north,
or squatting around stone altars where their painted
priests slew and offered their human sacrifices. The con-
quests of the mighty Alexander three centuries earlier had
broken up all old national divisions, and Rome had gath-
ered the fragments into one empire. But Alexander's
victories had wrought far more profound changes in the
religious than in the political sphere. The age-long con-
ception of religion had been that it was a national or tribal
affair. Each nation and tribe had its own religion and
its own God. Its religion was associated with the feeling
of patriotism or of race. Its duties and obligations were
public. Its rewards and penalties were tribal or social.
By breaking down national separations Alexander de-
stroyed the religious habit of the ages. Thenceforward
religion became less and less tribal or communal and more
and more an individual, personal affair. It ceased to be
the punctilious practice of a local cult and became a mat-
ter of personal salvation. The change marked an epoch
in the history of the human soul. It opened the way for
the religion of all future times. The futile philosophies
and observances of an external religion were replaced by

64

Pre-Christian Piety 65

a deep and earnest longing for a religion more satisfying
to the deeper emotions, a religion which should offer
divine help to human need, divine guidance amid the
darkness of the time, above all a divine light in the mys-
tery of death.

To satisfy this longing all the religions of all tribes and
peoples were drawn upon. The same men might, and did,
adopt half a dozen of them at the same time. They were
examined, tried, rejected, and what was helpful appro-
priated. From Greece, Egypt, Persia, Syria, Rome, and
farther Ind were drawn the materials which were to be
cast into the alembic and distilled into that Syncretism
which became the working religion of the peoples. In
this syncretizing process it was natural that those basic
religious conceptions which lie deepest in human nature
should come to the surface, and that the rites and cere-
monies which figured them should be elaborated. Among
the Roman people proper the old forms and observances
still held a place. They were intertwined with the whole
fabric of public and social life. The little godlets who
took kindly interest in humble folk were still cherished.
They were invoked at birth, at marriage, at harvest time
and vintage, on going on a journey or building a house,
strangely enough on every occasion except at death. But
Jupiter and Juno and the great gods generally invoked
by the state were too busy and too far off.

"Little people wanted little gods who were not too proud
to attend to the oxen and the babies or the profits of the
farm and the shop. The worship of these field and house-
hold gods was the most popular and the most enduring.
It lasted on until these gods had their names changed and
became the Christian Saints. Their place and function
has undergone no change save that of their names." ^
*'Bigg, "Origin of Christianity," p. 8.

66 Confessions of an Old Priest

But in a larger sense Jove and Neptune and Pluto had
been dethroned. The sure indication of this was that thej
had become the subjects of the same kind of pleasantry
with which the devil is treated to-day. A satirist of the
time ^ represents a council of the gods summoned on
Olympus to take steps to keep themselves from starving.
One of them reported that he had not had a smell of
incense for he could not tell how long. Another com-
plained that even when people swore by him they smiled
and took it as a joke. Another that he had had nothing
but one scrawny goat in a year. They all reported that
they were being crowded out by the myriads of new gods
flocking in from every quarter. Superficial historians
have been in the habit of finding in this chaos nothing
which may truly be called a religion at all. They can
comprehend the classic cults of Greece and Rome and the
mechanical system of the Jews. These appear to be rea-
sonable because they are capable of being analyzed and
described. But in truth this intelligibility is due to the
fact that these cults lacked the very essentials of religion.
Judaism was but the fancied '^covenant" between God
and a selected tribe. The old religion of Greece was
poetry. It grew from the fine imagination of that gifted
people. The Roman cult was practical and external and
had regard chiefly to the state. It affected individuals
only as citizens. Its final development into the apotheosis
of the emperor was logical and reasonable.

In reality it was in the chaotic heathen world that the
deepest aspirations of the soul were seeking and finding
expression. It was among them that the foundation truth
of all religion, the Unity of God, was first discerned. It
is an error to credit the Hebrew with this discovery. The
Jew, even the prophet, was never more than a benotheist,

^Lucius: Dialogues.

Pre-Christian Piety 67

his "one" God was such only in the sense that he was
above all gods. His was a monotheism of power, not of
being. The Stoic philosopher touched truth far more
nearly when he found a central unity in the universe and
called it the '^Generative Keason/' the ''Divine Word,"
the "Logos." From it came all things. In it all things
found their rationality. It — or he — is the "Vicegerent"
and "Embassador" of God and makes intercession for
the world. By and through him men may attain to
divine vision and "be lifted out of and above himself."
These conceptions and terms are all from Gentile sources.
They were spread with more or less distinctness through-
out the Grseco-Roman world. Also the idea of an arche-
typal, heavenly man was common to all the cults then cur-
rent. Salvation was everywhere related in some way,
often confused and grotesque, to this divine or semidivine
Person. It was everywhere and always a religion of
"redemption." During the two centuries before Christ
another age-long idea coalesced with it, namely that of
securing spiritual unity with this Divinity through the
sacramental eating of his body and drinking of his blood.
"The blood was the life." Religion was everywhere sacra-
mental. Our notion of religion being based upon a
theological creed was unknown. The gods were not de-
fined, in fact they were worshiped in idea. It might be
impersonated in any one or all, Osiris, Mithra, Messiah,
Isis, or Magna Mater.

For purposes of worship societies sprang up everywhere.
Sodalities and "colleges" by the thousand with their little
temples abounded in every city, town, and hamlet. The
ruins of these places of worship constitute the bulk of
all the remains of the time now extant. The age was pro-
foundly even though confusedly religious, more so than
any succeeding age, even the present. Compared with

68 Confessions of an Old Priest

later ages, life was amazingly barren and empty. For the
common people there were none of those interests which
now occupy and fill life. For them there were no books,
no news, no politics, no travel, no industry, nothing but
the plodding routine of every day and every day alike.
Into this vacant life flowed the religions of the East. The
flood was turbid and murky, but it spread in every direc-
tion. While the speculations of philosophers concerned
themselves with the problems of divinity and humanity the
interest of the common people found satisfaction in these
little sodalities, colleges, societies, which we may call their
churches, for in fact they were such.

The most" widely diffused cult was that of Mithra. Like
the other religions its central feature was the ^'Mysteries."
Religion was characteristically sacramental. The name
by which their sacraments was known, the Mysteries,
passed on into Christianity and is the name still in use
among us. These sacramental rites all revolved about the
central idea of a Savior-God. This title of "Savior" was
applied by the Jews to their Messiah, by Greeks to Zeus,
Helios, Dionysos, by Egyptians to Osiris and Isis. In
their phrase "he taketh away the sin of the world" and
is the judge at the last judgment. Erom the mysteries
of Mithra, Osiris, and Isis comes the "easy yoke" and the
"true vine." Osiris dies and is restored. To become one
with him is the mystical passion of the worshipers. All
alike proffer immortality through their sacraments. In
their organizations and rituals they are in many a way
simulacra of the Christian rites and ceremonies which we
see now. In 1852 the Fathers Hue and Gabet brought
from the East this description of a cult which has sur-
vived substantially unchanged since three centuries before
Christ:

Pre-Christimi Piety 69

"The Grand Lama, an infallible representative of the
Most High, is surrounded by minor lamas, much like car-
dinals ; with its bishops wearing miters, its celibate priests
with shaven crowns, cope, dalmatic and censer; its cathe-
drals with clergy gathered in the choir; its vast monas-
teries filled with monks and nuns vowed to celibacy and
chastity ; with shrines of saints and angels ; its service with
striking resemblance to the Mass; antiphonal choirs;
intoning prayers; recital of creeds; the offering and
adoration of bread on an altar ; drinking from a chalice by
the priest."

The belief in a divine Trinity has been extant since
the time of Plato, had been elaborated in Egypt, and had
spread through the Greek-speaking world. A "Logos"
or "Word," or conscious personality mediating between
men and God and interpreting each to the other was a
commonplace of religious speculation. The idea of salva-
tion through eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a
sacrificed god, and its actual practice in the rituals of
religious associations was a widespread custom. "Wash-
ing in the blood" of a sacrificed victim to the washing
away of sin was the supreme act of men who were grieved
and wearied with the burden of their sins. The Tauro-
bolium and the Criobolium were familiar in many lands.
Their essential idea is still a favorite one in many Chris-
tian circles.

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Emanuel's veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

Baptism with water by which the subject was believed to
be renatus ad cetemam, bom again to life eternal, the
"mystical washing away of sin" was as common in the
Gentile world as it is to-day in Christendom. The cross

70 Confessions of an Old Priest

has been a religious symbol from remotest antiquity.
The idea of resurrection and immortality through union
with a slain and revived god was a favorite conception of
the world in which Jesus lived. And these ideas and
practices come not from the "Old Dispensation" but from
the Gentile world.

When these things which looked so like Christianity
forced themselves on my attention they caused me the
same irritation and bewilderment that they did to Ter-
tullian long ago. At first the accounts seemed prepos-
terous. If the alleged facts were so why had all my
teachers been ignorant or regardless of them? If the
things which I had always taken to be the peculium of
Christianity had been in the world ages earlier, by what
title could we claim them? At first I stubbornly re-
fused to admit the facts. They were not facts but fan-
tastic conceits flung together by men who are congenital
iconoclasts, delighting to pull down what better men have
built up. Or they were fabrications erected on slight
foundations by ambitious archeologists. Thus I once
more balked at the truth. For the most part the refusal
to accept new truth is not so much that men do not see it
to be truth as because its admission would oblige them
to rearrange their mental furniture. They look at a new
piece when presented, with interest, and may be with
admiration, and would willingly possess it. But when
they see that it would not fit in with what they already
have, would oblige them to throw away some articles and
readjust others, then, partly from laziness, and partly
from old attachment, they turn away, saying, "The old is
good enough."

But when I had once read Frazer's "Golden Bough,"
Cumont's "Mysteries of Mithra," followed by a whole
literature of whose existence I had been ignorant, I found

Pre-Christian Piety 71

this would not do. The facts were facts and must be ad-
mitted and dealt with. I could not gainsay that many
at least of the doctrines, rites, ceremonies, and ideas which
we call Christian were far older than Christ. They had
sprung from a thousand sources, many of them from the
dimmest and remotest past. Some appeared even to be
coeval with primitive man. It is true that mythmongers
have dressed up for their purposes many fantastic con-
ceits. Still the facts are there. What was I to make of
them? The naive and ignorant early Christian Fathers
could dismiss them, like the Jesuit missionaries did later,
as devices of the devil for the confusion of the saints. It
is too late for that method. Such phenomena as con-
fronted me were actually part of the religion of the world
at least a century before Christ.

CHAPTER XII

SUKVIVAXS 11^ CHRISTIANITY

The fond attempt to account for all this pre-Christian
Christianity as ^'types'' and "unconscious prophecies'- of
a redeemer to come at a definite time of divine appoint-
ment seemed to me to be at once disingenuous and futile.
These things had an actual present worth in themselves.
They were, as is all religious activity, attempts to "seek
after God if haply they might find him." And they did
find him, in the only way by which he may be found, that
is, in rest for their souls and satisfaction for those vague
but insistent longings, part instinct and part reasoned
hope, which are the fount and origin of all religion.

In the presence of these newly realized facts I found
my preconceptions fading away. I had been taught to
think that the line of di\dne revelation ran solely through
the people Israel until it culminated in the great Son of
David. All the phenomena of the great world outside
were unrelated, isolated, disregarded, as phantoms flitting
about in the obscurity of "heathen darkness." l^ow I
realized how meager and unsatisfactory this conception
was. It gave to the Jew a monopoly of God, a monopoly
he has been ever eager to clutch, and whose self-satisfac-
tion has been ministered to by Christianity since John
made the tribal boast that "salvation is of the Jews." I
began to see that our inheritance is far richer, more
various and abundant than I had been accustomed to

72

Survivals in Christianity 73

believe. Even in religion we are the heirs of all the ages.
In my previous reading of the Bible I had been totally
unaware of all the phenomena I have been capitulating.
Heading the 'New Testament again in the light of the in-
formation which the last half century has gathered and
arranged, I was amazed to find how many of the ideas
and how many of the events recorded were very old, in
a new dress and setting.

I should say here that in all the instances which I have
given and shall give I make no pretense to original re-
search. That has been done by many skillful and honest
hands. I only adduce facts within easy reach of verifica-
tion by any one who will take the trouble to read. The
literature of the subject is very copious and very accessible.
Some of its findings are fanciful and speculative, and some
preposterous, but its great body of established fact is
sufficient. Among them may be capitulated such as these :

The belief in the birth of a divine person from a virgin
mother has been held in every age and by countless and
widely separated peoples from Judea to Persia and India
and Peru and Polynesia. Parthenogenesis is as common
in pagan as it is in Christian thought. To name only the
most familiar, Athene, Demeter, Persephone, were all
revered as ^^blessed virgins," as was the mother of the
Buddha. The Virgo Coelestis is one of the oldest concep-
tions in the history of religions. The Egyptian Isis with
the child Horus on her knee was adored under the titles
of ''Our Lady," "Queen of Heaven," "Star of the East,"
"Mother of God." Statues of that mother and child still
survive in southern Europe and are reverenced under the
names of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Babe. The
annunciation through an ancient woman relative, the birth
of the God in a cave, the visit of the Wise Men, the Mas-
sacre of the Innocents, are all counterparts of popular

74 Confessions of an Old Priest

stories which had been familiar in religious circles for
many ages. The birthday, December 25, was the same as
that assigned to the savior-gods of Egypt, Assyria, Persia,
and Phoenicia. Among the native people of Palestine it
had been a common holiday. The temptation in the wil-
derness is parallel almost in detail to the story of the
Buddha as well as in the Mithraic mysteries.

These parallelisms between the stories in the Gospels
and the beliefs current at the time when they were written
can be followed into innumerable details. But these are
sufficient to show that the absolute originality we are in
the habit of attributing to them is a delusion. We are
compelled to see in the Gospels a chapter in the long his-
tory of the evolution of religion.

But it is after we leave the New Testament time and
confront the church as it emerges from obscurity at the
end of the second century that its startling resemblance
to pre-Christian ethnic religion becomes manifest. Says
Justin Martyr: "The evil demons in mockery have
handed down that the same things should be done in
the mysteries of Mithra. For as in these mysteries
bread and a cup is set before the initiates, as you know."
Kneeling as a posture of worship as was the church's
custom was unknown among Romans and Jews, who
worshiped with uplifted hands. The organization of
the churches, the functions of the priest, the tonsure,
the white linen robes, all these are derived not from the
synagogue but from the heathen temple. The language
of the church from the beginning and everywhere was
Greek. But language is much more than a vehicle for
the exchange of intelligence. It not only conveys thought,
it molds and conserves it. The pentecostal legend en-
visages a profound truth; no one can hear a message of
religion except "in his own tongue in which he was bom."

Survivals in Christianity 75

The Greek language was itself saturated with religious
conceptions. When its words were borrowed to express
Christian thought they carried with them their old con-
notations. Thus we find that the church in the third and
fourth centuries not only defines in a heathen tongue her
doctrines, sacraments, rituals, and institutions, hut also
attaches the same ideas to the terms which they had for-
merly borne.

The going religion of the Mediterranean world in the
century before Christ was a Syncretism composed of an
incomplete fusion, or rather mosaic, of many creeds and
cults which had been in use in many lands. There were
countless temples to Apollo, to Dionysos, to Osiris and
Isis, to Mithra. The striking fact is that all these creeds
and cults were permeated by the same central idea, that of
propitiatory sacrifice. But they had all developed beyond
the stage where it was the literal "blood of bulls and goats
and the ashes of an heifer,'^ and had reached the stage
where the sacrifice was symbolized in sacramental mys-
teries. It is noteworthy that they had outdistanced and
passed contemporary Judaism. While the Gentiles had
left their bloody rites behind them and were celebrating
their sacraments in the kindly symbols of bread and wine,
at Jerusalem the voice of prayer and thanksgiving was
drowned by the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep,
while priests paddled about pavements reeking with offal.
A careful student of the time has formulated the beliefs
which were common to the worshipers of the Gentile
deities : —

"They were born of Virgin mothers.
"They led a life of toil or danger for mankind.
"They were vanquished by the powers of darkness and
descended to the Underworld.

76 Confessions of an Old Priest

*'Tliey came back to life again and became pioneers of

mankind to the heavenly world.
'They founded communities and churches into which

the initiates were admitted by Baptism.
"They were commemorated by Eucharistic meals." ^

These were the churches of the world into which Jesus
was born and in which Paul lived. These mystery societies
were everywhere, under many names, sodalities, guilds,
colleges. Again and again the Roman authorities tried to
suppress them, but always in vain. They were composed
largely of slaves and freedmen. But this does not imply
that their members were ignorant, unintelligent, or of low
human quality. The Roman slave was usually far su-
perior to his master in these qualities. In the first place,
they were white, prisoners of war or captives from among
peoples advanced in culture far beyond the Romans.
They possessed accomplishments of which their owners
were ignorant. From among them came the architects,
physicians, artists, goldsmiths, experts in the culture of
the vine and the olive. They were the rhetoricians and
grammarians, and the profession of teaching was largely
confided to them. It was from this type of folk that the
membership of the church was composed. As they were
chiefly of Eastern origin they brought with them the re-
ligious preconceptions of their homes. They had been
robbed of home and fortune and obliged whether young or
old to begin life over again.^ For them these sodalities
were a refuge and a home. But they had in their mem-
bership men and women of all ranks and position. They
stood for a religion, a brotherhood, and a pure life. They
demanded of the candidate for admission a confession of

* Edward Carpenter, "Pagan and Christian Christs."
^ Ferarro, "Greatness and Decline of Rome."

Survivals in Christianity 77

sin. He was received by a baptism in which he was signed
and sealed in the forehead. In looking at them it is hard
for one to persuade himself that he is not looking at a pic-
ture of the early Christian churches.

I had always without thinking regarded Baptism as
an institution peculiar to our religion. The most casual
reading of the ITew Testament ought to have corrected this
error. The earliest Gospel introduces Jesus at the time
of his baptism by John. In doing so it takes for granted
that the rite was one well known and needing no explana-
tion. And so it was ; but it was one which had no official
place in Jewish institutions, while it was a common one
in the other religions of the time. In the Pauline churches
it was the common practice, though Paul himself seems to
have regarded it slightingly, for he thanks God that he had
baptized only two or three of the converts. In the Mithraic
rites and those of Osiris it occupied a conspicuous place.
In the latter rite, by the way, a dove was the sjinbol of
the Holy Spirit. The whole range of ideas now associated
with it were common then; water, consecrated to the
mystical washing away of sin, buried with the Divinity,
born again to eternal life, these same phrases we use to-day
were familiar in the times before Caesar Augustus.

I know well that when such facts are thus concretely
and baldly stated they are likely to be received by the
good Christian with a smile of incredulity or a frown of
rebuke. But facts they remain. It is not necessary to
quote authorities. Christian scholars have gathered and
formulated them. They are plainly set forth in the ac-
credited encyclopedias and books of reference. Any one
who will may test and verify them. The important matter
is to know what to do with them. Orthodoxy would pre-
fer to have them buried and forgotten. This has always
been so. When Christianity became the official religion

78 Confessions of an Old Priest

of the Empire not only was every Gentile religion ruth-
lessly repressed, rooted out and destroyed, but every
record of their past was as far as possible eradicated. So
late as the sixteenth century Sahagun, the devoted mis-
sionary priest, wrote an account of the religion which he
found in Mexico. Besides recounting its superstitions and
cruelties, he was honest enough to speak highly of some
of its features. He described with great wonder and
perplexity the surprising similarity of their dogmas and
rites to the beliefs and sacraments of the church. The
authorities of the Mission got hold of his manuscripts
and concealed them. He appealed to the Spanish court,
and had them returned. When at eighty years of age,
and fifty years a missionary, he translated them into
Spanish and sent them home to Spain they immediately
disappeared. Two hundred years later they were dis-
covered in a convent at Tolosa and translated into English.
This sort of timidity and opposition is futile as well as
wrong. If it should appear that Christianity is a stage
in the long, continuous journey through which humanity
has traveled in its search after God, I should feel all the
more secure in my place as a late pilgrim. But I cannot
be unmindful of all the pilgrims who have trod the path
in every age and from every people. ]^ot alone in the
meager line of Abraham, but among the multitudinous
Gentiles is the path to be traced. Eor the Church's Doc-
trine it leads through Greek philosophy; for its worship,
through heathen rituals ; for its late organization, through
Roman law. The religious conceptions of the world into
which Jesus was born have been summed up by Professor
Harnack thus:

"1. There was the sharp division between the soul
(spirit) and the body; the more or less exclusive impor-

Survivals in CJiristicmity 79

tance attaclied to the spirit ; and the notion that the spirit
comes from other upper world and is either possessed or
capable of life eternal.

"2. That there is a sharp division between God and the
world.

"3. The depreciation of the world and that it was a
prison, or at least a penitentiary of the spirit.

'^4:. The conviction that connection with the flesh, ^that
soiled robe/ depreciated and stained the spirit; that the
latter would be inevitably ruined unless the connection
was broken or its influence counteracted.

"5. The yearning for redemption from the flesh, mor-
tality, and death.

^'6. That all redemption is to life eternal, and that it
is dependent upon knowledge and expiation.

"7. The belief that knowledge cannot be adequate ; it is
the ^initiation,' the Mystery or Sacrament, which is com-
bined with the impartation of knowledge by which alone
the spirit is sustained, by which it is actually redeemed
and delivered from the bondage of mortality and sin."

Here we have in the pagan world the whole range of
religious conceptions afterward formulated by Paul and
John, and current to this day in the Christian world. ^

*Harnack, "Expansion of Christianity," p. 34.

CHAPTER XIII

CHRISTIANITY AND JESUS

Says Emerson in his "Exploratio'' : ^'The life of Jesus
was the occasion and cause of an enormous development
in the spiritual faculties and perceptions of men. He
found us children in all that regards the hidden life and
he left us men.''

This was the estimate of him and his work which I had
always taken to be the truth, — that it was the new Jerusa-
lem suddenly let down from heaven four square and com-
plete, upon the empty plain of earth. This conception
could no longer hold its place. I had reluctantly adopted
the doctrine of evolution, but I had embraced it com-
pletely. It involves much more than the ascent of man
from the primordial slime. It is the law in science and
history and must be religion also. Things do not come
into being in this abrupt fashion. Miracles do not hap-
pen in history any more than they do in nature. No force
ever breaks into the world instantly. The ascent of man
is a long, slow, tortuous climb. Every advance is but a
stage in a continuous process. It is true that from time
to time humanity does appear to have taken a sudden leap
to a mountain top from which opens a view so broad and
all embracing that the slow steps and backward slipping
through which it was gained are forgotten. But a careful
backward look will always rediscover the mazy trail
through which it arrived. This evolutionary generaliza-
tion has now become a category of thought. All history

80

Christianity and Jesus 81

written before its prevalence is obsolete. All institutions
must be accounted for and described under its guidance.
A sudden incursion of a new and divine revelation would
be a breach of evolutionary law, an intellectual and psy-
chological miracle. It is impossible in the nature of things
that the apparition of a single teacher could instantly
bestow ^^subtlety of insight" to a race formely devoid of
it, raising to manhood at once a humanity which had
theretofore remained children, through ages of religious
speculation and striving. The stupendous phenomena of
Christianity may not be accounted for by a supposed
catastrophic invasion of the world by a new and unrelated
force or person. It is vastly easy so to explain it. In that
way it presents to the intelligence a neatness and precision
which makes it acceptable. A deus ex macJiina is the
readiest of all devices. A miracle is the most convenient
of all explanations. It is still generally accepted as the
simple and obvious explanation of the rapid growth of
the early church ; indeed it is not long since any other ex-
planation was denounced and its proponent frowned upon.
At the time of my own theological studies the only reference
to the matter was to abuse Gibbon for irreligion in attrib-
uting it to natural causes in his famous fifteenth chapter.
Here, then, is the problem, a new religion, originating,
as is claimed, in the time of Tiberius Csesar, appears a cen-
tury later covering the whole earth. All experience has
shown that in no area of human life does change take place
so slowly as in religion. It is the most tenaciously conserv-
tive of all things. Epochs do occur in it, but every ad-
vance comes like the revival of vegetation in the spring.
The blossoms and flowers and budding fruit are new, but
the roots are deep in the ground, and the seed was scat-
tered the year before. What is manifestly true of the
epochs within Christianity is equally true of Christianity

82 Confessions of an Old Priest

itself. It is not the sudden growtli and efflorescence of a
new and strange seed fallen to earth from regions above,
but the ripening of a harvest of vegetation sprung from
a thousand seeds. To pursue the figure, earth's living
forms present amazingly different aspects at different
epochs, once that of monsters weltering in the slime, and
again the fair earth of to-day with man as its crown. But
every intervening stage is but a slow modification of the
one which preceded it.

The accepted belief that it sprang from Judaism is
utterly indefensible. Both as to its outward form and
inward spirit it is the very antithesis of the Hebrew
spirit and the Hebrew institutions. This delusion has
handicapped its progress and obscured its history from
Paul's time till now. It fastened upon it the fardel of
the Hebrew Scriptures with their falsified history and
their "jealous" God, their savage moral ideals, their un-
intelligible vaticinations. Of course Hebrew literature
contains passages of spiritual elevation and deep insight;
every literature does. But its acceptance as authoritative
in religion has confused and hampered the church in every
age. Its few noble psalms and the scattered golden nug-
gets among its prophets cannot qualify it for the place
which it has usurped. This place would never have been
allowed to it but for the notion foisted upon the church
that it was the husk within which the precious kernel
grew and ripened. So far from its being a "progressive
revelation of God," that revelation and discovery took
place quite outside of it.

When I had become convinced that our religion in its
essential features long antedated the birth of Christ the
question arose. How and when did the historic Jesus come
into it, and what is his real place in it ?

Earliest in point of time is that congeries of belief?

Christianity and Jesus 83

derived from the religions of the East. Their center is
the idea of a dying and restored "Savior-God/' an advent,
a death and a restoration. Its primeval notion was that
redemption is attained by the individual through eating
the body of the divinity incarnated in a human sacrifice.
The cannibal feast, which was originally a religious rite,
had long been succeeded by one in which the sacrifice was
represented by a sacred animal. This in turn gave place
to the gentler "Mysteries" in which the fruits of the earth
became sacrificial symbols. But the fundamental idea was
never lost, of a sacrificed Divinity, and of union with him
through sacraments. This is the outstanding feature of
Christianity to-day. All sects and divisions of Christians
hold the sacraments to be the center of the cult. About
these have raged all the controversies. Upon their signifi-
cance has depended the value of all dogmas. The priest-
hood or the ministry is evaluated according to their defi-
nition. They are the supreme act of worship. The whole
plan of salvation is represented in them — cleansing from
sin by sacramental washing in water, union with sacrificed
Divinity through eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
These conceptions have been the earliest, the most con-
tinuous and the most permanent things in Christianity.

But not one of these things can be traced to Jesus. They
prevailed long before his time and far beyond his influence.
It seems now fairly well settled that even the Eucharist was
not established by him.^ The original authority in the
'New Testament is Paul, and he alleges that the account
of the institution was "revealed" to him. It has the same
historic value as his vision on the way to Damascus, no
less, no more. The whole circle of ideas which have the
sacraments as their center are altogether foreign to the

^ M'Giffert, "Apostolic Age," p. 68 ; Cone, "Oospel and Its Earliest
Interpreters," p. 175.

84 Confessions of an Old Priest

teacliing and practice of Jesus as portrayed in the Synop-
tic Gospels. He never brought so much as a turtle dove
to the temple. When, as a youth, he was brought there,
he showed no reverence for its cult and spent his time dis-
puting with the elders. He has never a good word for
priest or Levite. He tells the Samaritan woman that true
worship of God who is a spirit is neither to be confined
to her sacred mountain or to Jerusalem. He baptized no
one, and submitted to the rite himself not because he
valued it, but as a becoming thing. It is true that the
three Gospels represent him as establishing the Eucharist
with its characteristics of eating flesh and drinking blood,
but the identical terms used by all show plainly that the
stories had all been borrowed from a common source.
Moreover, it cannot be made to accord with the course of
the incidents of his last days, or with the tenor of his
life.

^Nevertheless, from the time when the church emerged
from obscurity at the end of the second century the cen-
tral feature has been the Eucharist. It represents the
broken body and shed blood of a sacrificed Divinity. Re-
demption is by blood. The creeds are but statements of the
worth and value of the divine Victim. Upon this founda-
tion rests the whole towering edifice of doctrines, confes-
sions, liturgies, cathedrals, papacies. Music and art have
poured out their richest treasures for it. Inquisitors have
persecuted for it, and martyrs have bled and burned for
believing it and for denying it. Browning's old monk
voiced the devotion of myriads when he begged to be
buried in old St. Praexed's where

He could hear the blessed mutter of the Mass
And see God made and eaten every day.

It is true that in late centuries the Protestant world
has shrunk away from the grosser conceptions of the sac-

Christianity and Jesus 85

raments. It has tended to vaporize tliem into symbols
and memorials. But in its official standards tlie original
conceptions are stated without qualification. The defini-
tion of sacraments is substantially the same in the Presby-
terian Confession of Faith, the Decrees of the Council of
Trent, and the standards of the churches of England and
Germany. It is to be noted, moreover, that those Chris-
tian societies which eliminate sacrificial ideas, such as
Unitarians, Quakers, and Liberals, show but a meager
vitality, dwindle, evaporate, and are passed by by the
multitude. The tragic element in human nature does not
find satisfaction in them. So far as organized Christianity
is concerned it may truly be said that the sacrificial idea
and cult have been its organizing principle. It was so,
is now, and so far as one can see, always will be so.

In the pathetic attempts now being made to bring about
"church union" this is the crux. Dogmas and priest-
hoods and ministries all revolve about it. Committees of
"Faith and Order," i.e., doctrine and organization, ex-
change diplomatic protocols and search for formulas —
not too unambiguous — concerning the sacraments and
priesthood. A true instinct tells them that this is the
central point of all. Many good people express wonder
that all cannot unite and become one in the religion of
Jesus. But the ecclesiastical instinct is right. If solidity
of organization and continuity of existence is the thing
sought it is through the mysteries alone that it can be
found. Here is the real apostolic succession. It reaches
backward through all the Christian centuries, back through
the heathen cults of Asia and Egypt, back through all the
ages and involving all the peoples of earth. Called by
the name of Moses or Mithra or Buddha or Christ it has
always been the same ; redemption by sacrificial blood and
union with Divinity by sacramental symbols.

CHAPTER XIV

JESUS AND CHRIST

What is the role of Jesus in this ecumenical religion?
Here is an historical problem whose solution seems in-
soluble with the data available. How did Jesus come to
be identified with the savior-gods of the peoples, to merge
them all in his person, to leave them all behind, mere
mummified curiosities from the forgotten past? This
transmutation took place during that century where our
information is so scant as to be almost nil. Yet the
general course can be traced. The molds in which that
plastic religiosity of the time was poured were all
ready. First in point of time was the identification
of Jesus with the Hebrew Messiah. But this could
be effected only after that had become transformed
through Gentile influence. What the true Jew always
had in mind was a conqueror like a sublimated David
in whom would be embodied their arrogant conceit that
the people Israel should put their foot on the neck of
kings. Their dispersion and the destruction of their
nation and temple compelled a modification of their expec-
tations. As their tribal fortunes became more and more
hopeless they began to dream of a "suffering Messiah"
who would redeem Israel. Their hope of world dominion
waned and they became ready to seek salvation like the
Gentiles. The Hebrew Messiah became the Greek Christ.
In this form it came in contact with the pagan world.
The kingly Messiah became the sacrificial Victim, and

Jesus and Christ 87

in this form found itself at home among the peoples whose
familiar ideas and practices corresponded thereto. Thus
the Jew entered into world-religion. He brought with
him his sacred books, his materialistic ideas, his proselyt-
ing zeal, his instinct of superiority.

It is possible that Jesus did at times believe himself
to be the Messiah. But it is clear from the Synoptic Gos-
pels that this fancy was not permanent nor was it the con-
trolling element in his life. Here again it is essential,
as it is difficult, to guard oneself in reading the first three
Gospels against notions thrown backward upon them from
the theological fiction which we call the Gospel by John.
Whatever value that may have for devotion it has less than
none for history. It is impossible to know with anything
like certainty what Jesus' conception of the Messiah was at
the moments when he identified himself with it. It was
not till long after his death and the removal of his fol-
lowers from Jewish environment that any coherent at-
tempt was made to define his nature and function. It is
impossible to do more than to catch glimpses of the real
Jesus through the clouds of miracle and prodigy with which
the Gospels surround him. Through this cloud, at once
murky and radiant, one can discern a real person and form
a general idea of his person and career. A striking fea-
ture is his continuous struggle against the grandiose role
which his followers pressed upon him. The suggestion
that he might be the Messiah did not originate with him.
At the height of his popularity he once asked his disciples,
"Whom do men say that I am ?" They answered, "Some
say that you are John the Baptist redivivus, some say
^that Prophet.' some say Elias." One enthusiastic mem-
ber said, "You are the Christ." His response is note-
worthy, "See that you do not say that to any man."
Did he mean to disclaim the role altogether ? Did he ac-

88 Confessions of an Old Priest

cept it but pronounce its proclamation untimely? It is
impossible to discover what he thought at that time. When
he was adjured — very reasonably as it would seem — "if
you be the Christ tell us plainly," he evaded the question.
But there can be no doubt that as he went on he more
and more claimed for himself some character superior to
that of ordinary humanity. His favorite title for him-
seK was "the Son of Man." 'No one has ever known
certainly what he meant by the term. The passages in
which he arrogates to himself as Son of Man the function
of judge of all men, and says that his followers will see
him come in the clouds of heaven to preside at the last
assizes, may have been spoken by him, or they may with
equal probability be put in his mouth by the generation
after his death who held all earthly things in contempt
while they waited the end of all things. But in the mood
of exaltation which marked the closing months of his life
he certainly believed himself to be something more and
greater than man. Just what that was can never be
known. It cannot be gathered from the New Testament
or deduced from all the writers of the century and a half
after his death. The pseudo-scientific definitions of his
person and nature by the theologasters of the third and
fourth centuries have been thrown backward upon him
for so long a time that in the popular mind they are taken
to be the facts of his owm consciousness. In any attempt
at an independent study of Jesus one is hampered and
frustrated at every step by these theological figments which
thrust themselves forward as biographical truth.

The inchoate Christology of the ISTew Testament is not
the source of "the Christ" of Christendom. All it fur-
nishes is the title, together with an ill defined but ex-
alted conception of a Divinity somewhere in an undefined
position between man and God. The Christ of popular

Jesus and Christ 89

belief is in the main the creation of two men neither of
whom had ever seen Jesus. Both were Jews of the Dis-
persion. Paul had been born and reared at Tarsus in
Roman Asia, a city devoted to the Mithra cult. John was
from Ephesus, a center of Greek philosophy. These two
are the architects of the popular creed. Jesus is indeed a
stone in its corner, but the architecture is Pagan-Jewish
composite. Paul seized the Jewish Messiah, bore him
away from Judea, and set him down among the savior-gods
of the Gentiles. John brought to him the philosophical
robe which had been spun in Greece and Alexandria,
endued him with it and called him the ^Word." Heathen
religion united to heathen philosophy took the Hebrew
Messiah and made of him the world's Christ. The real
cradle of Christianity is to be sought not in Bethlehem
of Judea but in the cities of Egypt and Asia Minor. It
grew there easily and naturally under the conditions ex-
isting.

Says Arnold Meyer: ^The belief in propitiation by
blood dominated the whole Jewish and Gentile world."
Dr. Hatch notes that 'Hhe mysteries and the religious so-
cieties which were akin to the mysteries existed on an
enormous scale throughout the eastern part of the Empire.
The majority of them had the aim of worshiping a pure
God, of living a pure life, of cultivating the spirit of
brotherhood. They were part of the great religious re-
vival which distinguished the age." A curious glimpse
of such a society is afforded in the eighteenth chapter of
the Acts. Apolos, an Alexandrian Jew, comes to Ephesus
representing a group who knew something about Jesus, but
had never heard of the new church which Paul and his
friends were propagating. These associations had their
sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Both in idea,
form and manner these sacraments continue in the church

90 Confessions of an Old Priest

to-day. The primitive name of Baptism, "enlightemnent,"
comes straight from the Greek mysteries, as does the sign
and seal on the forehead. The baptized were crowned with
garlands like the "initiates" at Eleusis, a custom continued
in oriental churches till a time within the memory of
men now living. As those admitted had a password, a
"symbol," so did the candidates for Christian Baptism.
The Eucharist was the Gentile mystery with the name
of Christ replacing the diverse savior-gods. In its fun-
damental meaning, its technical phraseology, its rubrics,
its bread and wine transmuted into the body and blood of
Christ, in the priestly quality of its celebrants, it hardly
changed at all in becoming a Christian rite. The canon
of the Mass or the Office for the Holy Communion could
have been used by the devout inhabitants of Tarsus or
Ephesus with satisfaction. The new religion was still the
old. Its fundamental properties were an incarnation, the
sacrifice of the incarnate one, initiation into his society by
washing in consecrated water which cleansed from sin and
conferred immortality, the new life nourished and sus-
tained by the flesh and blood of the God. The historic
Jesus became the Greek Logos, the Eternal Son took the
place of the savior-god.

I do not forget there are multitudes of Christians who
fancy that they can get on quite well without either sacra-
ments or definite creeds. Ever since the Evangelical move-
ment of a hundred and fifty years ago among English-
speaking people of the Protestant world there has been a
steady and accelerated movement away from Catholic
doctrine and rite. It is not that they deny the reality of
these things, but they deem them practically superfluous.
The Evangelical places the whole weight of emphasis on
"conversion" and does not consider either creed or sacra-
ment essential to that end. And in truth it is not. Con-

Jesus and Christ 91

version is a psycliological-emotional phenomenon whicli has
no necessary connection with religion at all. I^everthe-
less, the revivalist always associates it with the creed of
the ages, "without the shedding of blood there is no re-
mission of sins/' He assures the inquirer that "Jesus
has paid the price.'' He holds up Christ, the bleeding
Victim, and assures the believer that he has only to
accept and enjoy the redemption so dearly bought. To
him the creeds and sacraments are an embarrassment. He
does not know what to do with them. He accords them a
half-hearted reverence, and neglects them as much as he
decently can. But he holds all the more strenuously to the
belief in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. This is generally
represented to be the foundation of the Christian faith.
Does it truly represent the purpose and work of that
strange life of Jesus 1

CHAPTEK XV

THE SCAPEGOAT

The historical fact is that Jesus was put to death as a
malefactor. The times were cruel and it so happened that
the manner of his execution was by crucifixion. It took
place on a bald, round hill outside the city of Jerusalem.
To a visitor at the Judean town the sight would have had
nothing worthy of note. He would scarcely have singled
it out for notice from among the hundreds of crosses upon
which he had seen men writhing during his travels. Had
he inquired specially about this oifender he would have
been told that he had been a rather interesting and prob-
ably quite harmless man, a dreaming Jew who had pro-
claimed a new social and political order and had gathered
about himself a considerable following. It was a pity he
had to be taken seriously, indeed the Roman governor had
tried to save him from the consequences of his own indis-
cretions, but then, you know, the laws against sedition are
very stringent and none of these laws take any account
of motives, and so the poor man blundered into his fate.
It is a pity. Thus the official world would have answered.
The religious world explained that he was a very pesti-
lent and dangerous fellow. He was utterly without rever-
ence, jested at our most hallowed and venerable institu-
tions, spoke scurrilous abuse of priests and dignitaries, held
and taught loose notions about God and religion, broke
the holy Sabbath, told the rabble that harlots and tax far-
mers were more worthy people than magistrates or clerics.
He was a dangerous demagogue, all the more dangerous

92

The Scapegoat 93

because of his strangely attractive personality and the
diabolical charm of his speech. Something had to be done
with him. It was better that he should be put out of the
way than that the whole people be jeopardized. He was
leading them to anarchy, sedition and rebellion. He
simply came to the end which such men always reach.

The crowd seething around the spear-points which
guarded the bloody square mocked at him and shouted that
he was an exposed fraud and impostor, that he had de-
luded them with glittering promises about a new Kingdom
in which there would be no rich and no poor, where all
would share and share alike, a kingdom the least of whose
citizens would sit on thrones, in which every sick and ail-
ing one would have his ills cured by magic, where would be
no oppression, poverty, or toil.

A few timid and terrified friends looked on from a
safe distance broken-hearted. Here was the truest and
noblest man they had ever known or imagined. He had
steadfastly set his face toward right and goodness, he had
told the truth to priest and publican alike, he had led his
friends near to God, his speech had been the speech of an
angel, he had been pure and sweet and lovable beyond
telling, they had even hoped that he should redeem Israel,
but somehow he had managed to excite the hostility of the
powers, he had been injudicious and careless of offending,
he had said things about himself which when misinter-
preted had the color of blasphemy. ISTow all these hateful
forces had closed about him and brought to an ignomini-
ous and horrible end. And they looked him a despairing
and final farewell.

This is what the spectators saw, and it was all they
saw, a middle-aged man being crucified. When he was
dead they went their way.

But for centuries myriads of eyes have seen, or believe

94 Confessions of an Old Priest

that they have discerned in the tragedy something which
was not visible to the lookers-on. In their belief the cross
has been transformed into an altar, the crucified man has
become the Divine Victim, the soldier with bloody spear
has become all unconsciously a great High Priest, the
gushing blood has been etherealized into smoke of in-
cense ascending to the gratified nostrils of an angry God,
the turbulent crowd have become unwittingly the possible
beneficiaries of a great sacrifice offered once for all under
the dome of heaven for the sins of the world.

I^ow, may this event in history be rightly so construed ?
Is this the true interpretation of the tragedy ? If not, what
will account for the ghastly fiction? If this explanation
be not true we must reject the most widely current and
generally accepted notions about Christ. I say accepted,
rather than believed, for when the notion is stated in
terms with which the understanding can deal its intrinsic
incoherence and its ethical monstrosity compel its rejec-
tion. Nevertheless it remains as one of those idols of the
imagination before which generations have "prostrated
themselves, and whose grim hideousness is hidden from
the devotees by the smoke of their own incense. Most
Christians would be likely to aver that underlying all
their doctrinal and ecclesiastical differences they are at
one in what they would call their fundamental belief
that the crucified Jesus was a sacrifice to placate an of-
fended God, and that it has been so far efficacious as to
leave God no valid grievance against any one who takes
the proper steps to interpose this satisfaction between
himself and punishment.

O tree of glory, tree most fair,
Ordained those holy limbs to bear,
How bright in purple robe it stood,
The purple of a Saviour's blood !

The Scapegoat 95

Fpon its arm, like balance true.
He weighed the price from sinners due.
The price which he alone could pay.
And robbed the spoiler of his prey.

This is the burden of the Roman Mass, the Hallelujali
lasses' exhortations, the cult of the Sacred Heart. It is
the gloomy theme of ecclesiastical art, is enshrined in a
myriad pyxes, is what the wayfaring man takes to be the
central article of the Christian creed. It holds the central
place in the accredited formularies in the largest divisions
of the Church.

The Roman Church says, "It was a sacrifice most ac-
ceptable to God, offered by his Son on the altar of the cross,
which entirely appeased the wrath and indignation of the
Father.''

The Greek Church says, "He has done and suffered all
that is necessary for the remission of our sins."

The Presbyterian Confession of Faith says, "The Lord
Jesus, by his sacrifice of himself hath fully satisfied the
justice of the Father, and hath purchased reconciliation
for all whom his Father hath given him."

The two conceptions the dogma rests upon are: ap-
peasement of an angry God by pain, and the substitution
of a victim in the room of an offender. A notable tend-
ency in modem times is the attempt to retain the terms
of the doctrine while emptying it of its content. It has
begun to be realized in many quarters that its moral
estimate of God and its ethical judgment of men are un-
worthy, so the sacrosanct thing called "sacrifice" is saved
by giving it an exalted and unnatural meaning. This
cannot be allowed. It has been held before the world for
ages as the true interpretation of the work of Jesus. If
it be not true it ought to be cast out of the holy place.
Propitiation of God by sacrifice, and the transfer of

§6 Confessions of an Old Priest

righteousness from the guilty to the innocent are of the
very essence of it. But these are both survivals from the
most ancient paganism. Even the Gentile cults of the
time of Augustus had outgrown them. To outroot them
was the purpose of Jesus and the prophets. Judaism failed
and perished from clinging stubbornly to this idolatry.
Christianity has been saved so far because it has always
had at work within it another conception of the Christ
which has been its real dynamic. But the time ought not
to be distant when his work in the world will be inter-
preted in terms and images freed from the taint of out-
grown savagery.

Propitiatory sacrifice belongs at a stage of evolution
through which all peoples pass. At that state God and the
devil are one. If they are hostile they can be bribed ; if
they are angry they can be appeased by presents ; or when
one is guilty and afraid he can put some one else in his
place and slip away. It has been a fond device of the-
ology to interpret these savage customs as '^unconscious
prophecies," as shadows of the Great Sacrifice cast back-
ward along the pathway of human history by the true
cross. Especially is this claimed for the bloody rites of the
people Israel. This claim is utterly without foundation.
These phenomena are coming to be understood, and to
have a value of their own, but this is because they are
seen to be the natural and spontaneous expression of devo-
tion at a certain stage of evolution. They bear the same
relation to the religion of Jesus as the moralities of the
savage do to his. To interpret him in terms of primitive
cult is to shut up the sun of righteousness in troglodytic
caves. The history of Israel is as simple as it is melan-
choly. The prophet and the priest strove together ; finally
the voice of the prophet ceased and the priest remained in
possession. Five centuries later that system, which was

Tlie Scapegoat 97

not of Moses but elaborated in pagan Babylon, was set
up in all its gorgeous barbarity, and from that time the
decline of the people became inevitable. Keligion re*
mained for them the placation of God by gifts; holiness
was a ceremonial cleanliness without moral quality. The
prophet cried in vain his "Thus saith the Lord, what pur-
pose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? I am
surfeited with the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of
beasts and I delight not in the blood of bullocks or lambs
or be goats." It was a religion of the shamble, and the
medicine-men. Jesus' counsel was to bury it out of sight.

And yet within three centuries of his death we find this
ancient idol enthroned on the altar of the Christian church.

When I began to preach fifty years ago I believed my-
self to be an ambassador commissioned to offer men sal-
vation through the blood of Christ. I told them they were
living under a sentence of condemnation and unless they
embraced this way to escape their doom was inevitable.
That escape was possible only by securing an interest
in the equivalent which Jesus had paid to satisfy the
justice of God. This was my message. I had not begun
to question its genuineness. But presently I wondered
why my preaching and that of my contemporaries had so
little effect. Did we really believe what we said ? And
did the people believe it when we said it? Time was
when they did believe, and tremble ; why not now ? Most
Christian ministers will confess, if they be candid, that
it is increasingly difficult to get a hearing for their mes-
sage. Even thirty years ago their churches were well filled
and their message listened to, without much enthusiasm,
but without impatience. Every year their hearers and
their influence grow less and less. I know of course that
from published statistics of church growth one might
be convinced that all is well, but every minister knows

98 Confessions of an Old Priest

better. He knows that thrice the labor and energy are
needed for success now than was the case thirty years ago.
He knows also that those most difficult to win are the good
men rather than the bad ones. The late Professor Bruce,
whose orthodoxy none will question, has left on record
these strange words, ^^I am disposed to think that a great
and increasing portion of the moral worth of society lies
outside the Christian Church, separated from it not by
godlessness but rather by exceptional earnestness. Many,
in fact, have left the church in order to be Christians."
General Booth in his last days confessed that the philan-
thropic work of the Salvation Army had practically re-
placed the religious purpose for which it had been founded.
The reasons usually assigned for this arrest in the
church's growth are such as the enormous increase in ma-
terial progress, the bewildering advance in human knowl-
edge, the multiplication of provisions for pleasure and
travel, the domination of the physical sciences, the shallow
nature of the masses, and such like. But over against
these are to be set the facts that the intellectual activity
and skepticism of to-day are probably far less than that
of the world to which the apostles preached; that the
luxury and self-indulgence which encompass the church
are not a circumstance compared with the time of Ti-
berius. But there is this difference; Christianity com-
manded the consent of all men for its moral ideals.
This remained true for it for centuries after the bleeding
Christ had become its symbol. Low and unworthy as was
the plan of salvation offered to Gauls and Franks, Lom-
bards and Saxons, it was still above the ethical standards
of their own religions. No people has been converted to
Christianity for a thousand years. There are many ex-
planations of this, but there is one which the Christian
man cannot contemplate without pain. It is that the

The Scdpegoat 99

moral ideals of society have overtaken and passed beyond
those of the church. Endless labor has been expended to
remove intellectual difficulties out of the way, but it is
time to be reminded that the obstacle is not intellectual
but moral. Not unworthy Christians but an unworthy
Christ is the stumblingblock. The dogma of the propitia-
tory sacrifice of Christ, which is still offered as the central
truth, is rejected by a society whose moral sense has
outgTown it. It is true that it is slurred over and euphe-
mized by the pulpit. The minister spends his time
preaching righteousness and temperance. His appeal to
the community is for aid to social betterment, implying
that "doctrinal" things may be disregarded. They take
him at his word and follow him in all his philanthropic
enterprises — until they come to the door of the church,
and there they stop. In spite of all his camouflaging of
doctrine they know very well that once entered, they will
be expected to join in hymns and creeds and liturgies
against which their moral sense relucts.

The truth is, the church is widely believed to be dis-
honest. The clergy are gravely suspected of preaching
dogmas which they do not believe, or believe in an arti-
ficial and disingenuous way. Where they are unquestion-
ably honest, they are regarded as rather foolish. Matthew
Arnold said their besetting fault was want of seriousness,
by which he meant, partly their habit of using words and
phrases without seriously weighing their meaning, and
partly their habit of spending their time upon things and
questions which seem paltry to sensible men.

The whole scheme and so-called "plan of salvation" is
unbelievable by men of to-day. It is not so much the
formulated creeds they balk at as the theory of religion
which underlies them. They do not believe that human
nature is but the wreck and debris of Edenic man. When

100 Confessions of an Old Priest

they are told at baptism that all men are conceived and
born in sin and that they who are in the flesh cannot
please God, they know that the words on the face of them
are not true. They have no interest in the theological
exposition of the terms. They know that guilt is not
hereditary in any sense, though they know well^that sin
is. They believe that the law against the attainder of
blood is written in the constitution of the universe. They
do not believe that justice can ever accept the innocent
in place of the guilty, however willing the innocent may
be. At a certain stage of moral development Zaleucus,
king of the Locrians, could be admired. His law pro-
vided that the adulterer should lose his eyes. When his
own son was convicted his father, to save the sanctity of
law and allow his love to act at the same time, commanded
that one of his own eyes and one of his son's should be
put out. The world of that day looked upon Zaleucus as
a miracle of goodness. The world of to-day can see in
him only a fond and feeble tyrant.

The well-meant attempt to find analogies for the theory
in the experiences of life is rejected by the intelligence
and the conscience. Every one knows that the good are
always suffering with and for the bad, but they know also
that this suffering does not lessen, but augments, the
blameworthiness of the evil ones who would profit by it.
Every martyr of a holy cause sacrifices himself volun-
tarily, but who could believe that his pain could render
guiltless those who stone him or those who share his
goods ? The mother starves herself that her children may
eat ; the merchant pays his friend's debts to save his good
name; the engineer goes down to death with his hand on
the reverse lever to save the passengers' lives; but none
of these has any quality in common with the interpreta-
tion of Christ's suffering. In none of these is there any

The Scapegoat 101

thing like the transference of moral worth. They are
indeed included in that eternal cross-bearing which is the
concomitant of loving, but they have nothing in common
with a victim bound upon an altar and slain to appease
God.

It will not avail to be told that the doctrine of the
Atonement which I have set forth is a caricature or mis-
representation. 'NoY will it suffice to say with an arch-
bishop that "so far as it has any plausibility it rests on
the impassioned language of the pulpit and the hymn
book.'' Even if this were so, it must be remembered that
the pulpit and the hymn book are the accredited vehicles
upon which religious teaching is chiefly borne to the people.
"No ; what the archbishop calls "this reversion to the worst
ideas of pagan sacrifice, savoring of the heathen temples
and reeking of blood," is woven into the very fabric of
confessions, articles, and liturgies. Most distressing of all
it is defended in set terms by scientific theology. Lately
a volume was put forth in defense of the Faith by a group
of the most learned and representative divines of the
Church of England. Its article on the Atonement is a
reasoned defense of the principle of vicarious sacrifice,
and finds the justification of it in the Levitical system!
"There it is divinely ordered, clearly necessary and pro-
foundly significant, pointing to and foreshadowing the
perfect expiation. The death of Christ is the expiation
of those past sins which have laid the burden of guilt on
the human soul, is also the propitiation of the wrath of
God.'' 1

My brethren with whom I sometimes talked about these
things appeared to me strangely unaffected by the logic
of the situation. It seemed as though they had never
considered the implications of the conventional language

*"Lux Mundi," Article "Atonement."

102 Confessions of an Old Priest

they used. When their language was translated into the
speech of everyday life they could but admit its mon-
strosity, but they did not appear to understand that while
it was true to them only as a necessary part of a coherent
system, to the ordinary man it was understood as a state-
ment of actual truth.

Did Jesus conceive of himself as a propitiatory sacri-
fice, or his work as an expiation ? He certainly did not.
With the exception of two phrases put in his mouth years
after his death there is no indication that such a thought
ever entered his mind, and there is everything in his life
to show that the whole circle of ideas in which the con-
ception is embedded was abhorrent to him. If he had
thought that the express purpose of his being was to pro-
pitiate an angry God by means of a painful death surely
he would somewhere have said so. He speaks much about
himself, so much that it was the chief ground of his
offending. He presents himself and his mission in every
form which, as it seemed to him, would throw light upon
it. He calls himself a Light, to reveal God and illuminate
the dark places of life ; a Shepherd, leading a flock, guard-
ing it against rapacious beasts, feeding it and gathering
the mavericks ; as Bread, for the soul's hunger ; as Water,
for the soul's thirst; as Leaven, to stir a ferment in the
world's sodden life; as Salt, to keep life wholesome and
prevent its decay; as a Physician, diagnosing the ills of
men and laying balm on their sores; as the Vine, the
Door, the Strong Man, the Bridegroom, but he never
calls himself the world's Victim or the world's Priest.

CHAPTER XVI

THE EELIGION OF AXL SEN^SIBLE MEN

The story goes that an inquisitive person once asked
Disraeli, the Christian Jew, what was his real religion.
He replied, ^The religion of all sensible men." And
what is that ? "Sensible men never say."

Sometimes they do say. There is a curious instinct by
which men discover and recognize each other. Though
I supposed I had kept to myself my doubts and defeasance
of belief I found people whom I had thought unbelievers
opening their hearts to me as though they felt sure of my
sympathy and understanding. I was sometimes pleasantly
twitted by my brethren that I had gathered a congregation
of educated agnostics. I had; but I had done so uncon-
sciously. Moreover, I observed that the regular, orthodox
believers were quietly slipping away. I had, as I thought,
been careful not to attack their beliefs or offend their
prejudices, but they knew. There was something lacking
for them in my ministrations and they went where the
want could be supplied. In this situation I was brought
more and more into relations with that class of people
who are the despair of the church. They are so good that
the church cannot see why they do not become better by
joining her. The warfare of science and religion is over,
they say, what now keeps you out ? But they hold aloof.
A great and increasing number of the best and most in-
telligent men turn silently away from the churches. They
are not irreligious ; indeed, judged by any fair test of life,

103

104 Confessions of an Old Priest

they axe of the best among us. We can count them by
the dozen among our acquaintances. Many of them used
to go to church; they do not now.

Twenty years ago John Burroughs said,

"The religious skeptics to-day are a very large class, and
are among the most hopeful, intelligent, upright and
patriotic of our citizens. Let us see ; probably four fifths
of the literary men, a large proportion of journalists and
editors, more than half the doctors, a large percentage of
the teachers and business men. They find the creeds in
which they were reared incredible."

This was true twenty years ago; it is more true now.
A still more sinister fact is that of the youths and young
men who join the church at their aspiring age a very
large proportion drop out in middle life, and so far as
one can see, without any moral deterioration. If we can
induce such men to speak at all on the subject they will
say something like this:

"We are not unappreciative of the church's solicitude
concerning us. We would willingly join with her in all
good works; nor are we indifferent to the obligations of
religion. We are not without one. We face the deep
mysteries of existence and destiny seriously. We en-
deavor to do our duty ; we try to help our fellow men ; we
believe in God ; we bow in reverence before the person of
Jesus Christ as we understand him; but we cannot join
the church. Let us frankly state some of our reasons:
First, we do not believe to be true many of the things
which such action on our parts would endorse. We do
not believe that all mankind descended from Adam ; that
this man sinned; that all his posterity are sinners by
inheritance of his nature or transmission of his guilt ; that
the man Jesus was the incarnation of God; that he was
a divine Victim sacrificed to redeem humanity; that sal-

The Religion of All Sensible Men 105

vation is contingent upon "accepting" this way of salva-
tion; or in many of the secondary doctrines which follow
from these. We have no interest in these dogmas. Nor
can we see that they have any necessary connection with
the actual religion of all good men in all ages. Strictly
speaking, we do not know whether the things asserted in
the creeds are true or not. We neither believe nor dis-
believe them. They seem to us to be human speech applied
in a region where words have no meaning.

"But our chief obstacle is a more practical and a more
impassable one inasmuch as it concerns the eternal dis-
tinction of right and wrong. We would not be offensive,
but we think that the very central tenet of the church's
teaching is profoundly immoral. Atonement, Redemp-
tion, Propitiation, all these conceptions we believe belong
to a low and savage stage of evolution. We hope and
humbly believe that our moral sense is too far developed
to allow us to traffic with them. Moreover, we believe they
misrepresent and defeat the purpose of Jesus. We would
rather be with Simon the Cyrenean, helping to bear the
world's cross along life's via dolorosa than to hang upon
it like lazy lurdans, adding to its weight, while we sing,
^Simply to thy cross we cling.' For these reasons, there-
fore, because our reason and our conscience cannot consent,
we must decline your invitation."

Now, sympathizing so largely as I do, why should not
I myself step out from the church, join this company, try
to organize them on the basis of the "religion of all Sen-
sible Men," disregard all obsolete dogmas, dismiss the
mass of miracles, purge liturgies arid hymn books of
"blood," preach salvation by character instead of by
grace? Or why not cast in my lot with such organiza-
tions already in existence, the Unitarians, the Ethical Cul-
ture people? This would seem the obvious thing to do,
were it not for the fact that wherever this ecclesiastical

106 Confessions of an Old Priest

policy has been followed it has failed. It has offended and
alienated those within the orthodox churches, and has at-
tracted few from outside. The so-called "liberal churches,"
inspired as they are by sweet reasonableness and filled as
they are by noble souls, have made practically no impres-
sion. For, after all, the satisfaction of the religious need
is not to be found in sweet reasonableness. Why is it that
the Catholic Mass and Billy Sunday's tabernacle grip as
they do? They are in their message identical though
seemingly so unlike; both being the exhibition of the
same idea of "expiation" expressed in the baldest terms,
acceptance by faith of wonders which the intelligence
rejects, trust for salvation to a goodness which is not one's
own but imputed to his credit. We are perplexed when
we see intelligent men kneeling in awe and adoration at the
Mass. We are amazed and depressed when we see throngs
of reasonable people flocking to hear a mountebank evan-
gelist hold forth in terms which reason retches at. But
there it is. These are the places where men are to be
found when the religious emotion stirs within them.

The truth is we are here confronted with one of those
perplexing and exasperating antinomies of human nature.
The intelligence is forever summoning before her bar the
religious instinct, and the instinct pays no heed to the
summons. It mocks at logic. It beckons, drives, promises,
threatens, and comforts without the least thought of con-
sistency. Is there any way by which the intelligent man
and the religious man, or rather the religion and the in-
telligence in man, can get together? All churches agree
that they rest upon the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.
The good men outside are eager to declare their reverence
for the same incomparable personality. It is too much to
expect, on the one hand, that they can ever subscribe to
the interpretation of that life which has been formulated

The Religion of All Sensible Men 107

in the Creeds. It is too much to expect, on the other
hand, that the churches can renounce those dogmas which
are entangled in their very structure, the molds in which
their devotional life is run and which are hallowed by a
myriad sacred associations. The rafprocliement cannot
be reached by a surrender of intellectual integrity, on the
one hand, or of venerable creeds, on the other. What
then ? Is it not possible for the church to announce for-
mally and officially, in a way which honorable men could
not misunderstand, that membership in her body does not
imply and is not meant to imply, a subscription to doc-
trines, and to rearrange her regulations to conform to the
statement? Even so, the class I have in mind would not
find life easy in the church at once, but, being the sensible
men they are, could and would unite with her in the activi-
ties of the Christian life, and wait for the time to come
when the church's atmosphere would clear itself of the
vapors which cling to it from primeval paganism and the-
ological conceit.

But whether they would err not, two things are clear:
first, the life of religion among men cannot exist securely
and permanently without being organized into a church;
and, second, no new church can be organized successfully
apart from the great world-church which now occupies the
ground. It is a constant matter for wonder that the so-
called "liberal'' churches, like the Unitarian, for instance,
do not grow. One would think the good men outside the
church would flock eagerly to such a society. It offers
them apparently all the advantages of a church without
its doctrinal barriers. In it they could attack the evils
of life and society more effectively than in individual
isolation. There they could find spiritual companionship.
If they are, as they say, kept out of the church by doc-
trinal barriers, here is a rallying place where no dog-

108 Confessions of an Old Priest

matic obstacle hinders. But they remain for the most
part unmoved. They are not conscious of any peril from
the outside to drive them in, or of any charm inside to
draw them. They do not find there what they want. What
do they want?

In religion the "herd instinct" is among the most po-
tent of impulses. A church must have mass ; and it must
have history. This is why the Christian church as it is,
even though sorely let and hindered by its unhappy divi-
sions, may well hold all rivalry in contempt. It is too
big to allow place for any other. It is also venerable. It
has gathered into it and around it such store of association,
history, poetry, and sacred association, of conquest and
devotion as no extemporized associations can compete with.
The story of the Babe of Bethlehem, the chorus of the
angels, the weird figures of the Magi, the Christmas star,
the lowly manger, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimitis, the
Mater Dolorosa at the cross, the amazed Mary at the tomb,
call these what you will, legend, fiction, myth, the world
has so taken them into its imagination and its heart
that nothing could replace them. The "Religion of all
Sensible Men" cannot be organized into a church. Its
defect is that it is too sensible. It offers no satisfaction to
the emotions. It makes no appeal to the tragic element
of life. Sacraments and hymns have no place in it. But
religion in all ages has been, and always will be, sacra-
mental and emotional. If I cannot live in the church
which now is I cannot live in any.

CHAPTEK XVII

THE PEESONAL PROBLEM

When I had become convinced that the origins of Chris-
tianity were substantially as I have sketched above, and
that some of the major doctrines of the church were in-
tellectually incredible and morally unworthy, the question
confronted me, Can I continue in the ministry ?

Probably a majority would answer at once, "No, of
course not. They would answer so because of the wide-
spread notion that the prime function of the church is to
propagate truth in the form of doctrine. Ever since the
middle of the third century subscription to a creed has
been held the condition of admission. As soon as this
was done came the contentions and divisions which have
continued since. Indeed these contentions over doctrines
began much earlier. Even the later writers of the ISTew
Testament denounce their doctrinal opponents in un-
bridled terms. They call each other dogs, sorcerers, un-
clean, false teachers, bringers in of damnable heresies,
natural brute beasts, and such terms common to the odium
theologium. During two centuries the energy of the
church was expended in the attempt to elaborate a per-
fect creed and compel its acceptance. It succeeded at last
only by calling the emperor to the aid of a busy and in-
tolerant minority, and drove out the majority by the
sword. Ever since, through the Christian ages, these con-
troversies have continued. On account of them each group
has separated from, and denounced, the others. Each

109

110 Confessions of an Old Priest

makes its doctrinal shibboleths the test of truth and the
condition of ecclesiastical citizenship. All this time the
notion has prevailed that there is an irreducible minimum
of necessary and unchangeable doctrinal propositions
which, unless one holds and avows, he must be held an
alien from the household of faith. In a word, faith has
been changed from an attitude of the soul to "The Faith"
which is a set of propositions addressed to the under-
standing.

I asked myself. Are any or all of these really necessary
to being a Christian ? If not, is their acceptance an essen-
tial qualification for the ministry? Here I was con-
fronted by the ugly consideration that whether they are
or not I had fonnally and solemnly declared my accept-
ance of them at my ordination. I had done so in good
faith. How far and in what manner was that obligation
still binding? As I faced the situation, it seemed to me
to stand thus — when I was baptized my sponsors had
been asked, "Do you believe all the articles of the Chris-
tian faith as they are contained in the Apostles' Creed ?"
and they had answered, "I do." In youth, at my con-
firmation, I had been asked, "Do you ratify and confirm
the vows which you made or which your sponsors made in
your name at baptism?" and I had replied, "I do." At
ordination I had been asked, "Are you persuaded that
the Holy Scripture contains all doctrine necessary to
to salvation through Jesus Christ?" and again I had
replied, "I do." Here then was the sum and substance
of my obligation so far as belief was concerned. But
over and above that I realized that I had tacitly com-
mitted myself in general to the beliefs and traditions of the
church of my ministry. Now that I had come to see that
many of these beliefs were of no practical consequence,
and that some of them were false, what was I to do ? I

The Personal Problem 111

had reached my convictions slowly and reluctantly after
study and reflection during forty years. At the forum
of conscience the pledges made for me by my sponsors
at baptism had little weight. It would be hard to imagine
anything more preposterous than this sponsorship. To
solemnly promise for a baby that it will, during its life,
believe a set of the most remote and transcendental dogmas
is a solemn foolery at which honest men ought to revolt.
Such promises do not have and ought not have any con-
sideration by the child grown to manhood. The vows made
in youth weighed little more. On that occasion the boy
recks little of the intellectual obligations which he under-
takes. It is the stir of his spiritual emotions and his
wakened determination to lead a sober, righteous life which
absorb his whole interest. As to my ordination declara-
tion that I believed the Scriptures to contain all doc-
trines necessary to salvation, I still believe that they
(Jo — and a great many things that are not necessary.

But the real difficulty lay outside my own conscience.
How can one convince the church and the common-sensible
world that he could honorably be a minister in a church,
some of whose fundamental beliefs he denied? To do
this it is essential to make clear that he has no personal
advantage to gain thereby, no livelihood at stake, no
professional honors, no indebtedness for benefits received.
In my case all this was true. It would have been im-
measurably easier to quietly withdraw. Long reflection
convinced me, however, that this would not be the right
course to follow, neither honorable to myself nor advan-
tageous to the church.

The religious life cannot be lived alone. While it is
the most intimately personal thing it is also the most so-
cial. ISTo one can be a Christian by himself. Failure to
comprehend this is the besetting weakness of Protes-

112 Confessions of an Old Priest

tantism. It makes membersliip in the church an arbi-
trary duty instead of a natural necessity. The church is
not a militant army, or a city of refuge, or an ark of
safety ; it is the home of the solitary. For this reason its
door must be open to all. The only prerequisite is the
wish to join. ^Teither a sound belief nor a measurably
faultless life are the conditions of admission. "Whoso-
ever will, let him come." The yearning for spiritual com-
panionship is the credential. Whether it be a Thomas
who believes too little or a Peter who believes too much,
a repentant Magdalen, a crooked tax-collector, or an ig-
norant Samaritan woman, the door is open to all. But
is there to be no discipline, no bar against the unworthy,
no ejection of the unfit and the disobedient? Can any
society exist on such terms? The reply is, it does exist.
"Wilt thou that we go and gather up the tares? Nay,
lest while ye gather up the tares ye root up the wheat
also. Let both grow together till the harvest." Paul's
judgment in the case, that an offender should be treated
as a heathen man and a publican, that the Christian must
not so much as eat with him, is the judgment of a Jew.
He spoke instinctively in the spirit of the arrogant and
exclusive sect in which he had been reared. It was not
the judgment of Christ.

There are two irreconcilable conceptions of the church.
According to the one, it is a voluntary organization, a club,
an association which fixes its own condition of admission,
makes its own regulations, admits or rejects, and that,
having been once admitted, one cannot retain his member-
ship honorably if he disagrees with its rules.

According to the other, it is a State into which one is
born with the right of citizenship. Indeed the analogy
of the state is almost complete. One's citizenship is not
conditioned by his beliefs. As a citizen of a republic he

The Personal Problem 113

may believe in socialism or in monarchy, lie may believe
tbat many things which the state allows are wrong and,
that things which it prohibits are innocent. He may be
a pacifist in a time of war, he may believe that the policy
of the state at any given time is foolish or dangerous or
wicked, and may say so. For this he will pay the penalty
of unpopularity, but he will not be deprived of his citi-
zenship or of his office if he hold one. In fine, one's po-
litical creed has nothing to do with his citizenship. If
the church be conceived to be, as it is, a state into which
one is bom or enters at will, his membership is held by
the same tenure. The moment the position is assumed
that the church may demand subscription to a creed the
difficulty shows itself. What creed? Who shall set it
forth ? By what authority ? What authority, if any, can
change or modify it ? Can the pope and council add the
article of the Immaculate Conception ? And if not, why
not? Is there any limit beyond which the church would
be acting ultra vires in adding new articles ?

To escape this difficulty the ecclesiastically minded turn
fondly to the Vincentian rule, quod semper, quod uhique,
quod ah omnibus. "Whatever has been believed always
and everywhere and by everybody." Such a creed would
have a show of moral obligation if only there were such
a thing. "Everybody is wiser than anybody." It is a
mere dialectic figment to which no reality ever did, or ever
can, correspond. It cannot be applied to any article of
the Catholic creeds.

Another equally impracticable theory is the binding
authority of general councils, the assumption that at some
time or times in the past the whole Christian Society
met in formal assembly and agreed upon a creed to be
thereafter binding upon every member. But there has
never been a general council. What of Nice? Has the

114 Confessions of an Old Priest

creed which bears that name no such prescription ? Every
tyro in church history should know better. A group of
ignorant and turbulent bishops, arbitrarily selected by
a pagan emperor for political purposes, there issued a
creed which a majority of its members disbelieved and
which was rejected by the great body of the contemporary
church, and was imposed upon it only by the emperor's
sword. Apart from its own intrinsic truth it can have no
other authority.

But if the church be not organized about a creed, what
then is its principle of coherence? One has only to open
his eyes to see that while the Church Universal has always
been rent and divided over doctrines it still is a church
universal. Some community of instinct has always drawn
Christian to Christian and marked them off from the rest
of humanity. In this fact should be found the clew to
the path which the searchers for church unity should
follow. Such a unity is to be found neither in "Faith" or
"Order." The dream of an ecumenical Ecclesia "moving
like a mighty army," unified and disciplined, obedient to
a common will and command, is idle and would be mis-
chievous if realized. Such an imperium in imperio would
not long be tolerated in a free society. Even now, in its
smaller divisions, it is but too ready to "take Jesus by
force and make him a king." When they fail to persuade
men to temperance they call in Caesar's legions to prohibit
drink; when they find their Sabbath stillness disturbed
by the world's noise they call upon the police to maintain
silence; when they dislike the teaching of the common
schools they demand a share of the state's treasure to
maintain their own. If there were in the land one unified
church, and all Christians regimented within it, it would
not long keep in mind the distinction between the things
that are God's and the things that are Caesar's. May it

The Personal Problem 115

be that the impossibility of agreement in belief is the
natural safeguard against a church which would imperil
the state? In any case the principle of coherence is not
its acceptance of a common creed. E'o matter what or
how many articles it might contain it will always be too
much for some and too little for others who profess and call
themselves Christians.

The differentia of Christianity is a certain ideal of life,
and nothing else is. This ideal is incapable of precise
definition just because it is an ideal. But it is easily
recognized. It is at once complex and simple. It is so
exalted that none may attain to it, and so easy that any
one may follow it. Though it always eludes it always
beckons. It consists essentially of a certain conception of
personal purity; of good will toward one's fellows; of a
sense of security in God's universe; of willingness to be
sacrificed, if need be, for truth and for one's fellow men.
This ideal is usually referred to the historic Jesus as its
prototype and ensample. How far this can be justified
by the facts may be questioned. It was existent in the
world before him, and we know too little about him to be
sure. But whether the ideal comes originally from him,
or whether it has been slowly built up and fitted upon him,
the characteristic kind of life for which the church stands
now gathers itself about the person of "the Christ." The
Christ of human consciousness is not simply an historical
personage for us any more than it was for Paul, but the
accumulated ideals of the race. His completeness is not
in the past but in the future.

To further this ideal, to cojiserve its gains, to proclaim
it to the world is the charge to the church and the func-
tion of the minister.

CHAPTER XVIII

LIFE IN THE CHUKCH

In every association of men it is inevitable that eacli in-
dividual must forego a certain amount of liberty in the
interest of the society. The more deeply he feels the im-
portance of that object the more willingly he subordinates
his own preferences. He does so up to the point where
surrender would be dishonest or dishonorable. The higher
churchman he is the more willingly he makes this sur-
render. My problem was twofold : Could I, with my con-
victions, continue to exercise my ministry with any toler-
able degree of comfort ? and could the Church tolerate me
with my convictions avowed?

I had to confess that many things involved in my min-
istry were distasteful in the highest degree. I have al-
ready spoken of the absurdity of the Baptismal Office.
Could I be a party to what seemed to me the solemn farce
of asking sponsors to pledge for an infant that he would
all his life believe the Apostle's Creed ? Besides that, there
were statements in the Office which no intelligent man can
believe after he once realizes their meaning, — that "all
men are conceived and born in sin" ; that "God saved
Noah and his family in the ark from perishing by water" ;
that the miraculous transit was "intended to figure holy
baptism" ; that by means of baptism the child is regener-
ate. In the Office for the Visitation of the Sick is the bald
assertion that sickness, pain, and misfortune are sent by
God for Chastisement. In the Office of Holy Communion

116

Life in the Church 117

is the declaration of salvation by substitution, that ^^ Jesus
Christ by his death upon the cross made there by his one
oblation of himself once offered a full, perfect and suffi-
cient sacrifice and satisfaction for the sins of the world.''
In every service it was my duty to lead the people in the
recitation of the Creed. If I followed the regulations I
must at every service read portions from the Old Testa-
ment, portions some of which were morally objectionable
and most of them unintelligible. Could I honestly do and
say such things ? Then why not resign and thus escape all
these painful necessities ?

If the church were a club this course would be obvious
and natural. But the relation of priest and church is not
to be disposed of so lightly. At my ordination I had been
asked, ^^Do you think in your heart that you are truly
called according to the will of God and according to the
canons of this church to the order and ministry of the
priesthood ?" I answered that I did think so. I think so
yet. I have proved it by more than fifty years of a not
unsuccessful ministry. To abandon it, to thus confess
that I had been all the years like one of the sons of Eli,
this I could not do. If I had found the house too strait
to live in comfortably I must just live in it uncomfortably.
But all things considered, was this course open to me?
The main function of the ministry was as open to me as
it ever had been, — to proclaim the Christ as the ideal of
life, to persuade men of this ideal, to admit them to his
society by the age-long initiatory rite, to celebrate with
them life in the savior-god in symbols of bread and wine.
The obstacle was that the church in which I served had
chosen to connect these duties with certain dogmatic for-
mularies which, according to the letter of them, I did not
believe to be true.

A good many years ago Mr. Balfour in his "Founda-

118 Confessions of an Old Priest

tions of Belief" pointed out a phenomenon which concerns
the matter in hand. A creed, he says, when first framed
and promulgated is an honest, and so far as words will
serve, a scientific statement of truth. As such, it is re-
ceived and cherished. But as time goes on, words change
their connotation, habits of thought are modified, defini-
tions which were clear and sharp become blurred and ob-
literated. But loyalty to the creed does not cease on that
account. Its function changes, however. Instead of
being an intelligent statement of truth, it becomes a ban-
ner, a flag, a symbol. Its terms are not considered in their
literal meaning, but only the symbol as a whole. Its terms
may not be true but the truth is represented by it. It is
recited in public worship as though it were in an ancient
and unknown tongue. And in point of fact it is so.
When the fiery Poles in their cathedral at Cracow were
accustomed to recite it with swords brandished aloft they
were not expressing theological truth but vowing loyal
devotion. This I found to be the attitude of Christian
people generally toward doctrinal creeds and formularies.
Indeed, the less they understood them the more ardently
they maintained them. For them they are as ancient coins
whose superscriptions have been worn and partly oblit-
erated by the hands of the generations through which they
have passed, but the metal itself is precious.

I discovered that I had been weighing too scrupulously
the terms in which the church has expressed her thought.
What though she has wrapped Baptism around with ar-
chaic legend and obsolete theology there always remained
the central truth that as the body is cleansed by the wash-
ing of water so the soul must needs be cleansed by some
stream which can have its source only in the Spirit of God.

Even though the Eucharist be not an institution origi-
nally founded by Jesus, its central idea is eternally true

Life in the Church 119

and has been felt and commemorated by many peoples
through many millenniums. As the body is nourished and
sustained by the fruits of the earth and invigorated by the
juice of the grape, so the soul is united to God in a fashion
as intimate as by eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
Even if the phraseology of the sacrament be a survival
from Mithraic rite and Hebrew sacrifice and Egyptian
speculation, these are but borrowed vestments to adorn the
Christian priest. Eor him they may be but poorly fash-
ioned garments for the body of Christ in whom he finds
eternal truth. Ought the Christian to feel his Holy
Communion any the less holy or any the less a communion
or any the less a memorial of his own Master because it
has been shared by myriads before the time of Tiberius ?
Should the fact not make him feel all the more surely
embarked upon that great stream of religion which flows
through all the ages?

Thus my sense of oppression by the bondage of the
letter was relieved and I could minister with a mind at
ease. Men have always and everywhere tried to state
in words the truth about Grod, and the language has always
been inadequate and often faulty. Why should I not use
the terms provided for me by the church? I have con-
tinued to use them and will continue to do so during the
few remaining years of my ministry and my life. But
sadness oppresses me as I see the church which I love
clogged and overloaded by the burdens which she so need-
lessly bears.

The unanimous testimony of those who observed the re-
ligious side of our American youth in the G-reat War
showed that they have a religion which is real though in-
articulate. It is the working religion of all good men
everywhere and in all times. But they are indifferent
to the church and they neither know nor care anything

120 Confessions of an Old Priest

about tlie dogmas she insists upon. In this they are at
one with the educated men and women from the universi-
ties and the colleges, as well as with the multitude of work-
ing men. The reason commonly given why this latter class
holds aloof, because they think the church to be allied with
capitalism, is not the true one. It would not weigh for a
moment if they could feel at home in the Protestant
churches otherwise. They have a religion whose founda-
tion is Brotherhood, and that is the foundation of the
religion of Christ. They have shown that they know well
the necessity and power of organization and the futility
of individual action. They would be as ready to organize
in the religious sphere as in the economic. They know
that the church wants them. But they feel that they would
not feel at home in her house. This is not from fear of
social discomfort there. It is because the things they find
there do not appeal to them. The language is unintel-
ligible, the forms and rites are meaningless, the subjects
discussed seem to them to have no relation to actual life.

In a word, the educated and the practical world are
both alike steadily drawing apart from the church. I
have watched this movement for fifty years. Can any-
thing be done to reverse it or to turn it in a different
direction ? First of all, the church must open her eyes
and look. But she must look at things as they are to-day,
not as they were in the fourth century or the twelfth or
the eighteenth. She should no longer rest in a fool's
paradise. Her task will not be an easy ono. The practical
steps can only be taken one by one as they may appear.

But the fundamental principle is that the church's door
must be wide open and a welcome offered to every one
who wishes to enter and wishes to live his life following
the Christian Ideal, and upon no other condition ex-
pressed or implied.

CHAPTEE XIX

THE GOAL

My fifty years' ministry has been spent in the church
which is by tradition and inheritance the church of the
English-speaking race. Once it included that whole race.
Now it stands as one among the smallest of a dozen
churches speaking the same tongue. Altogether they
include in their membership little more than half of the
population. The other half would probably call them-
selves ''Christians" but they live outside the churches.

Is there any likelihood of the Episcopal church coming
to terms with the others?

Is there any likelihood of them all together recovering
the multitude outside ?

Is there any influence or tendency discernible which is
moulding or leading them all ?

One who has lived within them for fifty years can see the
general line of movement which they have all followed. In
this movement the Episcopal Church has been in advance,
but all have moved in the same direction. That motion
has been steadily toward what may justly be called Sdc-
ramentalism. By that I mean devotion expressed in sym-
bolic act as distinguished from inward experience whether
of the understanding or the emotions. Within the Episco-
pal Church the transformation has been most marked.
Its manners of fifty years ago and of today would scarcely
recognize each other. Then it was "Protestant," today

121

122 Confessions of an Old Priest

it is not. The essence of Protestantism is that salvation
is a transaction between the individual soul and God.
From this central idea all its doctrine and practice
emerges. Its theology concerns itself with the nature of
God. Its psychology deals with the stages and phases of
the individual transaction. It has no place, in any real
sense, for Sacraments. They are surplussage. They are
rather an embarrassing sacred tradition, observed but not
greatly valued. Two things and two things only are held
supreme, a right belief and a right inward experience.
This, with certain modifications, was the attitude of the
Church of England and her daughter in America, in
common with all Protestant churches.

But during nearly a century all the churches of the
western hemisphere have been moving as though attracted
by some unseen body in the religious galaxy. Rome has
led the way. Her sodalities of the Blessed Sacrament,
her cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the like are
the result of a newly felt attraction. The Church of
England followed after. Her interest traveled from the
pulpit to the altar. The Sacraments which had been but
vaguely conceived and but formally observed became
meticuously defijied and their celebration attended with
ever deepening reverence and compassed about with ob-
servances. Now they stand in the forefront. History,
doctrine and discipline revolve about them. Their ritual
becomes more and more ornate. The personal religious
life becomes more and more dependent upon them. The
Protestant element in the church is recalcitrant and de-
plores the tendency. It strives to bring the church back
again to the Protestant attitude. It strives in vain.
Like all human movements it is not the result of
conspiracy or even of conscious intent but of an unseen
force which no man can estimate or withstand. The

The Goal 123

whole religious world is within the sweep of this attrac-
tion. The most Protestant of churches have adorned their
sanctuaries, elaborated their services, devised rituals,
deepened their outward expressions of reverence. All
alike they find themselves in the same procession, only at
different distances from the front. The officially com-
missioned minister is resuming the place which the irre-
sponsible revivalists for a time usurped. Worship takes
the place of exhortation. The so-called science of theology
is held in less respect. Whither does it all tend ?

It would seem that religion is again finding its place
in that line of movement which it has followed through
all the ages. Out of the dumb experience of pain men
have looked about, above and beneath for relief or explana-
tion. They have found it in the conception that God him-
self is bound up together with them in the same necessity
and helplessness. The center of religion is the idea of a
Suffering God. Christianity long ago seized upon this
idea and, without warrant, claimed it as its exclusive
possession, located it in time and space, gave it a date,
a locality, circumstance, called God by the name of
a Man, and ignored or denied all the experiences of the
race.

But through Christianit/s whole course flows unsus-
pected the old stream of human experience and aspiration.
In mystic union with the dying and reviving Saviour-God
is the souFs life. For many the sense of appropriation is
satisfied by an intellectual comprehension. But for the
multitude satisfaction comes best through sacrificial sym-
bol, "eating his flesh and drinking his blood." Probably
its most sufficient expression is to be found in the Koman
Mass. The figment of Transubstantiation is of little con-
sequence. That is only a superficial attempt to rationalize
an instinct. All doctrines of Sacraments fail to express

124 Confessions of an Old Priest

this instinct. It is outside of reason because life itself
is beyond explanation.

The goal to which religion, therefore, would seem to
be moving is a Church of the Saviour-God, freed from
bondage to history, untrammeled by Scripture, unhar-
assed by definitions, open without question to all who
^^ 'neath life's crushing load" would find solace for their
body and soul in symbolic union with the spirit and body
of the broken God, ^'the promise of all religions, the cry
which makes all creeds one."

PAKTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

The New Testament

Harnack, ^TEIistory of Dogma."

M'GiFFERT, "Apostolic Age."

Mackintosh, "Natural History of Religion."

GuYAU, "Nonreligion of the Future."

Ramsay, "Church in the Roman Empire."

Carpenter, "Pagan and Christian Christs."

Usher, "The Greek Gospel."

Hatch, "Growth of Christian Institutions."

Keim, "Jesus of Nazara."

Wood, "Survivals in Christianity."

Cone, "The Gospel and its first Interpreters."

Renan, "L'Apotre Paul."

Jastrow, "Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions."

Frazer, "The Golden Bough."

Dill, "Roman Society in time of Nero."

Bacon, "Jesus and Paul."

Pfleiderer, "Early Christian Conception of Christ."

Bigg, "Origin of Christianity."

Robertson, "Christianity and Mythology."

"Pagan Christs."

Legge, "Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity."
Glover, "Conflict of Religions in Early Roman Empire."
Henry, "Jesus and the Christian Religion."
Conybeare, "Myth, Magic and Morals."
Case, "Historicity of Jesus."

"Evolution of Christianity."

CuMONT, "Textes et muniments aux Mysteres de Mythra."
Drews, "Christian Myths."
Smith, "Der Vorchristliche Jesus."
Schweitzer, "Quest of the Historical Jesus."
Kalthoff, "Was Wissen Wir von Jesus."
Reinach, "Cultes, mythes et Religions."
Harrison, Miss, "Prolegomena to Study of Greek Religion."
Tiele, "Egyptian Religion."
White, "Warfare of Science with Theology."

125

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