“You speak as though there were no such thing as religion. What you are really attacking is Christianity. You are not a Christian.”
Then Alistair looked at him gravely and steadily, and the thought that had been growing and taking shape in his mind ever since the night he had stood on Westminster Bridge came out firm and distinct at last.
“I am a christ!”
“Alistair!” Genuine consternation showed in the listener’s face and voice. He actually feared that his brother was out of his mind.
“I am your christ. Listen! It is not only the dukedom and the estates that have come to us from our ancestors. We have inherited other things—blood, instincts, passions, everything that makes the difference between one man and another. And that inheritance has been unfairly divided, too. Our forefathers were half Saxon and half Celtic. You have inherited the Saxon strain, and I the Celtic; and we live in a society in which it is well to be a Saxon, and ill to be a Celt. Our father was a drunkard and our mother a Puritan. You take after her and I after him, and we live in a world in which it is well with the Puritan and ill with the drunkard. Some of our forefathers were steady, plodding money-gatherers, others were wild, reckless adventurers. Again you have inherited the good strain, and I the bad. You have had everything, Trent. Everything which the world requires a man to be or to do, you are, or it is your nature to do. All that the world forbids a man to be and do, I am, or it is my nature to do. It is as though a breeder had deliberately bred you with all the good points and me with all the bad. You know what Sir Bernard Vanbrugh thinks about these things. What did he tell you?—that you had inherited an evil strain? The man was blind. I have inherited the evil strain, and by so doing I have saved you from it; I have carried it off from you, like a drainpipe. That is how it is. I am your saviour. Vanbrugh doesn’t see it, but Darwinism and Christianity are saying the same thing. Evolution is the sacrifice of the unfit on behalf of the fit. The scapegoat bears away the sins of the righteous. They were quite right to put up a crucifix in the old Courts of Justice, but it ought to have been over the dock, and not over the Judge’s head, because the criminal is the christ; he is the redeemer in whom the old vices and savage instincts in the blood of mankind are drained off and got rid of, for the salvation of the world. You may substitute the lethal chamber for the cross, but you will be still doing what those old Jews were doing, putting one man to death for the good of the people. Surely that is how it stands between you and me, Jim. Surely I have borne your sicknesses, and carried your pains, whereas you did esteem me stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But I was pierced for your transgressions, I was bruised for your iniquities: the chastisement on behalf of your peace was upon me; and with my stripes you are healed.”
AFTERWARDS
“Isle de St. Pierre,
“Lac De Bienne,
“Switzerland.
“My Dear One:
“I am writing to you from an island in the least known of the Swiss lakes, lying beneath the Jura. The island is the size of a small farm. It is crossed by a thickly-wooded ridge, and there are reed-grown marshes on one side, and on the other meadows and gardens and a homely inn. The inn has grown out of an older cottage or farmhouse, and certain rooms in the more ancient part of the building have become a place of local pilgrimage. On Sundays and holidays the workmen of the small neighbouring towns come here to drink and dance. But the foreign tourist is more rarely seen here, and the English tourist would most likely shun the spot if he had heard of it. For these rude quarters were the refuge, more than a hundred years ago, of a man who, more or less against his will, lit the great bonfire of the feudal system.
“It was during one of those breaks in his life when, like Jonah of old, he seemed to be trying to flee from his allotted task, that Rousseau came and hid himself for this little isle. But the feudal society craved for destruction, and, like all societies in that condition, it first bred its destroyer and then steadily goaded him to the work. The young Marat, from his home a few miles away, must have looked on while the prophet of the Revolution was being hunted out of this retreat by the Prussian police, and, as it were, ordered to resume his terrible apostolate.