Strauss's Life of Christ.—Now that I am sixty years old, it occurred to me to see what sort of a book Strauss's Leben Jesu is before I depart. In my youth, in the 'sixties, we read in school (of our own accord, however) "the last Athenian's doctrine of the Bible," but we never succeeded in seeing the original Life of Jesus. And although I have been in libraries, collected books, visited second-hand book-stalls, I have not seen Strauss's book. It seemed as though it had been confiscated by the Invisible Powers. Now when I am sixty, it has arrived and I tried to read it. But I could not.
It was simply unreadable! All these many pages contained nothing, and what was printed seemed to me incomprehensible, soulless, dry.
A man who writes a book about what he does not understand; a student who has learnt the æsthetic systems by heart; a philosopher who tries to define the beautiful; a mathematician who wants to prove or disprove axioms; a drunken man who tries to play the flute; a feeble foolish attempt to explain God's great miracle in the Atonement. I threw the book away, else I should have gone to sleep over it.
Strauss died in 1874, and in spite of the last stage of his development, when he did not believe any more in the immortality of the soul, he spent his last hours in reading Plato's Phædo, in which at the death-bed of Socrates the immortality of the soul is so clearly demonstrated.
His death was like that of Socrates, his pupils said. But they do not inform us whether the cup of poison was at hand.
Christianity and Radicalism.—Christianity is really more radical than Radicalism. Christ turns his back on the whole of society with its institutions, science, and art. He warns us against the scribes; the rich are not his friends, but rather Lazarus; the rich youth is told to sell all that he has and to give to the poor. To soldiers Christ says, "Those who take the sword shall perish with the sword." He says nothing about science, art, and industry because He is indifferent to them. He has no great illusions about men, for he calls them "a generation of vipers." And rightly; since the earth is a prison for those who have committed crimes in heaven, we are all rascals; but it is the prison chaplain's duty to preach pardon to those who behave properly. To open the prison would be unwise and unlawful; there Christianity differs from Anarchism. Give custom to whom custom is due, and to Cæsar what is Cæsar's. Authority is ordained of God, and beareth not the sword in vain.
Christianity and Radicalism accordingly agree in their criticism of society, but not in the inferences they draw. The Christian endures the sufferings of the prison-house with religious resignation; he does not waste valuable time in making foolish proposals regarding the reform of prison-life and management. In order to obtain mitigation and pardon, and to escape the dark cell and scourging, he tries to behave well, but he does not believe that the prison can be a place of recreation.
All that Rousseau, Max Nordau, and Tolstoi have said against the faults of society is quite true, but their inferences are false. Socialism, i.e. pagan socialism, which preached development and progress, went its crab-like course backwards to the trade unions which had been dissolved, limited industrial freedom, introduced inquisitorial methods, excommunicated heretics. In the great strike non-socialists were refused water and gas, bread and milk for children. They compelled the contented to be discontented, made men wild and despairing, and really made things worse, when they ought to have improved them.
But in their pagan Radicalism they did not attain to the height of Christianity. Unbelieving, they believed in everything that was false—scientific fallacies, politico-economical errors, philosophical stupidities. Into a pagan one may instil every possible falsehood and stupidity; but for the truth in its real relations he is deaf and blind.
To have a moderate quiet contempt of the world, to be already half out of it, one's staff in one's hand and one's knapsack on one's back, ever ready for departure, to have clean hands and a good conscience—that is the way not to be easily assailable. Then one is not envied, and suffers not from disappointments and humiliations, for one is prepared for all, and has anticipated all in advance.