At last:
“Well,” said Gildea, taking his cigarette from his lips, “and how did you like the happy family? You were a very quiet member of it.”
“Yes,” said Maddock, “I refrained from mewing and sat still, purring and pleasantly watching the others. It struck me, shortly after Alcock came in, that we were a very representative happy family.”
“We only wanted a genial Theist to make the pile complete. Your good Judge is a Theist. Now if we could only....”
“Ay, ay,” said Maddock with something like a chuckle, “Judge Parker is a Theist! As your friend the Argus said, he was ‘the learned gentleman who discovered Unitarianism in the early months of 1885.’—Come now,” he proceeded with a sudden concentration of interest, “what are you going to say of the affirmative side of this man’s criticism, after your remark that there was not, in modern times, one man of real intellectual power that has believed in a personal God and not believed in a divine Christ? Are you going to turn upon me again with your precious purely intellectual view of things, and say: ‘The question that now arises is, has not Theism, after all,’ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?”
“Certainly I am,” said Gildea laughing, “but all hope of utilizing the purely intellectual view seems lost after my unwary committal of myself.—No,” he added more seriously, “I have of course little more left to do than to try and get you to join me in abuse of the good Judge for his superstition, that is to say his Theism, and that other egregious vice of his—his ludicrously inadequate conception of what is ‘good and ennobling.’ To take the last first, I will say, as I once heard Hawkesbury say on a like occasion, that I would far sooner believe in the Orthodox Christ than in the Unitarian Jesus. Indeed I might broaden my saying, and declare to the whole Rationalistic conception of Christ and Christianity generally, what Carlyle declared to Voltaire: ‘Cease, my much respected Herr Von Voltaire, shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth.... Take our thanks, then, and—thyself away.’”
“Judge Parker’s view of Our Lord,” said Maddock frowning, “is,—not to say blasphemous,—simply fatuous! I do not know whether indignation at impudence or contempt at stupidity the most possesses a man, when he is told, by such an one as this, that ‘the Christian Theist, who regards Jesus as man, considers, and rightly from his point of view, that it is within his power to attain to the life of, and to follow the example of, Christ.’ Imagine Judge Parker attaining to the life of anyone but a blatantly successful lawyer in the truculent spiritual quagmires of a colonial capital!”
“Our good Judge’s discovery and investigation of the character of Jesus,” said Gildea, almost ready to laugh outright at Maddock’s concluding dythramb, “are certainly not unlike those of a man who should charter a penny steam-boat for a trip up the Nile, and proceed, on his return to England, to give a lengthy description of certain large triangular-shaped buildings which, he should say, bore considerable resemblance to the common-sense conception of pyramids! And it is possible perhaps to denominate such a description as fatuous. His conception of Jesus is, we are agreed—inadequate: ‘an exemplar ... who merits all praise, all esteem, and love, and admiration for that, being human, he led so pure, so blameless, so noble and unselfish a life.’ This, what this with our good Judge means, is an inadequate conception of Jesus. He perceives nothing of the real essence of Jesus. Anything that Arnold, whom he quotes so often, may have said of ‘the mildness and sweet reasonableness’ of Jesus, or that Renan may have said of the wonderful powers of personal attraction that are in Jesus—all this has fallen like water on the judicial back of our duck here! It is for none of these that our good Judge, our typical man of common-sense, goes to his New Testament. ‘Mildness and sweet reasonableness,’ the yearning of a consuming personal love, are not clear solid spiritual qualities which his mind can see and touch and handle. They have no place in the copy-books of the soul, nor yet in the sum-books thereof, and you shall search its ‘Little Arthur’s History’ from beginning to end and find no mention of them. Their only place is in the thoughts, words, and actions of the men and women who have moved thousands and millions of their fellows, in the radiant days of high civilizations, in the agonies of the travail or the destruction of peoples and races. ‘It is apparent,’ says he, ‘that we can collect from the Christian Bible, a purer, more beautiful, and more advanced ethical code, than is to be obtained from any other book or books.’ O good Judge, O belovèd Judge, if all that is to be got out of the Christian Bible is an ‘ethical code,’ then the sooner Martin Tupper and Mr. Harrison are deified, the sooner will the human soul have reached its apogee!”
“That is well,” said Maddock, “but, at the same time, there are few things that disgust me more than the man of the opposite sort—he who, like so many of these Socialists of yours, will sing the love of Christ with passion, and then go out and commit a hundred of the grossest sins. Christ is morality.”