There is neither contentment nor happiness in unshared wisdom. Therefore I make bold once more to speak plainly of such commonplace things. If we would build our towers higher and higher, we must seek to broaden the foundations, otherwise we topple over with our individual wisdom just as we had imagined heaven attained. The herd does not need our leading more urgently than we its following.
True, it must have been a great and ingenious Jew, who, now more than eighteen hundred years ago, wisely responding to the cry of anguish from his enslaved countrymen for a redeemer, as king, as Christ, pointed out to them the new man, the meek, the "Chrestus," with whom the whole earth felt herself pregnant.
No one can have known the divine reality, which so many millions have called Christ, so profoundly, and have felt it more clearly living in himself than he, when flown from his subdued and desolate country to Alexandria, be created the mighty and tragic heroic figure and chose the name that for so many centuries was to be accepted by mankind, as the personification and epithet of this same reality.
But I charge him gravely that with Jewish fearfulness he withdrew his own person from the struggle in which he let his hero perish, and suffered or even wished his noble and true work of art to be changed into a false piece of history. What might have gladdened and elevated poor suffering and blinded humanity as a wonderful masterpiece of art, like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and weakness, how the genius in fiction creates the highest perfection, such as has never been seen in flesh and blood, - has now, as an invented historical occurrence, driven the whole world to the rudest falsifications of truth and impossible efforts of imitation.
The glorious shapes of Phidias, more beautiful than any living human race has ever actually been, have still brought us joy and inspiration after a miserable barbaric Christian world bad mutilated and neglected them, - but the beautiful figure of Jesus, which as a work of art might have been immortal and beneficent, embellished with Pauline metaphysics and mixed in the Byzantine sorcerer's pot with Egyptian and Chaldean hodgepodge, has become an evil spirit for wretched human kind.
For eighteen hundred years the world has been the dupe of this marvellous dramatic genius and his work, changed in a fatal hour from fiction to history. I know no stronger proof for the existence of a malicious devil who takes pleasure in our amusing errors.
And many a night, when it is warm and the sea calm and the doves coo in the softly whispering elms on the city walls, I wander out of my quiet little city and gaze over the smooth extent of water, musing for hours on the beauty and the joy that would now reign on earth if, unprejudiced and unconfounded, men had asked what God it was that so mightily revealed himself in them and urged them with such perceptible will and pressure, and spoke in so audible a voice: if they had earnestly and attentively hearkened to the constant whisperings and warnings of their deep true nature, if they had borne and learned to follow the bridle of this faithful warner in their own soul, who strongly desires and alone has power to give us peace, - instead of worshipping the true word, and looking for outward signs and miracles, and through the beautiful creations of a human genius letting themselves be seduced to human deification, to stupid imitation, to fanaticism, to falsification of word and reality, to a sickly pursuit of pain, glorification of poverty, fear of knowledge, scorn of the world, hatred of beauty, poor stray sheep!
Then the great and good works of Greeks and Romans, of Indians and Saracens would have been thoughtfully carried on, art preserved, knowledge esteemed, - and the garden of peace made verdant with clear springs of beauty from these two pure fountains. While now, alas! again and again, in thousands of hearts, the true Christ must die the bitter death upon the cross because the truest word that he inspired one of his dearest favorites to utter was besmirched by a flat lie, and his most beautiful poetical image destroyed by a grossly sensuous error.
But be of good cheer, my reader; the devil made a good move, but shall lose the game nevertheless. The falsehood poison has soon spent itself, and the powers of the sick increase. No longer do the shepherdless dogs drive the flock asunder in a hundred different directions. You live, my reader, and hear the voice of me, the dead, - and as though heralded forth by trumpets, you learn that the crucified in you and in me is also victoriously and gloriously risen again.