The so-called “higher criticism” had already discovered errors in translation, and contradictions in interpretation, resulting in a “revised edition” of the sacred books, while under the name “Pragmatism,” certain metaphysical writers and accredited teachers have undertaken to determine essential meanings and interpretations, and to submit religious revelations, creeds, dogmas, and theologies to critical analysis.
How far this analysis has gone, and how little of the original interpretation actually remains, only they are aware who keep abreast of current thought, and who with open mind care more for the simple truth than for custom, tradition, theologies, and the folklore of the past.
Dogmatic theological authority is completely undermined, and its days are numbered.[1]
With the masses there is the habitual unrest, the feeling of uncertainty, the social upheaval, with the inevitable tendency to confusion and anarchy. A new religion is already in the formative stage, a new Avatar inevitable.
It is to be less a repudiation than a revision and rehabilitation of the old religion.
People everywhere are looking for the new revelation, for the coming of Christos, for the new Avatar, and few are aware that he is already here.
It should be borne strictly in mind that in every instance in the past, the advent of the Avatar has been unattended by signs and wonders, has come upon the stage of human action in the most commonplace way, and that myth, miracle, and folklore have followed as time went on.
To the people of his time Jesus was the “son of the carpenter,” whose family was obscure. He came “eating with publicans and sinners.”
Jesus, the demigod of to-day, was unknown and undreamed of in Galilee. Philo Judæus seems never to have heard of him.
What and who Jesus was, and what he did, is separated from what the church and theologians have made of him by a gulf that seems almost impassable, and yet this gulf has already been bridged and passed.