It is pessimism, yet again, that accepts the verdict: “Christianity is the truth of humanity.”[23] Were it not that Dr. Schmiedel endorses it, I should have been inclined to use a stronger term. This too is myth-making. It would be strange indeed if any depth of truth were sounded by men who had not the first elements of a conscience for truth of statement, truth of history: whose very notion of truth was a production of fiction. The “truth of humanity” is something infinitely wider than the structure raised by the “prophets” and “apostles” of the Jesus-cult, out of pre-existing materials, some two thousand years ago; and humanity will outlive that presentment of its cosmos and its destinies as it has outlived others. If it should carry something of the one with it, so does it from the others—even as the one drew from its predecessors; and it will certainly jettison more than it will keep. I have not noted in the Testaments of the Patriarchs any such nullification of its doctrine of forgiveness as is embodied in the promise of future perdition for Chorazin and Bethsaida, or in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, to say nothing of the Jesuine doctrine of future torment. The hate that breathes in “Ye brood of vipers”; in the continual malediction against Scribes and Pharisees as universally hypocrites, “sons of Gehenna,” making their proselytes twice as bad as themselves; and in the Johannine “your father the devil”—all these are “Christian” specialties, turning to naught the Jewish precept of forgiveness.
And I can “see no prospect” of a long currency for Professor Schmiedel’s panegyric of fictitious sayings in Acts[24] as “of the deepest that can be said about the inner Christian life.” If that be so, what amount of profundity goes to the whole construction of the faith? How long is it to be maintained that the secret or inspiration of good life lies in the ideas of men for whom the framing of false history was a pious occupation? The main ethical content of the Christian system, the moral doctrine by which the Church has lived down till the other day, is the ethic-defying doctrine of the redemption of mankind by a blood sacrifice—a survival of immemorial savagery. That is still the specifically “evangelical” view of Christianity. After living by the doctrine through two eras, the slowly civilizing conscience of the Church has itself begun to repudiate it; and we have the characteristic spectacle of its defenders declaring that the very terms of the historic creed form a libel framed by its enemies. Taught at last by human reason that the doctrine of sacrifice is the negation of morality, they pretend that that doctrine is not Christian. Without it, their Church would never have taken its historic form. To eliminate it, they have to suppress half their literature, prose and verse. The accommodations by which the fundamental immorality has been modified in the interests of saner morality are but the dictates of human experience; and these dictates are in turn pretended to be the revelation of the faith that flouted them.
Unless the world is again to retrogress collectively in its civilization, this polemic will not long avail to obscure historic issues. It is not merely the “religion” of Professor Drews, it is the emancipated human reason, that denies the mortmain of ancient Syria over the field of ethical thought, and claims the birthright of modern man in his own moral law. Not one day has passed since the penning of the Apocalypse without men’s hating each other in the name of Jesus. Wars generations long have been waged for interpretations of the lore. Hatred and malice and all uncharitableness stamp all the Sacred Books; and the literature of the Fathers imports into the dwindling intellectual life of the West all the rancour of battling Judaism. In our own day, Professor Schmiedel is malignantly assailed in the name of the divinity of the figure of which he claims to prove the exemplary humanity, his reasoned argument winning him no goodwill from the supernaturalists. And around him there figure virulent partisans, incapable of his candour, so little capable of love for enemies that they cannot conduct a debate without passion, perversion and insolence. A multitude of those who acclaim the gospel Jesus as the supreme Teacher reveal themselves as below the standards of normal candour.
From such pretenders to moral authority, the seeker for truth turns to the layman similarly concerned, and to those professional scholars who are capable of debating without passion, and in good faith. Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy are still, it is to be hoped, types of many. The problem is in the end, unalterably, one of historical science; and only by the use of all the methods of sound historical science will it ever be solved.
It is not merely in regard to the study of Christian origins that sociological problems are vitiated by the habitual passing of à priori judgments on issues never critically considered. When an expert hierologist like Dr. Budge tells us repeatedly that in ancient Egypt a “highly spiritual,” “lofty spiritual” and “elevated” religion went hand in hand with a system of sorcery of “degrading” savagery,[25] we are led to inquire how the estimates of altitude are reached or justified. There appears to be no answer save that Dr. Budge holds certain theories about the universe, and, finding these more or less akin to the esoteric theology of Egypt, laurels his own opinions in this fashion. But Dr. Budge is no more entitled than any one else to settle such questions without rational discussion, and the reason of some of us revolts at the concept of a conjoined sublimity and imbecility as a spurious paradox. It is but a convention of supernaturalist apriorism, figuring where it has no right of entry. In precisely the same fashion, Dr. Estlin Carpenter credits to the Aztecs a “lofty religious sentiment,” avowed to be “strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual.”[26] The “lofty” is again a wreath for the writer’s own philosophy of religion, in terms of which the act of the “good Samaritan,” performed a million times by unpretending human beings, was imaginable only by a supernormal Jew, and unmatchable in pagan thought.
In a word, these moral pretensions had better be withdrawn from the area of historical discussion proper. Involving as they do the inference that “lofty” religious conceptions are not merely of no moral value but potent sanctions for all manner of evil, they very effectually stultify themselves. But rationalism needs not, and should not seek, to turn such blunders to its account. As M. Loisy claims, the ground of historic criticism is not the place for such polemic, which tends only to confuse the scientific issue. That is hard enough to solve, with the best will and the best methods.
[1] Apropos d’histoire des religions, end. [↑]
[2] Compare the recent volume of debate between Dr. Sanday and the Rev. N. P. Williams on Form and Content in the Christian Tradition. Mr. Williams argues against Dr. Sanday—who is less destructive in his criticism than M. Loisy—in this very fashion. [↑]