To a pagan who asked Hillel concerning the law, he answered: “That which you like not for yourself do not to thy neighbour, that is the whole law; the rest is but commentary.” It will be observed that Hillel humanizes the law laid down in Lev. xix. 18, where the Israelites are to love each his neighbour among “the children of thy people” as himself. Even Paul (Rom. xiii. 8, Gal. v. 14) quotes it for a rule among the believers, while hurling anathema on others. But Jesus is made (Matt. vii. 12) to inflate the rule into the impracticable form of “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them.” By which rule a wealthy Christian would give at least half his property to the first beggar, as he would wish the beggar to do to him were their situations reversed. This might be natural enough in a community hourly expecting the end of the world and their own instalment in palaces whose splendour would be proportioned to their poverty in this world. But when this delusion faded the rule reverted to what Hillel said, and no doubt Jesus also, as we find it in the second verse of “Didache,” the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. It is a principle laid down by Confucius, Buddha, and all the human “prophets,” and one followed by every gentleman, not to do to his neighbour what he would not like if done to himself. But it is removed out of human ethics and strained ad absurdum by the second-adventist version put into the mouth of Jesus by Matthew. I have dwelt on this as an illustration of how irrecoverably a man loses his manhood when he is made a God.
Irrecoverably! In the second Clementine Epistle (xii. 2) it is said, “For the Lord himself, having been asked by some one when his kingdom should come, said, When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female.” Perhaps a humorous way of saying Never. Equally remote appears the prospect of recovering the man Jesus from his Christ-sepulchre. Even among rationalists there are probably but few who would not be scandalized by any thorough test such as Jesus is said, in the Nazarene Gospel, to have requested of his disciples after his resurrection, “Take, feel me, and see that I am not a bodiless demon!” Without blood, without passion, he remains without the experiences and faults that mould best men, as Shakespeare tells us; he so remains in the nerves where no longer in the intellect, insomuch that even many an agnostic would shudder if any heretic, taking his life in his hand, should maintain that Jesus had fallen in love, or was a married man, or had children.
[1] The name Jesus is used in these pages for the man, Christ being used for the supernatural or risen being.
[2] About 1832 the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson notified his congregation in Boston (Unitarian) that he could no longer administer the “Lord’s Supper,” and near the same time the Rev. W. J. Fox took the same course at South Place Chapel, London. The Boston congregation clung to the sacrament, and gave up their minister to mankind. The London congregation gave up the sacrament, and there was substituted for it the famous South Place Banquet, which was attended by such men as Leigh Hunt, Mill, Thomas Campbell, Jerrold, and such women as Harriet Martineau, Eliza Flower, Sarah Flower Adams (who wrote “Nearer, My God, To Thee”). The speeches and talk at this banquet were of the highest character, and the festival was no doubt nearer in spirit to the supper of Jesus and his friends than any sacrament.
[3] Dr. Nicholson’s “The Gospel According to the Hebrews,” p. 60. In all of my references to this Gospel I depend on this learned and very useful work.
[4] It has always been a condition of missionary propagandise that the new religion must adopt in some form the popular festivals, cherished observances and talismans of the folk. It will be seen by 1 Cor. x. 14–22 that Paul’s eucharist was only a competitor with existing eucharist, with their “cup of devils,” as he calls it.