The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

by Richard B. Westbrook

“This is no speculation; it is the positive law of progress, as history presents it. To worship ideals is the condition of spiritual life. To lose belief that there is somewhere a better than ourselves is to gravitate downward to what is worse than ourselves. We grow better by definite homage to a best. And this worship of ideals is a process of idealization.... Man’s power of growth, therefore, resides in the ability to shift his veneration....

“Ideals prove themselves to be idealizations, that they may point him on to higher levels. This is religious progress....

“So a time comes when every religion that centres in an individual's prerogative of divinity falls under criticism, and is, so far, referred to temporary causes. Christianity cannot escape this law. As a distinct religion it is but Christism, and passes away, like Jehovism, before a broader faith. Whether what succeeds it be called Theism or Pantheism, this terminology of systems fails to express its scope. It is free worship of the one infinite and eternal life of the spiritual, moral, and physical universe....

“How, then, did the concentration of the religious sentiment upon Jesus originate? Not, as the Church insists, in the undeniable rights of a perfect Being to the everlasting allegiance of mankind, for there is no evidence of his perfection, intellectual or spiritual, but in the fact that the religious sentiment, at a certain stage of its historical progress, demanded a single human centre, and knew how to satisfy its own demand by its own process of idealization.

“The ideal itself was sent in the soul of the age. It was bound to do what it would with its materials by its own divine gift. It was the creative force of the time. It is not the whole truth to say with Merivale, then, that( the religion of Christ seized and developed, with a divine energy, the latent yearnings of mankind for social combination, having for its essence, in a human point of view, the doctrine of the equality of man/ Rather did that religion catch a spirit of universality already abroad in the age—not latent, but mighty to transform society, to inspire both Hebrew Messiah and Gentile philosopher, to make its god in its own image, and to transform the little Jewish sect at last into a Church of civilization....

“And this, at least, is sure; always there is a man for the hour. Somehow or other, a great demand will find satisfaction. But the man is not what the hour reports him when it has crowned him with all that faith and fancy can bestow, and set up, through him, its own special demand as valid for all time. Future ages will revise, from a freer standpoint, the image it transmits for their adoration....

“The earliest types and emblems of Christ-worship betray this powerful element in its origination. Jesus is represented in the form of the old deities and in conjunction with them. Between the images of Mercury Criophorus and Apollo Nomius, and that of the ‘Good Shepherd/ the transition is so gradual that it is hard to decide whether the picture is pagan or Christian. In the Catacombs Jesus sits as Pluto on the judgment-seat, with Mary as Proserpine, while Mercury leads in souls. Still earlier emblems of Jesus, the Lamb, the Fish, the Ship, the Cross, the Dove, are all associated with older heathen mysteries or mythological beliefs, as are also the Christian festivals and rites.

“And so the idealization of Jesus went on steadily and consistently till it reached deification. The early Christian ‘apologists’ ridiculed the human gods of the old polytheism, yet they did but concentrate the same principle more perfectly in the form of their Christ. Hebrew monotheism was indeed too strong in Paul to allow of his finding in Jesus more than a man in whom the fulness of the Godhead dwelt. But this hovers very close upon the larger desire of the nations. And later, in the Gospel of John, the Gentile current has absorbed the Hebrew and the call for a God-man is boldly met. A life of Jesus is here dramatically constructed, not out of historical facts, nor even traditions, but out of that preconceived ideal of an incarnate word attaching itself, in its longing for actual and living substance, to the growing prestige of his name....

“The records of Jesus’ life have had to be idealized also; and these are not, like his person, so dim and veiled as to leave the religions imagination a certain margin of freedom, however inadequate, but a definite statement of doctrines, doings, and claims; so that science, philosophy, art, and morality have been taught to bow in his name to the limitations of half-developed times and men.

“It is not denied that by leaving out what we dislike we can find in the New-Testament Jesus as noble an ideal as we will, though it can be only of a purely interior individualism, unrelated to practical and political functions. But we cannot ignore the many sources, apart from the real life of Jesus, from which this feast of good things has been derived. The New Testament is, in fact, not so much the record of a life as the fruit of two ancient civilizations, the Oriental and Greek, of whose confluence Christianity itself was the product....