He was called upon to explain how his goodness could have brought upon him such extreme suffering, and he says:
“See what, a god, I suffer from the gods!
For mercy to mankind I am not deemed
Worthy of mercy; but in this uncouth
Appointment am fixed here,
A spectacle dishonorable to Jove!
On the throne of heaven scarce was he seated,
On the powers of heaven
He showered his various benefits, thereby
Confirming his sovereignty; but for unhappy mortals
Had no regard, but all the present race
Willed to extirpate and to form anew.
None save myself opposed his will. I dared,
And, boldly pleading, saved them from destruction—
Saved them from sinking to the realm of night;
For which oflënce I bow beneath these pains,
Dreadful to suffer, piteous to behold!”
None remained to be witnesses of his dying agony but the chorus of ever-faithful women, who bewailed and lamented him. The earth trembled and the whole frame of nature was convulsed, and the curtain fell on the sublimest scene ever presented to human sight—a dying god! The preternatural darkness was exhibited on the stage, and the most agonizing and heartfelt sorrow manifested by the weeping audience. It was the “Passion Play.”
Let it be kept in mind that all of the incidents of the Gospels have been acted in the theatres or illustrated in the sacred rites and religious ceremonies of pagan peoples from time immemorial. Are not the Gospels a plagiarized and adapted drama?
We close this chapter with a further quotation from Mr. Johnson:
“I am not asserting that all this was pure fiction—that no one stood where men imagined they saw a God on earth. But I do recognize the extreme difficulty of satisfying a free and sincere mind as to how much or how little did ‘happen,’ and the extreme hardihood of asserting at this day that there was anything in the person or life of Jesus to vest in him the claim to be the enduring definitive centre of religious thought and association under any name or title whatsoever. Neither the character of the records nor the manner of their origination authorizes that postulate of perfection through which alone such claim could vest in any being. The veneration of ages for his name deserves respect as the satisfaction of a natural demand during a certain stage of human progress. But it does not prove him an exception to the law that the worship of personages must give way to the worship of principles—the centrality of an individual to the centrality of ideas—the divinity or ‘lordship’ of a man to the deity of the infinitely wise and good. It illustrates that law. Christism in due time passes, like polytheism, and a larger faith succeeds. Thus the theory refutes itself.
“The Christian idealization demands that all imperfections in the New-Testament Jesus shall be ascribed to the misapprehensions of the disciples and the ignorance of the biographers. It is confident that Jesus must have been greater than the record shows. But we do not know that he was even so great as the record shows. We are confidently told that such an ideal as can be there discerned presupposes its actual—that no man could have drawn such a character except from life. ‘Such a grand figure is not hewn out of air.’ But it is quite possible to carry this kind of divination too far.
“If a man could be that, why could not a man or an age conceive that it ought to be? All that can fairly be assumed is, that there must have been an impressive life (or lives) behind all the construction; and this is not denied. But the necessities of the religious life in that time produced Jesus. Why could they not magnify their own product and improve upon it ideally as they developed into new and larger demands? If we are to insist that the idealizing faculty cannot go beyond actuality, no meaning will be left to the word ideal, and no such faculty will remain. This is the irony to which the old belief comes....
“A pure and simple worship of the Infinite and Eternal is the necessity of philosophy; it is the goal of science; it is the true ground of trust and prayer and love, of philosophic Theism and spiritual Pantheism alike; it is the parent of prophets, of mystics, of reformers, of all true builders of man’s social unity and religious communion.”
No reasonable man can doubt that the Christ of Paul and the Gospels is largely, if not altogether, ideal; and in the succeeding chapter we proceed to give more specifically our reasons for thinking so.