In thus epitomizing the events in the life of Jesus upon which, from his day until now, men have laid such fearful stress, and upon whose acceptance the present life as well as the future of all men has been conditioned, I should be far from doing justice to myself should I fail to point out my own attitude in the matter. I hold it true that the self-evident truth, as well as the wonderful sublimity of Christ's teachings, become apparent upon the study of the same, and are weakened rather than strengthened by insistence upon all that is supernatural, mysterious and inconceivable in the generally accepted account of his life and labor. My mind is freed from the necessity for the mysterious which the Graeco-Jewish people demanded, and which the superstitious people of to-day still demand, and I prefer to let him stand for what he seems to me to be,—the greatest moralist and teacher of all time, rather than to surround him with a veil of imagery and with statements so impossible of belief as to make it impossible to accept one part without accepting them all. The Jews already had doctrines of unity of God and love for others; the Grecian philosophy antedated him in insisting upon elevation of life to a higher plane than that of mere gratification of the senses, and everywhere his predecessors and contemporaries could furnish miracles by the hundred, but in force, grandeur and simplicity of his teachings, in his comprehensive humanity, in his directness of appeal, in his condemnations of those who departed from the model which he set, he never has had and probably never will have an equal. In his self-abasement and love for others he was as irresistible as have been these principles in civilizing and, in this sense, christianizing the world.
In Jesus' own day there was no hair-splitting theology; devotion, love of fellow-men, charity, repentance, these were all that were needed. But the beautiful simplicity of his teaching was lost with the death of his first disciples. The system was esteemed too simple, too unadorned to appeal to the people used to something quite the contrary. And so Stephen the Martyr, who was of Grecian education, was stoned because he demanded a repudiation of certain Jewish teachings, although the congregation at Antioch adopted his views.
Paul the great leader was an epileptic and had frequent fits and visions, and these made a strong impression, not only on himself but on his followers. On the creations of his imagination the doctrine of the resurrection is largely based. He set up the God-man Jesus as the counterpart of the first man Adam, who represented sin and death, and who was to be crucified and born anew in Christ. Between Paul, the great Gentile Christian, and Peter, the Jewish Christian, the church was quickly split into two parties; these two soon subdividing into others, and among them all arose the New Testament literature, whose Alexandrine dialect establishes the influence of Greek education.
Thus did Christianity develop out of the secret associations of the ancient world. The early Christians themselves constituted, at least while under persecution, a sort of secret society. Their worship was mystical, but not because Jesus so taught;—rather because of their environment and traditions. The practice of baptism, the last supper and the doctrines of incarnation and resurrection have been as certainly added to the Nazarene's sublime code of ethics as to them in turn, in the centuries to follow, were added every conceivable notion, mystery and stupid absurdity which the diseased minds of men could imagine, and which have been the cause of more departure from Christ's original teachings, and of more strife and bloodshed than any other feature in the history of mankind.
Indeed it is one of the greatest inconsistencies of history that the doctrines of love, unity and peace, taught by the Founder of Christianity, should have been the greatest of all factors to rend mankind apart, beget feelings of hatred, and result in the death, from this cause, of millions of men such as Jesus himself most loved.
[VI]
THE KNIGHTS HOSPITALLER OF ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM
The three great militant, mendicant and monastic orders of the middle ages were the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, the Knights Templar, and the Teutonic Order. In addition were numerous others, smaller, shorter lived, less important in every respect, scarcely mentioned in even the larger histories, like the knights of Calatrava, Alcantara, Santiago de Compostella, and the English Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. These orders were the immediate as well as the indirect outgrowth of mediaeval conditions for which both the Church and the State were responsible. The secret tenets of the Christians had been made public, and those who held to them had for some time ceased to be a secret society; their faith was now a part of that church which was essentially the State, and which occupied a goodly part of Europe.
Sad to say the Church was rent, and the State suffered accordingly from constant strife between sects and parties, who contested, even to the death, over interpretations to be given to the scriptures, and the matter of creeds. Thus while discussing at point of the sword whether the soul is to be saved by good works, or by grace of God, they disregarded the very essence of the simple teachings of Jesus, and brought upon theology, even in those days, the contempt and ridicule of the liberal minded and the non-believer, so that even to-day it suffers because of the unfortunate light in which it was made to appear. That theology should lead to war is the antithesis of the Christian doctrine, yet no wars have been so fierce and bloody as those waged in "spreading the cross" and propagating a misinterpreted gospel. And so theology suffered doubly from the Monks who perverted it, and from the Knights and the State that inculcated it with fire and sword.