Origen and Augustine, the two greatest men which Christianity has produced, would agree with Greg in this. We have already quoted the motto of this section from Origen, and we will now quote this from Augustine:
It very often happens that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world, respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation, and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian, speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.
FOOTNOTES:
[K] But if Adam and Eve are not historical personages there is no doctrine of supernaturalistic Christianism resting on the solid ground of facts and the whole of its immense dogmatic structure is floating in the air of theories and myths.—Author.
[L] It is questionable whether such persons as Samson, Jonah and Daniel ever lived, but it is certain that their adventures are as mythical as anything in Aesop's Fables.—Author.
[M] But these nine texts which for some years were often triumphantly pointed to as the pillars upon which securely rested the historicalness of Jesus as a man are now lying in the dust where the learned and brilliant Professor William Benjamin Smith of Tulane University put them by his great contribution to the Christological problem in a book, entitled Ecce Deus in which he, as I think, proves conclusively that the Jesus of the New Testament never was a real man but always an imaginary god, the Christian recasting of the Jewish God, a new Jehovah.—Author.
IV. WOULD SOCIALISM CHANGE HUMAN NATURE?
Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever, Or the priests of the bloody Faith: They stand on the brink of that mighty river Whose waves they have tainted with death, It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells, Around them it foams and rages and swells, And their swords and their scepters I floating see Like wrecks in the surge of eternity.
—Shelley.