Ever since with the beginning of Christendom a new soul entered the
body of exhausted Europe, it is true to say that we have not only had
a certain idea but been haunted by it, as by a ghost. It is the idea
crystallised in legends like those of St. Christopher and St. Martin.
But it is equally apparent in the most modern ethics and eloquence, as,
for instance, when a French atheist orator urged the reconsideration
of a criminal case by pointing at the pictured Crucifixion which hangs
in a French Law Court and saying: “Voilà la chose jugée.” It is the
idea that when oppressing the lowest we may actually be oppressing the
highest, and that not even impersonally, but personally. We may be,
as it were, the victims of a divine masquerade; and discover that the
greatest of kings can travel incognito.
Such a picture, therefore, as the cartoonist has drawn here can be
found in all ages of Christian history as a comment on contemporary
oppression. But while the central figure remains always the same, the
types of the tyrant and the mocker hold our temporary attention; for
they are sketched from life and with a living exactitude. Upon one of
them especially it would be easy to say a great deal; the grinning
Prussian youth with the spectacles and the monkey face, who is using a
Prussian helmet instead of the crown of thorns.
Such a scientific gutter-snipe is the real and visible fruit of
organised German education; he is a much truer type than any gory and
hairy Hun. In the face of that young atheist there is everything that
can come from the congestion of the pagan with the _parvenu_; all the
knowingness that is the cessation of knowledge; and that something
which always accompanies _real_ atheism--arrested development.