The question seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of resolute adherence
to the old cry of "Not this man, but Barabbas." Yet it is beginning to
look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of his strong right hand,
his victories, his empires, his millions of money, and his moralities
and churches and political constitutions. "This man" has not been a
failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way. But he
has had one quaint triumph. Barabbas has stolen his name and taken his
cross as a standard. There is a sort of compliment in that. There is
even a sort of loyalty in it, like that of the brigand who breaks every
law and yet claims to be a patriotic subject of the king who makes them.
We have always had a curious feeling that though we crucified Christ on
a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it, and that
if we were better men we might try his plan. There have been one or two
grotesque attempts at it by inadequate people, such as the Kingdom of
God in Munster, which was ended by crucifixion so much more atrocious
than the one on Calvary that the bishop who took the part of Annas went
home and died of horror. But responsible people have never made such
attempts. The moneyed, respectable, capable world has been steadily
anti-Christian and Barabbasque since the crucifixion; and the specific
doctrine of Jesus has not in all that time been put into political or
general social practice. I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or
you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to
Annas and Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the
world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the
world's misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will
if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman. Pray
do not at this early point lose patience with me and shut the book. I
assure you I am as sceptical and scientific and modern a thinker as you
will find anywhere. I grant you I know a great deal more about economics
and politics than Jesus did, and can do things he could not do. I am
by all Barabbasque standards a person of much better character and
standing, and greater practical sense. I have no sympathy with vagabonds
and talkers who try to reform society by taking men away from their
regular productive work and making vagabonds and talkers of them too;
and if I had been Pilate I should have recognized as plainly as he the
necessity for suppressing attacks on the existing social order, however
corrupt that order might be, by people with no knowledge of government
and no power to construct political machinery to carry out their views,
acting on the very dangerous delusion that the end of the world was at
hand. I make no defence of such Christians as Savonarola and John of
Leyden: they were scuttling the ship before they had learned how to
build a raft; and it became necessary to throw them overboard to save
the crew. I say this to set myself right with respectable society; but
I must still insist that if Jesus could have worked out the practical
problems of a Communist constitution, an admitted obligation to deal
with crime without revenge or punishment, and a full assumption
by humanity of divine responsibilities, he would have conferred an
incalculable benefit on mankind, because these distinctive demands of
his are now turning out to be good sense and sound economics.
I say distinctive, because his common humanity and his subjection to
time and space (that is, to the Syrian life of his period) involved his
belief in many things, true and false, that in no way distinguish
him from other Syrians of that time. But such common beliefs do not
constitute specific Christianity any more than wearing a beard, working
in a carpenter's shop, or believing that the earth is flat and that
the stars could drop on it from heaven like hailstones. Christianity
interests practical statesmen now because of the doctrines that
distinguished Christ from the Jews and the Barabbasques generally,
including ourselves.