I do not imply, however, that these doctrines were peculiar to Christ.
A doctrine peculiar to one man would be only a craze, unless its
comprehension depended on a development of human faculty so rare that
only one exceptionally gifted man possessed it. But even in this case it
would be useless, because incapable of spreading. Christianity is a step
in moral evolution which is independent of any individual preacher. If
Jesus had never existed (and that he ever existed in any other sense
than that in which Shakespear's Hamlet existed has been vigorously
questioned) Tolstoy would have thought and taught and quarrelled with
the Greek Church all the same. Their creed has been fragmentarily
practised to a considerable extent in spite of the fact that the laws
of all countries treat it, in effect, as criminal. Many of its advocates
have been militant atheists. But for some reason the imagination of
white mankind has picked out Jesus of Nazareth as THE Christ, and
attributed all the Christian doctrines to him; and as it is the doctrine
and not the man that matters, and, as, besides, one symbol is as good as
another provided everyone attaches the same meaning to it, I raise, for
the moment, no question as to how far the gospels are original, and how
far they consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The record that
Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration that
Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a literal divine
paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that the same
claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not just now
concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records of fact; for
I am not acting as a detective, but turning our modern lights on to
certain ideas and doctrines in them which disentangle themselves from
the rest because they are flatly contrary to common practice, common
sense, and common belief, and yet have, in the teeth of dogged
incredulity and recalcitrance, produced an irresistible impression that
Christ, though rejected by his posterity as an unpractical dreamer, and
executed by his contemporaries as a dangerous anarchist and blasphemous
madman, was greater than his judges.