I know quite well that this impression of superiority is not produced
on everyone, even of those who profess extreme susceptibility to it.
Setting aside the huge mass of inculcated Christ-worship which has no
real significance because it has no intelligence, there is, among people
who are really free to think for themselves on the subject, a great
deal of hearty dislike of Jesus and of contempt for his failure to save
himself and overcome his enemies by personal bravery and cunning as
Mahomet did. I have heard this feeling expressed far more impatiently by
persons brought up in England as Christians than by Mahometans, who are,
like their prophet, very civil to Jesus, and allow him a place in their
esteem and veneration at least as high as we accord to John the Baptist.
But this British bulldog contempt is founded on a complete misconception
of his reasons for submitting voluntarily to an ordeal of torment and
death. The modern Secularist is often so determined to regard Jesus as a
man like himself and nothing more, that he slips unconsciously into the
error of assuming that Jesus shared that view. But it is quite clear
from the New Testament writers (the chief authorities for believing that
Jesus ever existed) that Jesus at the time of his death believed
himself to be the Christ, a divine personage. It is therefore absurd to
criticize his conduct before Pilate as if he were Colonel Roosevelt or
Admiral von Tirpitz or even Mahomet. Whether you accept his belief in
his divinity as fully as Simon Peter did, or reject it as a delusion
which led him to submit to torture and sacrifice his life without
resistance in the conviction that he would presently rise again in
glory, you are equally bound to admit that, far from behaving like a
coward or a sheep, he showed considerable physical fortitude in going
through a cruel ordeal against which he could have defended himself as
effectually as he cleared the moneychangers out of the temple. "Gentle
Jesus, meek and mild" is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant
in the gospels. St. Matthew would as soon have thought of applying such
adjectives to Judas Maccabeus as to Jesus; and even St. Luke, who makes
Jesus polite and gracious, does not make him meek. The picture of him
as an English curate of the farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a
policeman, and everybody's butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften
children; but that such a figure could ever have become a centre of the
world's attention is too absurd for discussion; grown men and women may
speak kindly of a harmless creature who utters amiable sentiments and is
a helpless nincompoop when he is called on to defend them; but they will
not follow him, nor do what he tells them, because they do not wish to
share his defeat and disgrace.