There is yet another page in the history of religion which must be
conned and digested before the career of Jesus can be fully understood.
people who can read long books will find it in Frazer's Golden Bough.
Simpler folk will find it in the peasant's song of John Barleycorn, now
made accessible to our drawingroom amateurs in the admirable collections
of Somersetshire Folk Songs by Mr. Cecil Sharp. From Frazer's magnum
opus you will learn how the same primitive logic which makes the
Englishman believe today that by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the
strength and courage of the bull, and to hold that belief in the face
of the most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and racers
and bicyclists, led the first men who conceived God as capable of
incarnation to believe that they could acquire a spark of his divinity
by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And from the song of John
Barleycorn you may learn how the miracle of the seed, the growth,
and the harvest, still the most wonderful of all the miracles and as
inexplicable as ever, taught the primitive husbandman, and, as we must
now affirm, taught him quite rightly, that God is in the seed, and that
God is immortal. And thus it became the test of Godhead that nothing
that you could do to it could kill it, and that when you buried it, it
would rise again in renewed life and beauty and give mankind eternal
life on condition that it was eaten and drunk, and again slain and
buried, to rise again for ever and ever. You may, and indeed must, use
John Barleycorn "right barbarouslee," cutting him "off at knee" with
your scythes, scourging him with your flails, burying him in the earth;
and he will not resist you nor reproach you, but will rise again in
golden beauty amidst a great burst of sunshine and bird music, and
save you and renew your life. And from the interweaving of these two
traditions with the craving for the Redeemer, you at last get the
conviction that when the Redeemer comes he will be immortal; he will
give us his body to eat and his blood to drink; and he will prove his
divinity by suffering a barbarous death without resistance or reproach,
and rise from the dead and return to the earth in glory as the giver of
life eternal.