And there I must leave the matter to such choice as your nature allows
you. The honest teacher who has to make known to a novice the facts
about Christianity cannot in any essential regard, I think, put the
facts otherwise than as I have put them. If children are to be delivered
from the proselytizing atheist on the one hand, and the proselytizing
nun in the convent school on the other, with all the other proselytizers
that lie between them, they must not be burdened with idle controversies
as to whether there was ever such a person as Jesus or not. When Hume
said that Joshua's campaigns were impossible, Whately did not wrangle
about it: he proved, on the same lines, that the campaigns of Napoleon
were impossible. Only fictitious characters will stand Hume's sort of
examination: nothing will ever make Edward the Confessor and St.
Louis as real to us as Don Quixote and Mr. Pickwick. We must cut the
controversy short by declaring that there is the same evidence for the
existence of Jesus as for that of any other person of his time; and
the fact that you may not believe everything Matthew tells you no more
disproves the existence of Jesus than the fact that you do not believe
everything Macaulay tells you disproves the existence of William III.
The gospel narratives in the main give you a biography which is quite
credible and accountable on purely secular grounds when you have trimmed
off everything that Hume or Grimm or Rousseau or Huxley or any modern
bishop could reject as fanciful. Without going further than this, you
can become a follower of Jesus just as you can become a follower of
Confucius or Lao Tse, and may therefore call yourself a Jesuist, or even
a Christian, if you hold, as the strictest Secularist quite legitimately
may, that all prophets are inspired, and all men with a mission,
Christs.
The teacher of Christianity has then to make known to the child, first
the song of John Barleycorn, with the fields and seasons as witness to
its eternal truth. Then, as the child's mind matures, it can learn, as
historical and psychological phenomena, the tradition of the scapegoat,
the Redeemer, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and
how, in a world saturated with this tradition, Jesus has been largely
accepted as the long expected and often prophesied Redeemer, the
Messiah, the Christ. It is open to the child also to accept him. If the
child is built like Gladstone, he will accept Jesus as his Savior,
and Peter and John the Baptist as the Savior's revealer and forerunner
respectively. If he is built like Huxley, he will take the secular view,
in spite of all that a pious family can do to prevent him. The important
thing now is that the Gladstones and Huxleys should no longer waste
their time irrelevantly and ridiculously wrangling about the Gadarene
swine, and that they should make up their minds as to the soundness of
the secular doctrines of Jesus; for it is about these that they may come
to blows in our own time.