IT is necessary here, and at another place, to introduce an interlude
into the story. These interludes are designed as threads to connect the
different parts of the narrative together. They are each a suggestion
instead of a description; for even a description of things holy would
too much shock the sense of propriety of us scribes and pharisees.
For the accepted religion of the civilized world has become so
enveloped with wrappings of spiritual ideality that it is impossible
to strip away those investments and to show the reality in all its
nakedness. Such an exposure would too much violate our accepted
religious ideas. It would not do for any man to tell just how it was
that Christ actually did appear in the midst of that motley multitude;
nor would it do for any pharisee among us to listen to the story.
Either the truth would sound blasphemous, or else, if it were accepted
and received, then we scribes and pharisees, priests and Levites of
to-day would rise up and stone it and crucify it exactly as we did of
old.
Since those times we have grown accustomed to say that we believe in
Christ--even though we do not really believe. Expressed belief and real
belief are very different matters. What we think we believe in is not
the living Christ as He was in the flesh, but a Christ we have created
for ourselves--a white-robed, visionary figure that passes through the
world of humanity like a spirit rather than like a man of flesh and
blood.
For the story of Christ is surrounded by the narrative of such
incredibly miraculous happenings that it is necessary for us to create
such a spiritual image, or else we cannot believe those narratives at
all. It is with us now as it was in those ages past--we cannot bear to
have the spiritual image of truth blasphemed by the living fact. In
our souls we disbelieve that which seems to us to be unbelievable. We
endeavor to stimulate faith, first by saying that we believe, and then
by creating for ourselves an imaginary image of Christ who might have
performed the miracles if He had really lived.
Nearly all intelligent and thoughtful men really do believe in the
existence of an infinitely intelligent and infinitely powerful deity.
For a man has but to gaze about him and he beholds, with the eyes of
his flesh, infinity itself--infinity of what is great; infinity of what
is minute; infinity of time; infinity of space.
These are actual entities, for we know that there never was and never
can be a time in which there was no created thing--not even vacuum--and
we know that there can be no limit to space in which everything--even
space itself--ceases to exist. The very material universe exists
infinitely, and we behold with the eyes of the flesh. We do not
comprehend it, yet we know that it really is.
In the hollow vault of night we behold countless myriads of huge
and flaming suns, scattered like dust through the sky, or sparkling
in points of radiance, and we know that that created stellar system
extends, without limit, into the emptiness of limitless space. We know
that each incredibly gigantic sun--flaming with light and heat--follows
a perfect and well-assigned orbit. We know that about each of these
glorious suns there must revolve scores of planets, like this earth
upon which we stand.
Seeing this fact with our eyes, it is not possible for the reason to
suppose that all this well-ordered and perfect system of enormous
stellar and planetary system was created, is governed, is sustained by
blind and chaotic chance. Chance never built even so much as a brick
wall. How could it, then, create a living sun whose heat and light give
life to the planets that revolve about it?
There must be a Creator for these things--a Creator infinitely potent,
infinitely intelligent--or else those things could not have been
created.
On the other hand, man looks about him upon the earth, and there he
beholds an equally and infinitely perfect creation. For every one of
the myriad blades of grass, and every one of the myriad leaves of
the trees, and every one of the myriad flowers of the field, is, in
itself, as tremendously perfect in its every minutest particular as is
the greatest sun that flames in the empty heavens. Not only does it
live in a minute and orderly sequence of progressive existence, but it
possesses an infinitely vital power of procreation, so that each tiny
seed, under proper circumstances, has the power of filling the entire
universe with its progeny.
Every bird, beast, and fish is not only exactly fitted into its
surroundings--not only is each perfect even unto every hair, feather,
and scale--not only is each endowed with a vitality that enables
it upon an instant to adapt itself to the circumstances of its
existence; but each in itself is endowed with the same potentiality of
indefinitely procreating its kind with equal bodily perfection.
These things can neither be created nor sustained excepting by an
intelligent Creator who makes and sustains them; for it is impossible
for any reasoning man to suppose that vacuity and death has created
that which is a fact and is alive--that nothingness can have created
that which is not only perfect in itself, but which is endowed with
such infinite potentiality.
And at the apex of all creation stands man himself, so nicely and
perfectly adjusted to the conditions that surround him that it takes
only a few degrees in the variation of so small a thing as the
temperature of the air to destroy him or to sustain his life. And
each man possesses not only volition, but thought and reason to such
particularity that each tiny idea may be continued to infinity; or,
when applied to the things of nature, may evolve a physical phenomenon
that can affect or transform the entire economy of the world in which
he lives.
Whence comes this perfect and intelligent life? Man does not cause
himself to think, nor does he cause himself to live. He may shape and
direct his thoughts, but intelligence comes to him without his own
volition. He receives these things, but he does not cause either the
one or the other to be created.
That which causes life and intelligence to exist and to inflow into
man is and must be infinite vitality and infinite intelligence--an
omniscient Creator--or else these things must spring from nothing.
Thus any man who thinks and reasons within himself must perceive that
there actually is and does exist a divine and infinite Creator.
But that which we scribes and pharisees, priests and Levites, cannot
really accept is the fact that this infinite Creator--this tremendous
God, who sustains the universe and who flings blazing suns and planets
by the handful through the heavens--that this omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent Divinity should actually have become finitely incarnate
upon this earth. It is still more impossible for us to believe with our
reason that the humble wife of a common carpenter should have given
Him birth as a little, whimpering, helpless babe among the cattle of a
stable in Palestine.
Our caste has been compelled by the force of circumstances to accept
this as a dogma, but we cannot believe it in our hearts. Consequently
we build for ourselves an ideal Christ who is so different from the
actual Christ that, were the real Christ to appear to-day, we would
crucify Him exactly as we did nineteen hundred years ago.
It is, indeed, the crowning truth of the ages that Jehovah did enter
finitely into the flesh of a man; that He was miraculously conceived;
that He was born in a stable in Bethlehem, and that His mother was the
wife of a journeyman carpenter, who had a carpenter-shop in Nazareth.
But that truth is not for us; consequently we either become sadducees
and deny the resurrection of the soul, or else we are pharisees
who, with a helpless hypocrisy, try to cause ourselves, by some
_hocus-pocus_ of inverted reasoning, to believe that which we do not
believe.
We do not really believe that the actual laws of nature were ever so
preposterously violated as the Scriptures tell us. No rational pharisee
ever really believed that water, at a touch, can be actually transmuted
into wine; or that dead and gangrenous flesh ever was, at a touch,
actually transformed into healthy tissues; or that eyes organically
imperfect ever were, at a touch, made to receive the light like healthy
orbs.
Either we falsify ourselves by saying that we believe these things,
or else we benumb our reasoning so as not to think about them at all.
Many of us would fain expurgate those miraculous narratives from the
divine word, retaining only such spiritual and intangible ideas as
are believable because they have no foundation in fact. Others of us
give up the task as hopeless, and declare frankly that we do not know
whether they are true or not, but that we are willing to give them the
benefit of the doubt.
These things of divine truth are so preposterous to the common sense
that only the ignorant can believe them. Wherefore the Scriptures
are given into the hands of the ignorant for preservation, lest we,
intelligent pharisees, should alter and amend them to fit our own
ideas--in the which case they would inevitably perish.
For it is to be remembered that, while the divine Scriptures have
lasted in their entirety through the ages, nearly every system of
human philosophy--whether physical or metaphysical--has perished after
a generation or two, to give place to another system. So would the
Scriptures perish if it were left to us to amend them so as to fit the
rational and intelligent science of the age.
We were born to crucify the truth; it is our mission in life, and we
must not be blamed when we fulfil our destiny.
* * * * *
Shortly after that visit of the priests and Levites to the baptisms of
John, the promised Messiah suddenly appeared in the midst of the motley
crowd gathered to hear the truth.
A poor woman, the mother of two ordinary fishermen, thus described the
divine miracle that thereupon happened. She told it somewhat thus: "I
saw it. There was a great many people around; some saw it and some did
not see it. I can't tell just how it was, but it was after He went down
into the water with John. There was a light as if it was sunshine up
this way; then something came. It looked like a dove--they all said it
was a dove. It looked like it came down upon Him. I don't know how long
it lasted--I saw it for a little and then it was gone. He was standing
in the water along with John; then He came out close to where I stood.
The folk were calling out 'Hallelujah!' all about us. They were crying
'Hallelujah! Hallelujah!' They crowded so they pushed me into the
water. I felt as though I were going crazy, and I, too, kept calling
out 'Hallelujah! Hallelujah!'"
Even in the recounting of such a reality it sounds shocking. How
shocking, then, must it have been to those of us who were living when
it really happened.
But with this, the mission of John came to an end. The crowds that had
gathered about him departed hither and thither, and the earth was
left bare and desolate where the growing things of the spring-time
had been trampled into the dry and dusty soil by the treading of many
feet--where the pure waters of the streams had been defiled by human
contact.
V