|WHILE {378}the world was thus seething and fermenting with new faiths
the creed of the Christ made its first appearance on the seaboard of
Asia. In spite of certain remarks in my first chapter, _I am not such
a “gross and crass Euhemerist” as to insist dogmatically on the
historical existence of a personal Jesus. Of the Christ himself, if a
Christ there were, we know little or nothing. The account of his life
which has come down to us in the Gospels is so devoid of authority, and
so entirely built up of miraculous fragments, derived from elsewhere,
that we may well be excused for gravely doubting whether he is not
rather to be numbered with St. George and St. Catherine, with Perseus
and Arthur, among the wholly mythical and imaginary figures of legend
and religion._
On the other hand, it is quite possible, or even probable, that there
really did live in Galilee, at some time about the beginning of our
accepted era, a teacher and reformer bearing the Semitic name which is
finally Hellenised and Latinised for us as Jesus. If so, it seems not
unlikely that this unknown person was crucified (or rather hung on
a post) by the Romans at Jerusalem under the Procurator C. Pontius
Pilatus; and that after his death he was worshipped more or less as a
god by his immediate followers. Such kernel of truth may very well exist
in the late and derivative Gospel story; a kernel of truth, but imbedded
in a mass of unhistorical myth, which implicitly identifies him with all
the familiar corn-gods and wine-gods of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Furthermore, {379}it is even possible that the Christ may have been
deliberately put to death, at the instigation of the Jewish rabble, as
one of those temporary divine kings whose nature and meaning we have
already discussed. If this suggestion seem improbable from the lack of
any similar recorded case in the scanty Jewish annals, I would answer
that formal histories seldom give us any hint of the similar customs
still surviving in civilised European countries; that many popular rites
exist unheard of everywhere; and that the Jews were commonly believed
through the Middle Ages to crucify Christian boys, like St. Hugh of
Lincoln, in certain irregular and unrecognised ethnical ceremonies.
Furthermore, lest I should be thought to adduce this instance through an
anti-Semite tendency (which I do not in the slightest degree possess), I
may add that even among Christians similar customs are believed to exist
in rural parts of Italy at the present day,--there are villages where a
man dies yearly as the representative of Christ; and that in my
opinion the Oberammergau and other Passion Plays are survivals of like
representations in which a condemned criminal, the usual substitute, did
once actually enact the part of Christ. In short, I do not hesitate to
say that _god-slaying ceremonies, more or less attenuated, have lingered
on everywhere in obscure forms among the folk-rites and folk-customs of
the most civilised peoples_.
Without doing more than briefly indicate this possibility, however, I
pass on to say that _if ever there was really a personal Christ, and
if his followers began by vaguely believing in his resurrection, the
legend, as we get it, is obviously made up of collected fragments from
all the godslaying customs and beliefs we have been considering in
detail through the last six or seven chapters_. In the Gospel of his
later believers, after the sect had spread widely among the Gentiles of
the towns, _Jesus is conceived of as a corn and wine god, a temporary
king, slain on a cross as a piacular atonement, and raised again from
the dead after {380}three days, in the manner common to all corn and
wine gods._ It is possible, of course, that the first believers may have
fastened all these ideas on to an accidental condemnation and execution,
so to speak; but it is possible too that the _Christ may actually
have been put to death at the great spring feast of the Passover, in
accordance with some obscure and unrecognised folk-rite of the rabble of
Jerusalem_. I do not even pretend to have an opinion on this subject;
I do not assert or deny any historical nucleus of fact: I am satisfied
with saying that _the story on the whole exhibits the Christ to us
entirely in the character of a temporary king, slain with piacular
rites as a corn and wine god_. In this case at least, I am no dogmatic
Euhemerist.
I think it was Professor Freeman who once quaintly described Buddhism
as “a blasphemous anticipatory parody of Christianity.” _The learned
historian’s idea apparently was that the author of all evil, being
aware beforehand of the divine intentions, had invented Buddhism before
the advent of Christ, so as to discount the Christian Plan of Salvation
by anticipation_. If so, we must regard all other religions as similar
blasphemous attempts at forestalling God: for we shall see as we
proceed that every one of them contains innumerable anticipations of
Christianity--or, to put it conversely, that Christianity subsumes them
all into itself, in a highly concentrated and etherealised solution.
In the earliest Christian documents, the Pauline and other Apostolic
Epistles, we get little information about the history of the real or
mythical Christ. Shadowy allusions alone to the crucifixion and the
resurrection repay our scrutiny. But through the mist of words we see
two or three things clearly. The Christ is described as the son of
God--that is to say of the Jewish deity; and he is spoken of continually
as slain on a post or tree, the sacred symbol of so many old religions.
He dies to save mankind; and salvation is offered in his name to all
men. A careful reading {381}of the epistles from this point of view will
give in brief an epitome of the earliest and least dogmatic yet
very _doctrinal Christian theology. Its cardinal points are four
--incarnation, death, resurrection, atonement_.
The later accounts which we get in the Gospels are far more explicit.
The legend by that time had taken form: it had grown clear and
consistent. _All the elements of the slain and risen corn and wine god
are there in perfection._ For brevity’s sake, I will run all these
accounts together, adding to them certain traits of still later origin.
_The aspect of Christ as a survival of the corn-god is already clear in
Paul’s argument in First Corinthians on the resurrection of the
body. This argument would strike home at once to every Greek and every
Asiatic. “That which you sow is not quickened unless it die. And when
you sow, you sow not the body that is to be, but bare grain; it may be
wheat or any other grain. But God gives it a shape as pleases him; to
every seed its own body.”_ _The whole of this fifteenth chapter, the
earliest statement of the Christian belief, should be read through in
this connexion by any one who wishes to understand the close relation
of the idea of sowing to the resurrection. It might have been written by
any worshipper of Adonis or Osiris who wished to recommend his special
doctrine of a bodily resurrection to a doubtful cremationist, familiar
with the cult of Dionysus and of Attis._
The earliest known rite of the Christian church was the sacramental
eating and drinking of bread and wine together; which rite was said to
commemorate the death of the Lord, and his last supper, when he eat
and drank bread and wine with his disciples. _The language put into
his mouth on this occasion in the Gospels, especially the Fourth, is
distinctly that of the corn and wine god. “I am the true vine; ye are
the branches.” “I am the bread of life.” “Take, eat, this is my
body.” “This is my blood of the new testament.”_ Numberless other
touches of like kind are scattered through the speeches. In the parable
{382}of the vineyard, God the Father is described as the owner of a
vineyard, who sends his only begotten son to receive the fruit of it:
and the workers slay him. The first miracle at Cana of Galilee is one
where water is turned into wine by the hand of Jesus: and so on through
a long series of curious instances, which readers can discover for
themselves by inspection.
In early Christian art, as exhibited in the catacombs at Rome, the true
vine is most frequently figured; as are also baskets of loaves, with the
corresponding miracle of the loaves and fishes. _Multiplication of bread
and wine are the natural credentials of the corn and wine god_. The
earliest description we possess of Christ, that of John of Damascus,
states that his complexion was “of the colour of wheat”; while in
the apocryphal letter of Lentulus to the Roman Senate we read in the
same spirit that his hair was “wine-coloured.” The Greek description
by Epiphanius Monachus says that Christ was six feet high; his hair
long and golden-coloured; and in countenance he was ruddy like his
father David. All these descriptions are obviously influenced by the
identification of the bread and wine of the eucharist with the personal
Jesus.
_In the usage of the church from very early days, it has been customary
to eat the body of Christ in the form of bread, and to drink his blood
as wine in the sacrament. In the Catholic church, this continuous
ceremony takes place at an altar, containing sacred bones, and is
represented as being the offering of God, himself to himself, in the
form of a mystic and piacular sacrifice. The priest drinks the wine or
blood; the laity eat only the bread or body_.
A curious custom which occurs in many churches of Sicily at Easter still
further enforces this unity of Christ with the cult of earlier corn and
wine gods, like Adonis and Osiris. The women sow wheat, lentils, and
canary-seed in plates, which are kept in the dark and watered every
second day. The plants soon shoot up; they are then tied together
{383}with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are placed on the
sepulchres which, with effigies of the dead Christ, are made up in Roman
Catholic and Greek churches on Good Friday, “just as the gardens of
Adonis,” says Mr. Frazer, “were placed on the grave of the dead
Adonis.” In this curious ceremony we get a survival from the very
lowest stratum of corn-god worship; the stratum where an actual human
victim is killed, and corn and other crops are sown above his body. Even
where the sowing itself no longer survives, the sepulchre remains as a
relic of the same antique ritual. Such sepulchres are everywhere common
at Easter, as are the cradles of the child-god at the feast of the
winter solstice. The Pietà is the final form of this mourning of the
corn-god by the holy women.
Passing on to the other aspects of Christ as corn-god and divine-human
victim, we see that he is doubly recognised as god and man, like all the
similar gods of early races. In the speeches put into his mouth by
his biographers, he constantly claims the Jewish god as his father.
Moreover, he is a king; and his kingly descent from his ancestor David
is insisted upon in the genealogies with some little persistence. He
is God incarnate; but also he is the King of the Jews, and the King of
Glory. Wise men come from the east to worship him, and bring gifts of
gold and myrrh and frankincense to the infant God in his manger cradle.
But he is further the Christ, the anointed of God; and, as we saw,
anointment is a common element with numerous other divine-human victims.
Once more, he is the King’s son; and he is the only begotten son, _the
dearly beloved son, who is slain as an expiation for the sins of the
people_. The heavens open, and a voice from them declares, “This is
my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” He is affiliated, like all
other such victims, on the older and earlier ethnical god, Jah-weh; and
though he is himself God, and one with the Father, _he is offered
up, himself to himself, in expiation of {384}the sin committed by men
against divine justice. All this would be familiar theology indeed to
the worshipper of Osiris, Adonis, and Attis._
_The common Hebrew offering was the paschal lamb; therefore Christ is
envisaged as the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. In
the paintings of the catacombs, it is as a lamb that the Saviour of
the world is oftenest represented._ As a lamb he raises another lamb,
Lazarus; as a lamb he turns the water into wine; as a lamb he strikes
the living springs from the rock on the spandrils of the sarcophagus of
Junius Bassus. But his birth in a manger is also significant: and his
vine and his dove are almost as frequent as his lamb in the catacombs.
The Gospel history represents the passion of Christ essentially as the
sacrifice of a temporary king, invested with all the familiar elements
of that early ritual. Christ enters Jerusalem in royal state, among
popular plaudits, like those which always accompany the temporary king,
and the Attis or Adonis. He is mounted on an ass, the royal beast of the
Semites. The people fling down branches of trees in his path, as they
always fling down parts of green trees before the gods of vegetation.
On Palm Sunday his churches are still decked with palm-branches or with
sprays of willow-catkin. Such rites with green things form an integral
part of all the old rituals of the tree-god or the corn-god, and of all
the modern European survivals in folk-lore--they are equally found in
the Dionysiac festival, and in the Jack-in-the-Green revels on English
fair-days. The connexion with trees is also well marked throughout the
Gospels; and the miracle of the barren fig-tree is specially mentioned
in close connexion with the entry into Jerusalem. The people as he
entered cried “Hosanna” to the son of David and the prophetic words
were supposed to be fulfilled, “Behold, thy king cometh unto thee,
meek, sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.”
The Christ goes as a willing victim to the cross; he does not
{385}seriously ask that the cup should pass from him. He foretells his
own death, and voluntarily submits to it But he is also bought with a
price--the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. Of all this, we had
forecasts in the Khond, the Mexican, and various other rituals.
Furthermore, there is a trial--a double trial, before the high priest,
and before Pilate. Such trials, we have seen, are common elements of the
mock-king’s degradation. Like all other similar victims, the Christ,
after being treated like a monarch, is reviled and spat upon, buffeted
and insulted. He is bound with cords, and carried before Pilate. The
procurator asks him, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” and the Christ
by implication admits the justice of the title. All the subsequent
episodes of the painful drama are already familiar to us. The sacred
victim is cruelly scourged that his tears may flow. As in other cases he
is crowned with flowers or with bark, in order to mark his position as
king of vegetation, so here he is crowned with a chaplet of thorns that
adds to his ignominy. The sacred blood must flow from the sacred
head. But still, he is clothed with purple and saluted with the words,
“Hail, King of the Jews!” in solemn irony. He is struck on the head
with a reed by the soldiers: yet even as they strike, they bow their
knees and worship him. They give him to drink wine, mingled with myrrh;
“but he received it not.” Then he is crucified at Golgotha, the
place of a skull, * on a cross, the old sacred emblem of so many
religions; it bears the inscription, “The King of the Jews,” by
order of the Procurator. After the death of the Christ he is mourned
over, like Adonis and Osiris, by the holy women, including his mother.
_I do not think I need point out in detail the many close resemblances
which exist between the Mother of the Gods and the Mother of God--the
Theotokos_.
* According to mediaeval legend, the skull was Adam’s, and
the sacred blood which fell upon it revived it. In
crucifixions, a skull is generally represented at the foot
of the cross.
The {386}thieves crucified with the Saviour have their legs broken, like
many other sacred victims; but the Christ himself has not a bone broken,
like the paschal lamb which was the Jewish substitute for the primitive
human victim. Thus both ideas on this subject, the earlier and the
later, seem to find an appropriate place in the history. Instead of
having his legs broken, however, the Christ has his side pierced; and
from it flows the mystic blood of the atonement, in which all Christians
are theoretically washed; this baptism of blood (a literal reality
in older cults) being already a familiar image at the date of the
Apocalypse, where the robes of the elect are washed white in the blood
of the lamb that was slain.
After the crucifixion, the Christ is taken down and buried. But, like
all other corn and wine gods, he _rises again from the dead on the third
day--this very period of three days being already a conventional one in
similar cases_. Every one of the surroundings recalls Osiris and Attis.
It is the women once more who see him first; and afterwards the men.
Finally, he ascends into heaven, to his Father, before the wondering
eyes of his disciples and his mother. In each item of this, there is
nothing with which we are not already familiar elsewhere.
I will not pursue the analogy further. To do so would be endless.
Indeed, I do not think there is an element in the Gospel story which
does not bear out the parallel here suggested. The slight incident of
the visit to Herod, for example, is exactly analogous to the visit of
the false Osiris in modern Egypt to the governor’s house, and the
visit of the temporary or mock king in so many other cases to the real
king’s palace. The episode where Herod and his men of war array
the Christ in a gorgeous robe is the equivalent of the episode of
the Mexican king arraying the god-victim in royal dress, and is also
paralleled in numerous other like dramas elsewhere. The women who
prepare spices and ointments for the body recall the Adonis rites;
Pilate washing his hands of the guilt of condemnation {387}recalls the
frequent episode of the slaughterers of the god laying the blame upon
others, or casting it on the knife, or crying out, “We bought you with
a price; we are guiltless.” Whoever will read carefully through the >
Gospel accounts, side by side with Mr. Frazer’s well-chosen collection
of mock-king narratives, will see for himself that endless other minor
traits crop up in the story which may be equated with numerous similar
incidents in the death and resurrection of the man-god elsewhere.
The very subjects of the parables are in themselves significant: the
lord of the vineyard who sends his son, whom the hirers slay; the
labourers who come at the eleventh hour: the sower and the good and bad
ground: the grain of mustard-seed: the leaven of the Pharisees: the seed
growing secretly: the sons in the vineyard. It will be found that almost
all of them turn on the key-note subjects of bread and wine, or at least
of seed-sowing.
By what precise stages the story of the Galilæan man-god arose and
fixed itself around the person of the real or mythical Jesus it would be
hard to say. Already in the epistles we may catch stray glimpses, in the
germ, of most of it. Already we notice strange hints and foreshadowings.
Probably the first Jewish disciples had arrived at the outline of the
existing story even before the Gentiles began to add their quotum. And
when we look at documents so overloaded with miracle and legend as the
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, we find it hard indeed to separate
any element of historical truth from the enormous accretion of myth and
legend. Still, I see no grave reason to doubt the general truth of the
idea that the Christian belief and practice arose first among Galilæan
Jews, and that from them it spread with comparative rapidity to the
people of Syria and Asia Minor. It even seems probable that one Saul or
Paul was really the person who first conceived the idea of preaching the
new religion throughout the empire, and especially in the great cities,
as a faith which might be embraced by both Jew and Gentile.
Certainly, {388}while the young cult contained most of the best features
of Judaism, viewed as a possible universal religion,--its monotheism,
its purity, its comparative freedom from vile and absurd legends of the
gods and their amours--it surpassed the elder faith in acceptability to
the world at large, and especially to the people of Syria and western
Asia. Every one of them could have said with perfect truth, “Nothing
is changed; there is but one god more to worship.”
As the church spread, the legend grew apace. To the early account of the
death and resurrection of the King of the Jews, later narrators added
the story of his miraculous birth from a virgin mother, who conceived
directly from the spirit of God wafted down upon her. The wide extent
and the origin of this belief about the conception of gods and heroes
has been fully examined by Mr. Sidney Hartland in his admirable study of
the Legend of Perseus. The new believers further provided their divine
leader with a royal genealogy from David downward, and made him by a
tolerably circuitous argument be born at Bethlehem, according to the
supposed prophecy--though if there ever was really a Jesus at all, it
would seem that the one fact of which we could feel tolerably sure about
him, was the fact of his being a man of Nazareth. Later writers put into
his mouth a high moral teaching for its time, somewhat anticipated by
Hillel and other rabbis, and perhaps in part of Buddhist origin; they
also made him announce for himself that divine _rôle_ of mediator and
atoner which they themselves claimed for the Saviour of Mankind. He
calls himself the vine, the bread of life, the good shepherd; he is
called “_the lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world_,”
by John the Baptist, an enthusiast whose fame has attracted him at last
into the Christian legend. Very early, the old rite of water-lustration
or baptism, adopted by John, was employed as one of the chief Christian
ceremonies, the ceremony of initiation, which replaced with advantage
the bloody and dangerous Jewish circumcision.
This {389}allowed for far freer proselytism than Judaism could ever
expect; and though no doubt at first the Christians regarded themselves
as a sect of the Jews, and though they always adopted entire the Jewish
sacred books and the Jewish God, with all the Jewish history,
cosmogony, and mythology, yet the new religion was from the beginning a
cosmopolitan one, and preached the word unto all nations. Such a faith,
coming at such a moment, and telling men precisely what they were ready
to believe, was certain beforehand of pretty general acceptance. When
Constantine made Christianity the official creed of the empire, it is
clear that he did but put an official stamp of approval on a revolution
that had long been growing more and more inevitable.
In one word, Christianity triumphed, because it united in itself all the
most vital elements of all the religions then current in the world, with
little that was local, national, or distasteful; and it added to them
all a high ethical note and a social doctrine of human brotherhood
especially suited to an age of unification and systematic government.
Occasionally, even in the Gospels themselves, we get strange passing
echoes of a mysterious identification of the Christ with the ancient
Hebrew ethnical god, not as the Lord of the Universe alone, but vaguely
remembered as the sacred stone of the ark, the Rock of Israel. “The
stone which the builders rejected, that one has become the head of the
corner.” “Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but
on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” And in a
speech put into the mouth of Christ, he says to Peter, “Rock thou art,
and on this Rock will I build my assembly.” *
* I can honestly assure the polemical Protestant divine
that I am well aware of the difference in gender in this
passage--and of its utter unimportance. The name Peter could
not well be made feminine to suit a particular play upon
words or to anticipate the objections of a particular set of
trivial word-twisters.
Sometimes, too, in the epistles the two ideas of the corn-god and
the foundation stone-god are worked upon alternately. {390}“I have
planted; Apollos watered.” “Ye are God’s husbandry; ye are God’s
building.” “I have laid the foundation, and another builds thereon.
Let every man take care how he builds upon it. For other foundation can
no man lay than that which is laid, which is the Christ, Jesus.”
Or again, “You are built upon the foundation of the apostles and
prophets, Jesus, the Christ, being himself the chief corner stone.”
Whoever rereads the epistles by the light of the analogies suggested in
this book will find that they positively teem with similar references
to the familiar theology of the various slain man-gods, which must have
been known to every one along the shores of the Mediterranean.
The church which was built upon this rock--and that Rock was Christ--has
shown its continuity with earlier religions in a thousand ways and by
a thousand analogies. Solar and astrological elements have been freely
admitted, side by side with those which recall the corn and wine gods.
The chief festivals still cling to the solar feasts of the equinoxes
and the solstices. Thus every year the church celebrates in mimicry
the death and resurrection of the Christ, as the Mediterranean peoples
celebrated the death and resurrection of the Attis, the Adonis, the
Dionysus, the Osiris. It celebrates the feast at the usual time for most
such festivals, the spring equinox. More than that, it chooses for the
actual day of the resurrection, commonly called in English Easter,
and in the Latin dialects the Paschal feast (or Pâques), a trebly
astrological date. The festival must be as near as possible to the
spring equinox; but it must be after a full moon, and it must be on the
day sacred to the sun. Before the feast, a long fast takes place, at
the close of which the Christ is slain in effigy, and solemnly laid in
a mimic sepulchre. Good Friday is the anniversary of his piacular death,
and the special day of the annual mourning, as for Adonis and Attis. _On
Easter Sunday, he rises again from the dead, and every good Catholic is
bound to communicate--to eat the body of his slaughtered {391}god on the
annual spring festival of reviving vegetation._ Comparison of the
Holy Week ceremonies at Rome with the other annual festivals, from the
Mexican corn-feast and the Potraj rite of India to Attis and Adonis,
will be found extremely enlightening--I mean, of course, the ceremonies
as they were when the Pope, the Priest-King, the representative of the
annual Attis at Pessinus, officiated publicly in the Sistine Chapel,
with paschal music known as Lamentations, and elevation of the Host amid
the blare of trumpets. On this subject, I limit myself to the barest
hint. Whoever chooses to follow out so pregnant a clue will find it lead
him into curious analogies and almost incredible survivals.
Similarly, the birth of Christ is celebrated at the winter solstice,
the well-known date for so many earlier ceremonies of the gods of
vegetation. Then the infant god lies unconscious in his cradle. Whoever
has read Mr. Frazer’s great work will understand the connexion of the
holly and the mistletoe, and the Christmas tree, with this second great
festival of Christendom, very important in the Teutonic north, though
far inferior in the south to the spring-tide feast, when the god
is slain and eaten of necessity. I limit myself to saying that the
Christmas rites are all of them rites of the birth of the corn-god.
Even the Christian cross, it is now known, was not employed as a symbol
of the faith before the days of Constantine, and was borrowed from the
solar wheel of the Gaulish sun-god-worshippers who formed the mass of
the successful emperor’s legionaries.
We are now, therefore, in a very different position for understanding
the causes which led to the rise and development of the Christian
religion from that which we occupied at the outset of our enquiry. We
had then to accept crudely the bare fact that about the first century of
our era a certain cult of a Divine Man, Jesus, arose among a fraction of
the maritime people of Lower Syria. That fact as we at first received it
stood isolated and unrelated {392}in its naked singularity. We can now
see that it was but one more example of a universal god-making tendency
in human nature, high or low; and in our last chapter we shall find that
this universal tendency to worship the dead has ever since persisted
as fully as ever, and is in fact the central element in the entire
religious instinct of humanity.
The main emotional chord upon which Christianity played in its early
days--and indeed the main chord upon which it still plays--is just,
I believe, the universal feeling in favour of the deification or
beatification of the dead, with the desire for immortality on the part
of the individual believer himself in person. Like all other
religions, but even more than any other religion at that time in vogue,
Christianity appealed to these two allied and deep-seated longings of
human nature. It appealed on the one hand to the unselfish emotions and
affections of mankind by promising a close, bodily, personal, and
speedy reassociation of the living believer with his dead relatives and
friends. It appealed on the other hand to the selfish wishes and desires
of each, by holding forth to every man the sure and certain hope of
a glorious resurrection. Like all other creeds, but beyond all other
creeds, it was the religion of immortality, of the dead revived, of the
new world: in an age of doubt, of scepticism, of the decay of faith, it
gave fresh life and a totally new basis to the old beliefs--perhaps the
old delusions--of the religious nature.
A necessary consequence of the universal ferment and intermixture of
pantheons everywhere during the early days of the Roman empire was a
certain amount of floating scepticism about the gods as a whole, which
reaches its highest point in the mocking humour of Lucian, or still
earlier in the Epicurean atheism of Lucretius and of Roman philosophy
in general. But while this nascent scepticism was very real and very
widespread, it affected rather current beliefs as to the personality
and history of the various gods than the {393}underlying conception
of godhead in the abstract. Even those who laughed and those who
disbelieved, retained at bottom many superstitions and supernatural
ideas. Their scepticism was due, not like that of our own time to
fundamental criticism of the very notion of the supernatural, but to
the obvious inadequacy of existing gods to satisfy the requirements of
educated cosmopolitans. The deities of the time were too coarse, too
childish, too gross for their worshippers. The common philosophic
attitude of cultivated Rome and cultivated Alexandria might be compared
to some extent to that of our own Unitarians, who are not indeed hostile
to the conception of theology in its own nature, but who demur to the
most miraculous and supernatural part of the popular doctrine.
With the mass, however, the religious unrest showed itself mainly, as
it always shows itself at such critical moments, in a general habit of
running after new and strange religions, from some one or other of which
the anxious enquirer hopes to obtain some divine answer to his doubts
and difficulties. When old faiths decay, there is room for new ones. As
might have been expected, this tendency was most clearly shown in the
great cosmopolitan trading towns, where men of many nations rubbed
shoulders together, and where outlandish cults of various sorts had
their temples and their adherents. Especially was this the case at Rome,
Alexandria, and Antioch, the capitals respectively of the Roman, the
Hellenic, and the Semitic worlds. In the Græco-Egyptian metropolis, the
worship of Serapis, a composite deity of hybrid origin, grew gradually
into the principal cult of the teeming city. At Antioch, Hellenic
deities were ousting the Baalim. At Rome, the worship of Isis, of
Jahweh, of Syrian and other remoter Eastern gods was carried on by an
ever-increasing body of the foreign, native, and servile population.
These were the places where Christianity spread. The men of the villages
were long, as the world still quaintly phrases it, “pagans.”
The {394}strange cults which united in thus gradually crushing out the
old local and national pantheons throughout the Roman world, had for
the most part two marked attributes in common: they were more or less
mystical; and they tended more or less in the direction of monotheism.
Solar myth, syncretism, the esoteric priestly interpretations, and
the general diffusion of Greek philosophic notions, mixed with subtler
oriental and Zoroastrian ideas, had all promoted the rise and growth of
the mystic element: while a vague monotheistic movement had long been
apparent in the higher thought of Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the East. In
the resulting conflict and intermixture of ideas, Judaism, as one of
the most mystical and monotheistic of religions, would have stood a good
chance of becoming the faith of the world, had it not been for the fatal
weight of its strict and obstinate national character. Even as it was,
Jewish communities were scattered through all the commercial towns of
the Græco-Roman world; a Jewish colony strongly influenced Alexandria;
and Jewish teachers made proselytes in Rome in the very bosom of the
imperial household.
The ferment which thus existed by the Orontes, the Nile, and the
Tiber must also have extended in a somewhat less degree to all the
cosmopolitan seaports and trading towns of the great and heterogeneous
military empire. What was true of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch,
was true in part, we have every reason to believe, of Damascus, of
Byzantium, of Sinope, of Ephesus: of Rhodes, of Cyrene, of Athens, of
Carthage; perhaps even of Massilia, of Gades, of Burdigala, of Lugdunum.
All around the eastern Mediterranean at least, new faiths were
seething, new ideas were brewing, new mysticisms were being evolved,
new superstitions were arising, Phoenix-like, out of the dying embers
of decaying creeds. Setting aside mere exotic or hybrid cults, like the
worship of Serapis at Alexandria and of Isis at Rome, or mere abortive
attempts like the short-lived worship of Antinous in Egypt, {395}we may
say that three of these new religions appealed strongly to the wants
and desires of the time: and those three were Mithraism, Gnosticism, and
Christianity.
All were alike somewhat eclectic in character; and all could lay claim
to a certain cosmopolitan and catholic spirit unknown to the cults of
the old national pantheons. All came to the Greek and Roman world from
the mystic east, the land of the rising sun, whose magic is felt even at
the present day by the votaries of Theosophy and of Esoteric Buddhism.
Which of the three was to conquer in the end might have seemed at one
time extremely doubtful: nor indeed do I believe that the ultimate
triumph of Christianity, the least imposing of the three, inevitable as
it at last became, was by any means at first a foregone conclusion.
The religion of Jesus probably owed quite as much to what we call
chance--that is to say, to the play of purely personal and casual
circumstances--as to its own essential internal characteristics. If
Constantine or any other shrewd military chief had happened to adopt the
symbols of Mithra or Abraxas instead of the name of Christ, it is quite
conceivable that all the civilised world might now be adoring the mystic
divinity of the three hundred and sixty-five emanations, as sedulously
as it actually adores the final theological outcome of the old Hebrew
Jahweh. But there were certain real advantages as well, which told,
I believe, in the very nature of things, in favour of the Christ
as against the coinage of Basilides or the far-eastern sun-god.
Constantine, in other words, chose his religion wisely. It was the cult
exactly adapted to the times: above all others, during the two centuries
or so that had passed since its first beginning (for we must place the
real evolution of the Christian system considerably later than the life
or death of Jesus himself) it had shown itself capable of thoroughly
engaging on its own side the profoundest interests and emotions of the
religious nature.
We must remember, too, that in all religious crises, while {396}faith in
the actual gods and creeds declines rapidly, no corresponding weakening
occurs in the underlying sentiments on which all religions ultimately
base themselves. Hence the apparent paradox that periods of doubt are
also almost always periods of intense credulity as well. The human mind,
cast free from the moorings which have long sufficed for it, drifts
about restlessly in search of some new haven in which it may take refuge
from the terrors of uncertainty and infidelity. And its new faith is
always but a fresh form of the old one. A god or gods, prayer, praise,
and sacraments, are essential elements. More especially is it the case
that when trust in the great gods begins to fail, a blind groping after
necromancy, spiritualism, and ghost-lore in general takes its place for
the moment. We have seen this tendency fully exemplified in our own time
by the spiritualists and others: nor was it less marked in the tempest
of conflicting ideas which broke over the Roman world from the age of
the Antonines to the fall of the empire. The fact is, the average man
cares but little, after all, for his gods and his goddesses, viewed as
individuals. They are but an outlet for his own emotions. He appeals
to them for help, as long as he continues to believe in their effective
helpfulness: he is ready to cajole them with offerings of blood or to
flatter them with homage of praise and prayer, as long as he expects to
gain some present or future benefit, bodily or spiritual, in return for
his assiduous adulation. But as soon as his faith in their existence and
power begins to break down, he puts up with the loss of their
godhead, so far as they themselves are concerned, without one qualm of
disappointment or inconvenience. It is something far other than that
that touches him in religion: it is his hopes for his own eternal
welfare, and the welfare after death of those that love him.
Hence, a decline of faith in the great gods is immediately followed by a
recrudescence of the most barbaric and original element in religion--the
cult of the ghost or spirit, {397}necromancy, the direct worship of the
dead or intercourse with the dead: a habit of enquiry into the positive
chances of human immortality. This necromantic spirit is well marked
in Gnostic remains, and in the fragmentary magical literature of the
decadent Græco-Roman world. It is precisely the same tendency which
produces spiritualism in our own time: and it is due to the desire to
find some new and experimental basis for the common human belief in the
immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body.
And here we get the clue to the serious change which Christianity
wrought in the religious feeling of the western world: a change whose
importance and whose retrograde nature has never yet, I believe, been
fully recognised. For Christianity, while from one point of view, as a
monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic religion, an immense advance upon the
aesthetic paganism of Greece and Italy, was from another point of view,
as a religion of resurrection rather than a religion of immortality, a
step backward for all Western Europe.
Even among the Jews themselves, however, the new cult must have come
with all the force of an “aid to faith” in a sceptical generation.
Abroad, among the Jewish Hellenists, Greek philosophy must have
undermined much of the fanatical and patriotic enthusiasm for Jahweh
which had grown stronger and ever stronger in Judæa itself through
the days of the Maccabees and the Asmonæan princes. Scraps of vague
Platonic theorising on the nature of the Divine were taking among these
exiles the place of the firm old dogmatic belief in the Rock of Israel.
At home, the Hellenising tendencies of the house of Herod, and the
importance in Jerusalem of the Sadducees “who say there is no
resurrection,” were striking at the very roots of the hope and faith
that pious Jews most tenderly cherished. Instead of Israel converting
the world, the world seemed likely to convert Israel. Swamped in the
great absorbing and assimilating empire, Judah {398}might follow in the
way of Ephraim. And Israel’s work in the world might thus be undone,
or rather stultified for ever.
Just at this very moment, when all faiths were tottering visibly to
their fall, a tiny band of obscure Galilæan peasants, who perhaps had
followed a wild local enthusiast from their native hills up to turbulent
Jerusalem, may have been seized with a delusion neither unnatural nor
unaccustomed under their peculiar circumstances; but which nevertheless
has sufficed to turn or at least to modify profoundly the entire
subsequent course of the world’s history. Their leader, if we may
trust the universal tradition of the sect, as laid down long after in
their legendary Gospels, was crucified at Jerusalem under C. Pontius
Pilatus. If any fact upon earth about Jesus is true, besides the fact
of his residence at Nazareth, it is this fact of the crucifixion, which
derives verisimilitude from being always closely connected with the
name of that particular Roman official. But three days after, says the
legend, the body of Jesus could not be found in the sepulchre where his
friends had laid him: and a rumour gradually’ gained ground that he had
risen from the dead, and had been seen abroad by the women who mourned
him and by various of his disciples. In short, what was universally
believed about all other and elder human gods, was specifically asserted
afresh in a newer case about the man Christ Jesus. The idea fitted in
with the needs of the time, and the doctrine of the Resurrection of
Jesus the Christ became the corner-stone of the new-born Christian
religion.
Nothing can be clearer than the fact admitted on all hands, that this
event formed the central point of the Apostles’ preaching. It was the
Resurrection of Jesus, regarded as an earnest of general resurrection
for all his followers, that they most insisted upon in their words and
writings. It was the resurrection that converted the world of western
Europe. “Your faith is flagging,” said the early Christians in
effect to their pagan fellows: “your gods are {399}half-dead; your
ideas about your own future, and the present state of your departed
friends, are most vague and shadowy. In opposition to all this, we
offer you a sure and certain hope; we tell you a tale of real life, and
recent; we preach a god of the familiar pattern, yet very close to you;
we present you with a specimen of actual resurrection. We bring you
good tidings of Jesus as the Messiah, and him crucified: to the Jews, a
stumbling-block; to the Greeks, foolishness; but to such as are saved,
a plain evidence of the power of the God of Israel. Accept our word: let
your dead sleep in Christ in our catacombs, as once they slept in Osiris
at Abydos, or rested upon him that rests at Philæ.” “If Christ be
not risen,” says one of the earliest Christian writers in a passionate
peroration, “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is vain also:
but as it is, Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the first
fruits of them that slept.” “Else what shall they do,” he goes on,
touching to the quick that ingrained human desire for communion with the
departed, “what shall they do which are baptised for the dead, if the
dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptised for the dead?” These,
in short, apart from the elements common to all creeds, are the three
great motors of primitive Christianity: one dogmatic, the resurrection
of Jesus: one selfish, the salvation of the individual soul: one
altruistic, the desire for reunion with the dead among one’s beloved.
Syria and Egypt could easily accept the new doctrine. It involved for
them no serious change of front, no wide departure from the ideas and
ceremonies which always formed their rounded concept of human existence.
There is a representation of the resurrection of Osiris in the little
temple on the roof at Denderah which might almost pass for a Christian
illustration of the resurrection of Jesus. To Syrian and Egyptian, the
resurrection indeed was but a special modern instance of a well-known
fact; a fresh basis of evidence upon which to plant firmly the tottering
edifice {400}of their old convictions.’ In its beginnings, in short,
Christianity was essentially an oriental religion; it spread fastest
in the eastern Mediterranean basin, where Judaism was already well
established: at Rome, it seems to have attracted chiefly the oriental
population. And it is a significant fact that its official adoption as
the public religion of the Roman state was the act of the same prince
who deliberately shifted the seat of his government from the Tiber to
the Bosphorus, and largely transformed the character of the empire from
a Latin to a Græco-Asiatic type. All the new religions which struggled
together for the mastery of the world were oriental in origin: the
triumph of Christianity was but a single episode in the general triumph
of aggressive orientalism over the occidental element in the Roman
system.
Egypt in particular, I believe, had far more to do with the dogmatic
shaping of early Christianity, and the settlement of Christian symbolism
and Christian mysticism, than is generally admitted by the official
historians of the primitive church. There, where the idea of
resurrection was already so universal, and where every man desired to be
“justified by Osiris,” Christianity soon made an easy conquest of a
people on whose faith it exerted so little change. And Egypt easily made
its influence felt on the plastic young creed. It is allowed that the
doctrine of the Trinity took shape among the Triad-worshippers on the
banks of the Nile, and that the scarcely less important doctrine of the
Logos was borrowed from the philosophy of Alexandrian Jews. Nobody can
look at the figures of Isis and the infant Horus in any Egyptian museum
without being at once struck by the obvious foreshadowing of the Coptic
and Byzantine Madonna and Child. The mystery that sprang up about the
new doctrines; the strange syncretic union of Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost into a single Trinity; the miraculous conception by the Theotokos
or mother of God--a clear variant in one aspect on the older idea of
Hathor; and the antenatal existence of Christ {401}in heaven before
his incarnation; all are thoroughly Egyptian in character, with a faint
superadded dash of Alexandrian Jewish Hellenism. The love of symbols
which the young church so early exhibits in the catacombs and elsewhere
smacks equally of Ptolemaic reminiscences of Thebes and Memphis. The
mummy-form of Lazarus; the fish that makes such a clever alphabetic
ideogram for the name and titles of Jesus; the dove that symbolises the
Holy Ghost; the animal types of the four evangelists--all these are in
large part Egyptian echoes, resonant of the same spirit which produced
the hieroglyphics and the symbolism of the great Nilotic temples. At the
same time it must be remembered that sacred fish were common in Syria,
and that similar identifications of gods with animals have met us at
every turn, in our earlier investigation.
Nay, more, the very details themselves of Christian symbolism often go
back to early Egyptian models. The central Christian emblem of all, the
cross, is holy all the world over: it is the sacred tree: and each race
has adapted it to its own preconceived ideas and symbols. But in Coptic
Christianity it has obvious affinities with the _crux ansata_. In the
Coptic room of the New Museum at Ghizeh is an early Christian monument
with a Greek uncial inscription, on which is represented a cross of four
equal limbs with expanded flanges, having a crux ansata inserted in all
its four interstices. At the Coptic church of Abu Sirgeh at Old Cairo
occurs a similar cross, also with suggestions of Tau-like origin, but
with other equal-limbed crosses substituted for the _cruces ansatae_ in
the corners. * How far the Egyptian Christians thus merely transferred
their old ideas to the new faith may be gathered from a single curious
example. In Mr. Loftie’s collection of sacred beetles is a scarabæus
{402}containing a representation of the crucifixion, with two palm
branches: and other scarabs have Christian crosses, “some of them,”
says Mr. Loftie, “very unmistakable.” If we remember how extremely
sacred the scarab was held in the Egyptian religion, and also that it
was regarded as the symbol of the resurrection, we cannot possibly miss
the importance of this implication. Indeed, the Alexandrian Father,
Epiphanius, speaks of Christ as “the scarabæus of God,” a phrase
which may be still better understood if I add that in the treatise on
hieroglyphs known under the name of Horapollo a scarabæus is said to
denote “an only-begotten.” Thus “the lamb of God” in the
tongue of Israel becomes “the scarabæus of God” in the mouth of an
Egyptian speaker. To put it shortly, I believe we may say with truth,
in a sense far other than that intended by either prophet or evangelist,
“Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
* Count Goblet d’Alviella’s interesting work on The
Migration of Symbols well illustrates this common syncretism
and interchangeability of symbolic signs, which runs
parallel with the syncretism of gods and religions.
In the west, however, the results of the spread of Christianity were far
more revolutionary. Indeed, I do not think the cult of Jesus could ever
have spread at all in Rome had it not been for the large extent to which
the city was peopled in later times by Syrians and Africans. And if
Christianity had not spread in Rome, it could never have gained a
foothold at all in the Aryan world: for it is not at bottom an Aryan
religion in tone and feeling: it has only become possible among Aryan
peoples by undergoing at last a considerable change of spirit, though
not largely of form, in its westward progress. This change is indicated
by the first great schism, which severed the Latin from the Greek
communion.
Foremost among the changes which Christianity involved in Italy and
the rest of western Europe was the retrograde change from the belief
in immortality and the immateriality of the soul, with cremation as its
practical outcome, to the belief in the resurrection of the body, with
a return to the disused and discredited practice of burial as its
normal correlative. The catacombs were the necessary {403}result of this
backward movement; and with the catacombs came in the possibility of
relic-worship, martyr-worship, and the adoration of saints and their
corpses. I shall trace out in my next chapter the remoter effects of
this curious revival of the prime element in religion--the cult of the
dead--in greater detail: it must suffice here to point out briefly that
it resulted as a logical effect from the belief in the resurrection
of Christ, and the consequent restoration of the practice of burial.
Moreover, to polytheists, this habit gave a practical opening for the
cult of many deities in the midst of nominal monotheism, which the
Italians and sundry other essentially polytheistic peoples were not slow
to seize upon. Here again the difference between the more monotheistic
and syncretic east, which puts a ban upon graven images, and the more
polytheistic and separating west, which freely admits the employment of
sculpture, is not a little significant. It is true that theoretically
the adoration paid to saints and martyrs is never regarded as real
worship: but I need hardly say that technical distinctions like
these are always a mere part of the artificial theology of
scholastic priesthoods, and may be as safely disregarded by the broad
anthropological enquirer as may all the other fanciful lumber of
metaphysical Brahmans and theologians everywhere. The genuine facts of
religion are the facts and rites of the popular cult, which remain in
each race for long periods together essentially uniform.
Thus we early get two main forms of Christianity, both official and
popular: one eastern--Greek, Coptic, Syrian; more mystical in type, more
symbolic, more philosophic, more monotheistic: the other western--Latin,
Celtic, Spanish; more Aryan in type, more practical, more material, more
polytheistic. _And these at a later time are reinforced by a third or
northern form,--the Teutonic and Protestant; in which ethical ideas
preponderate over religious, and the worship of the Book in its most
literal and often foolish interpretation supersedes the earlier worship
of Madonna, saints, pictures, statues, and emblems._
At {404}the period when Christianity first begins to emerge from
the primitive obscurity of its formative nisus, however, we find it
practically compounded of the following elements--which represent _the
common union of a younger god offered up to an older one with whom he is
identified_.
First of all, as the implied basis, taken for granted in all the early
Hebrew scriptures, there is current Judaism, in the form that Judaism
had gradually assumed in the fourth, third, and second centuries before
the Christian era. This includes as its main principle the cult of the
one god Jahweh, now no longer largely thought of under that personal
name, or as a strictly ethnic deity, but rather envisaged as the Lord
God who dwells in heaven, very much as Christians of to-day still
envisage him. It includes also an undercurrent of belief in a heavenly
hierarchy of angels and archangels, the court of the Lord (modifications
of an earlier astrological conception, the Host of Heaven), and in a
principle of evil, Satan or the devil, dwelling in hell, and similarly
surrounded by a crowd of minor or assistant demons. Further, it accepts
implicitly from earlier Judaism the resurrection of the dead, the
judgment of the good and the wicked, the doctrine of future rewards and
punishments (perhaps in its fullest shape a Hellenistic importation from
Egypt, though also commonly found in most spontaneous religions), and
many other tenets of the current Jewish belief. In short, the very
earliest Christians, being probably for the most part Jews, Galilæans,
and proselytes, or else Syrians and Africans of Judaising tendencies,
did not attempt to get rid of all their preconceived religious opinions
when they became Christians, but merely superadded to these as a new
item the special cult of the deified Jesus.
On the other hand, as the Gospel spread to the Gentiles, it was not
thought necessary to burden the fresh converts with the whole minute
ceremonial of Judaism, and especially with the difficult and unpleasant
initiatory rite of circumcision. {405}A mere symbolical lustration,
known as baptism, was all that was demanded of new adherents to the
faith, with abstinence from any participation in “heathen” sacrifices
or functions. To this extent the old exclusiveness of Jahweh-worship,
the cult of the jealous God, was still allowed to assert itself. And the
general authority of the Hebrew scriptures, especially as a historical
account of the development of Judaism, from which Christianity sprang,
was more or less fully admitted, at first by implication or quotation
alone, but afterwards by the deliberate and avowed voice of the whole
Christian assembly. The translation of this mixed mass of historical
documents, early cosmogonies, ill-reported and Jeho-vised Jewish
traditions, misinterpreted poems, and conscious forgeries, in the Latin
version known as the Vulgate, had the effect of endowing Europe for many
centuries with a false body of ancient history, which must have largely
retarded the development of the race up to our own time, and whose
evil effects have hardly yet passed away among the more ignorant and
conservative Bibliolatrous classes of modern society.
Superimposed upon this substratum of current Judaism with its worship
of Jahweh came the distinctive Jesus-cult, the worship of the particular
dead Galilæan peasant. This element was superadded to the cult of the
Father, the great god who had slowly and imperceptibly developed out of
the sacred stone that the sons of Israel were believed to have brought
up with them from the land of Egypt. But how, in a religion pretending
to be monotheistic, were these two distinct cults of two such diverse
gods to be reconciled or to be explained away? By the familiar doctrine
of the incarnation, and the belief in the human god who is sacrificed,
himself to himself, as a piacular offering. Jewish tradition and subtler
Egyptian mysticism sufficed to smooth over the apparent anomaly. The
Jews looked forward to a mysterious deliverer, a new Moses, the Messiah,
who was to fulfil the destiny of Israel by uniting all nations under the
sceptre of David, and by {406}bringing the Gentiles to the feet of the
God of Israel. Jesus, said the Christians, had proclaimed himself that
very Messiah, the Christ of God; he had often alluded to the great
Hebrew deity as his father; he had laid claim to the worship of the Lord
of heaven. Further than this, perhaps, the unaided Jewish intelligence
would hardly have gone: it would have been satisfied with assigning to
the slain man-god Jesus a secondary place, as the only begotten Son
of God, who gave himself up as a willing victim--a position perhaps
scarcely more important than that which Mohammad holds in the system
of Islam. Such, it seems to me, is on the whole the conception which
permeates the synoptic Gospels, representing the ideas of Syrian
Christendom. But here the acute Græco-Egyptian mind came in with its
nice distinctions and its mystical identifications. There was but one
god, indeed; yet that god was at least twofold (to go no further for
the present). He had two persons, the Father and the Son: and the Second
Person, identified with the Alexandrian conception of the Logos, though
inferior to the Father as touching his manhood, was equal to the Father
as touching his godhead--after the precise fashion we saw so common in
describing the relations of Osiris and Horus, and the identification
of the Attis or Adonis victim with the earlier and older god he
represented. “I and my Father are one,” says the Christ of the
Fourth Gospel, the embodiment and incarnation of the Alexandrian Logos.
And in the very forefront of that manifesto of Neo-Platonic Christianity
comes the dogmatic assertion, “In the beginning was the Logos: and the
Logos dwelt with God: and the Logos _was_ God.”
Even so the basis of the new creed is still incomplete. The Father and
Son give the whole of the compound deity as the popular mind, everywhere
and always, has commonly apprehended it. But the scholastic and
theological intelligence needed a Third Person to complete the Trinity
which to all mankind, as especially to orientals, is the {407}only
perfect and thoroughly rounded figure. In later days, no doubt, the
Madonna would have been chosen to fill up the blank, and, on the analogy
of Isis, would have filled it most efficiently. As a matter of fact, in
the creed of Christendom as the Catholic people know it, the Madonna
is really one of the most important personages. But in those early
formative times, the cult of the Theotokos had hardly yet assumed its
full importance: perhaps, indeed, the Jewish believers would have been
shocked at the bare notion of the worship of a woman, the readmission of
an Astarte, a Queen of Heaven, into the faith of Israel. Another object
of adoration had therefore to be found. It was discovered in that vague
essence, the _Holy Ghost, or Divine Wisdom, whose gradual development
and dissociation from God himself is one of the most curious chapters
in all the history of artificial god-making_. The “spirit of Jahweh”
had frequently been mentioned in Hebrew writings; and with so invisible
and unapproachable a deity as the Jewish God, was often made to do duty
as a messenger or intermediary where the personal presence of Jahweh
himself would have been felt to contravene the first necessities of
incorporeal divinity. It was the “spirit of Jahweh” that came
upon the prophets: it was the “wisdom of Jahweh” that the poets
described, and that grew at last to be detached from the personality of
God, and alluded to almost as a living individual. In the early church,
this “spirit of God,” this “holy spirit,” was supposed to
be poured forth upon the heads of believers: it descended upon Jesus
himself in the visible form of a dove from heaven, and upon the
disciples at Pentecost as tongues of fire. _Gradually, the conception
of a personal Holy Ghost took form and definiteness: an Alexandrian monk
insisted on the necessity for a Triad of gods who were yet one God: and
by the time the first creeds of the nascent church were committed to
writing, the Spirit had come to rank with the Father and the Son as the
Third Person in the ever-blessed Trinity._
By {408}this time, too, it is pretty clear that the original manhood of
Jesus had got merged in the idea of his eternal godhead; he was regarded
as the Logos, come down from heaven, where he had existed before all
worlds, and incarnate by the Holy Ghost in the Virgin Mary. The other
articles of the Christian faith clustered gradually round these
prime elements: the myth gathered force; the mysticism increased;
the secondary divine beings or saints grew vastly in numbers; and the
element of Judaism disappeared piecemeal, while a new polytheism and a
new sacerdotalism took root apace in the Aryan world. I shall strive to
show, however, in my concluding chapters, how even to the very end the
worship of the dead is still the central force in modern Christianity:
how religion, whatever its form, can never wander far from that
fundamental reality: and how, whenever by force of circumstances
the gods become too remote from human life, so that the doctrine of
resurrection or personal immortality is endangered for a time, and
reunion with relations in the other world becomes doubtful or insecure,
a reaction is sure to set in which takes things back once more to these
fundamental concepts, the most persistent and perpetually recurrent
element in all religious thinking.