d a saint, a man of overwhelming personal force, to this
cruel anarchist, relentless, half-mad fanatic and his theological
doctrines we owe the preservation and power of the Christian Church. At
first the Christians were the miserable offscourings of society, slaves,
criminals, and lunatics. They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened
themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the
parasites they were. A series of political catastrophes, a popular
uprising against the rotten emperors of decadent Rome, and the wide
growth of the socialist idea--these things and an unscrupulous man,
Constantine the Great, put the Christians firmly in the saddle. And soon
came cataracts of blood. If the tales of the imperial persecutions are
true, then hath Christianity been revenged a million fold; where her
skirt has trailed there has been the cruel stain of slaughter. It must
not be forgotten, too, that immorality of the grossest sort was promised
the deluded sectarians, compared with which the Mahometan paradise is
spiritual. And the end of the world was predicted at the end of every
century, and finally relegated to the millennial celebration of
Christianity's birth. When, in 1000 A.D., this catastrophe did
not occur, the faith received its first great shock.

He summoned to his memory a cloud of witnesses, all contradictory.
Josephus was barred. Philo Judaeus, who was living near the centre of
things, an observer on the scent of the spiritual, a man acquainted with
the writings of Rabbi Hillel, and the father of Neoplatonism--never
mentions Jesus, nor does he speak of any religious uprising in Judea.
The passage in Virgil, which has through the doubtful testimony of
monkish writers been construed into a prophecy of a forthcoming Messiah,
Hyzlo, who was a scholar, knew to have been addressed to a son of
Virgil's intimate friend. Tacitus, too, has been interpolated. Seneca's
ideal man is not Jesus, for Jesus is Osiris, Horus, Krishna, Mithra,
Hercules, Adonis,--think of this beautiful young god's death!--Buddha.
Such a mock trial and death could not have taken place under the Roman
or Jewish laws. The sacraments derive from the Greeks, from the
Indians--the mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, from the _Haoma_ sacrifice
of the Persians, originally Brahmanic. The Trinity, was it not a relic
of that ineradicable desire for polytheism implanted in the human bosom?
Was the crucifixion but a memory of those darker cults and blo