Madness, and a watching demon that whispered of substance, and
sought to guide his wanderings in the night. Hodder clung to the shell
of reality, to the tiny panorama of the visible and the finite, to the
infinitesimal gropings that lay recorded before him on the printed page.
Let him examine these first, let him discover--despite the price--what
warrant the mind of man (the only light now vouchsafed to him in his
darkness) gave him to speculate and to hope concerning the existence of
a higher, truer Reality than that which now tossed and wounded him. It
were better to know.

Scarcely had the body been lifted from the tree than the disputes
commenced, the adulterations crept in. The spontaneity, the fire and
zeal of the self-sacrificing itinerant preachers gave place to the
paralyzing logic then pervading the Roman Empire, and which had sent
its curse down the ages to the modern sermon; the geometrical rules of
Euclid were made to solve the secrets of the universe. The simple faith
of the cross which had inspired the martyr along the bloody way from
Ephesus to the Circus at Rome was formalized by degrees into philosophy:
the faith of future ages was settled by compromises, by manipulation,
by bribery in Councils of the Church which resembled modern political
conventions, and in which pagan Emperors did not hesitate to exert their
influence over the metaphysical bishops of the factions. Recriminations,
executions, murders--so the chronicles ran.

The prophet, the idealist disappeared, the priest with his rites and
ceremonies and sacrifices, his power to save and damn, was once more in
possession of the world.

The Son of Man was degraded into an infant in his mother's arms. An
unhealthy, degenerating asceticism, drawn from pagan sources, began with
the monks and anchorites of Egypt and culminated in the spectacle of
Simeon's pillar. The mysteries of Eleusis, of Attis, Mithras, Magna
Mater and Isis developed into Christian sacraments--the symbol became
the thing itself. Baptism the confession of the new life, following
the customs of these cults, became initiation; and from the same
superstitious origins, the repellent materialistic belief that to eat
of the flesh and drink of the blood of a god was to gain immortality:
immortality of the body, of course.

Ah, when the superstitions of remote peoples, the fables and myths,
were taken away; when the manufactured history and determinism of the
Israelites from the fall