the Apostles sees nothing of the
significance of this. The great danger of conversion in all ages has
been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower
mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding
it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level
by degrading it. Years ago I said that the conversion of a savage
to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery. The
conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted
the religion that had raised one man above sin and death into a religion
that delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that
their own common nature became a horror to them, and the religious life
became a denial of life. Paul had no intention of surrendering either
his Judaism or his Roman citizenship to the new moral world (as Robert
Owen called it) of Communism and Jesuism. Just as in the XIX century
Karl Marx, not content to take political economy as he found it,
insisted on rebuilding it from the bottom upwards in his own way, and
thereby gave a new lease of life to the errors it was just outgrowing,
so Paul reconstructed the old Salvationism from which Jesus had vainly
tried to redeem him, and produced a fantastic theology which is still
the most amazing thing of the kind known to us. Being intellectually
an inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding the irrational real
thing for the unreal but ratiocinable postulate, he began by discarding
Man as he is, and substituted a postulate which he called Adam. And when
he was asked, as he surely must have been in a world not wholly mad,
what had become of the natural man, he replied "Adam IS the natural
man." This was confusing to simpletons, because according to tradition
Adam was certainly the name of the natural man as created in the garden
of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own time had described as
typically British Frankenstein's monster, and called him Smith, and
somebody, on demanding what about the man in the street, had been told
"Smith is the man in the street." The thing happens often enough; for
indeed the world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the street
and average sensual men and economic men and womanly women and what
not, all of them imaginary Atlases carrying imaginary worlds on their
unsubstantial shoulders.

The Eden story provided Adam with a sin: the "original sin" for which
we are all damned. Baldly stated,