things were calculated to offend those Greeks and Latins who had
absorbed the teaching of Dionysus and the Muses. He himself felt he was
incapable of winning the allegiance of free men and of cultivated minds,
and he employed cunning. To seduce their souls he invented a fable
which, although not so ingenious as the myths wherewith we have
surrounded the spirits of our disciples of old, could, nevertheless,
influence those feebler intellects which are to be found everywhere in
great masses. He declared that men having committed a crime against him,
an hereditary crime, should pay the penalty for it in their present life
and in the life to come (for mortals vainly imagine that their existence
is prolonged in hell); and the astute Iahveh gave out that he had sent
his own son to earth to redeem with his blood the debt of mankind. It is
not credible that a penalty should redress a fault, and it is still less
credible that the innocent should pay for the guilty. The sufferings of
the innocent atone for nothing, and do but add one evil to another.
Nevertheless, unhappy creatures were found to adore Iahveh and his son,
the expiator, and to announce their mysteries as good tidings. We should
not be surprised at this folly. Have we not seen many times indeed human
beings who, poor and naked, prostrate themselves before all the phantoms
of fear, and rather than follow the teaching of well-disposed demons,
obey the commandments of cruel demiurges? Iahveh, by his cunning, took
souls as in a net. But he did not gain therefrom, for his glorification,
all that he expected. It was not he, but his son, who received the
homage of mankind, and who gave his name to the new cult. He himself
remained almost unknown upon earth."

CHAPTER XX

THE GARDENER'S STORY, CONTINUED

"The new superstition spread at first over Syria and Africa; it won over
the seaports where the filthy rabble swarm, and, penetrating into Italy,
infected at first the courtesans and the slaves, and then made rapid
progress among the middle classes of the towns. But for a long while the
country-side remained undisturbed. As in the past, the villagers
consecrated a pine tree to Diana, and sprinkled it every year with the
blood of a young boar; they propitiated their Lares with the sacrifice
of a sow, and offered to Bacchus--benefactor of mankind--a kid of
dazzling whiteness, or if they were too poor for this, at least they had
a little wine and a little flour