d nationalities,
factory children, thieves, people in prison, outcasts, those who are dumb
under oppression and whose silence is heard only of God; and not merely
imagining this but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment
all who come in contact with his personality, even though they may
neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find
that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their
sorrow revealed to them.

I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true. Shelley
and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also is the most
wonderful of poems. For 'pity and terror' there is nothing in the entire
cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The absolute purity of the
protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from
which the sufferings of Thebes and Pelops' line are by their very horror
excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was when he said in his treatise
on the drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one
blameless in pain. Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of
tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great
artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of
the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no
more than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer
simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect,
can be said to equal or even approach the last act of Christ's passion.
The little supper with his companions, one of whom has already sold him
for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend
coming close to him so as to betray him with a kiss; the friend who still
believed in him, and on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house
of refuge for Man, denying him as the bird cried to the dawn; his own
utter loneliness, his submission, his acceptance of everything; and along
with it all such scenes as the high priest of orthodoxy rending his
raiment in wrath, and the magistrate of civil justice calling for water
in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of innocent blood
that makes him the scarlet figure of history; the coronation ceremony of
sorrow, one of the most wonderful things in the whole of recorded time;
the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of his mother and of
the disciple whom he loved; the soldiers gambling and throwing dice