otional
maunderings of the fool and the Philistine. He would have had the
Bible prohibited for a century or two, till mankind should be able to
read it with fresh vision and true profit. He wished that Christ had
crucified the Jews and defeated the plan for the world's salvation. O
happy Christ, to have died without foresight of the Crusades or the
Inquisition!

IX

Irritation passed into an immense pity for humanity, crucified upon
the cross whose limbs are Time and Space. Those poor Russian pilgrims
faring foot-sore across the great frozen plains, lured on by this
mirage of blessedness, sleeping by the wayside, and sometimes never
waking again! Poor humanity, like a blind Oriental beggar on the
deserted roadway crying _Bakhshish_ to vain skies, from whose hollow
and futile spaces floats the lone word, _Mafish_--"there is nothing."
At least let it be ours to cover the poorest life with that human love
and pity which is God's vicegerent on earth, and to pass it gently
into the unknown.

X

But since Christianity already covered these poor lives with love and
pity, let them live in the beautiful illusion, so long as the ugly
facts did not break through! What mattered if these sites were true or
false--the believing soul had made them true. All these stones were
holy, if only with the tears of the generations. The Greek fire might
be a shameless fraud, but the true heavenly flame was the faith in it.
The Christ story might be false, but it had idealized the basal
things--love, pity, self-sacrifice, purity, motherhood. And if any
divine force worked through history, then must the great common
illusions of mankind also be divine. And in a world--itself an
illusion--what truths could there be save working truths, established
by natural selection in the spiritual world, varying for different
races, and maintaining themselves by correspondence with the changing
needs of the spirit?

XI

Absolute religious truth? How could there be such a thing? As well say
German was truer than French, or that Greek was more final than
Arabic. Its religion like its speech was the way the deepest instincts
of a race found expression, and like a language a religion was dead
when it ceased to change. Each religion gave the human soul something
great to love, to live by, and to die for. And whosoever lived in
joyous surrender to some greatness outside himself had religion, even
though the world called him atheist. The finest souls