appropriated
an ancient Pagan festival--the festival of spring. I may be told
by scholars amongst you that the time of Christ's crucifixion and
resurrection was fixed by the Jewish Passover. I reply that the Passover
was itself a spring festival, whose original and natural meaning was
obscured by priestly arts and legendary stories. That it happened at
this time of the year, that it depended on astronomical signs, that
its commemoration included the sacrifice of the firstlings of the
flock--shows clearly enough that it was a Jewish counterpart of the
common Gentile celebration. Has it ever occurred to you that if Christ
died, he died on a particular day; and that if he rose from the dead, he
rose on a particular morning? That day, that morning, should have been
observed in the proper fashion of anniversaries. But it never was, and
it is not now. Good Friday--as you curiously, and almost facetiously
call the day on which the founder of your faith suffered a painful and
ignominious death--and Easter Sunday, when he left his sepulchre,
never fall on the same date in successive years. They are determined by
calculations of the position of the sun and the phases of the moon--a
planet sacred to lovers and lunatics, and naturally dear therefore to
devotion and superstition. You decorate your churches with evergreens
and flowers as the Pagans decorated their temples and altars. You use
Easter eggs like the pre-Christian religionists. You show, and your
creed shows, in everything that Easter is really a spring festival. The
year springs from the tomb of winter, and Christ springs at the same
time from the tomb of death.

I am disposed to regard your "Savior" as a purely mythical personage,
like all other Saviors and sun-gods of antiquity, who were generally,
if not always, born miraculously of virgin mothers, mysteriously
impregnated by celestial visitors; and whose careers, like that of your
Christ, were marked by portents and prodigies, ending in tribulation and
defeat, which were followed by vindication and triumph. Whether there
was a man called Jesus, or Joshua (the Jewish form of the name), who
lived and taught in Galilee and died at Jerusalem, is more than I will
undertake to determine, and it seems to me a question of microscopic
importance. But I am convinced that the Christ of the Gospels is the
product of religious imagination; an ideal figure, constructed out of
materials that were common in the East for hundreds and