and similar
sentences, lose all meaning without the doctrine of a future life, about
which the early Christians were intensely enthusiastic. It was not in
_this_ world, as Gibbon remarks, that they wished to be happy or useful.

Mr. Le Gallienne argues that Christ taught in parables. He promised
heaven, and threatened hell, but he spoke in a Pickwickian sense.
However he used such phrases, it is "certain" that the evangelists "have
distorted their importance out of all proportion to the rest of his
teaching." By "certain" we are not to assume that Mr. Le Gallienne has
access to occult sources of information. We are only to infer that he
deals with the gospels arbitrarily; accepting them, or rejecting them,
as they accord or disagree with his preconceptions. Indeed, this is what
"essential Christianity" must always be. What each picker and chooser
likes is "essential." What he does not like is unessential, if not a
positive misrepresentation.

Short and easy is Mr. Le Gallienne's criterion for deciding when Christ
is literal and when parabolical. "It is only Christ's moral precepts
that are to be taken literally"--"all the rest is parable." What a pity
it is that the Prophet of Nazareth did not give us a clear hint to this
effect! The theory is one of admirable simplicity. Yet, for all that
demure look of his, Mr. Le Gallienne is not so admirably simple as
to work it out in practice. Accepting the moral precepts of Christ
literally, a Christian should hate his father and mother, take no
thought tor the morrow, live in poverty to obtain the kingdom of heaven,
and turn his left cheek to everyone who takes the liberty of striking
him on the right. Mr. Le Gallienne does not ask us to do these things;
he does not say he performs them himself, He would probably say, if
pressed, that allowance should be made for oriental ways of speaking.
But, in that case, what becomes of the "literal" method of reading the
"moral precepts" of Christ?

Mr. Le Gallienne, who despises "thinkers," is all at sea in his chapter
on Essential Christianity. He does not know his own mind. He declares
that Christ "combined" in his own person and teaching "the intense
spirituality of the Hebrew, the impassioned self-annihilation of the
Hindoo, the joyous naturalism of the Greek." Yet he also remarks that
there is something beautiful in "such presences as Pan, Aphrodite, and
Apollo," which we do not find in Christianity; though he is careful to
add th