Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/93

Rh the Bible, we do so for our own edification, or to find an intimation of comfort in our own personal troubles, whether great or small; in short, we read ourselves both into it and out of it. Who—save a few learned people—knows that it records among other things the history of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive souls, of a wind both superstitious and cunning—the history of St. Paul, the apostle? But for this remarkable story, for the aberrations and passions of such a mind, of such a soul, Christianity would not exist, we should hardly have heard of a small Jewish sect, whose teacher died on the cross. Of course, had we understood this very story at the proper time, had we read, really recall, the writings of Paul with free and independent minds, without giving any thought to our personal troubles, not as the revelations of the "Holy Ghost"—suchreaders did not exist for more than a thousandyears—Christianity long since would have ceased to exist: so thoroughly do these pages of the Jewish Pascal expose the origin of Christianity, just as the pages of the French Pascal expose its fate and that by which it will ultimately perish. The fact that the vessel of Christianity has thrown a good deal of the Jewish ballast overboard, that it went and was able to go anong the heathens—all this is bound up with the history of this one man, a man greatly tormented, greatly to be pitied and very disagreeable, both to others and to himself.He suffered of a fixed idea, or, to speak more plainly,