Page:God and His Book.djvu/137

Rh always kept well out of the way. The next to burning a writer's self is to burn his book, and the Ghost's book has been burnt in tons. Buggins of Bethel says that the blessed Jesus would not approve of the burning of men and books. Possibly the " blessed Jesus" of Buggins of Bethel would not ; but then, there are as many Jesuses as there are Bugginses. The Jesus of the Gospels is so hazily and imperfectly drawn that any one can take his pencil and finish off the picture to suit his own predilection and idiosyncrasy. The strongest lines in the Gospel drawing are those that embody a dash of fanaticism and mental aberration. If you maintain from your delineation of the character of the Son that he would, not have burnt the writings of the Ghost in the same fire with those who read them, I, from a delineation quite as legitimate, will contend that he who scourged the money-changers, cursed the fig-tree, and thrust Chorazin "down to hell" gives a warranty to the career of Torquemada and Deza.

In short, the best and the worst of Jesus is that he is "all things to all men." There is no diabolical crime that his name has not been quoted to warrant; there is no exalted virtue his name has not been invoked to approve. "Each Church, each Christian age and generation," remarks Soury, "has had its own Jesus. The 'meek' Jesus of Renan is, for certain, neither the Jesus of James nor of John, the bosom companions of the man Jesus, as he really was. The grace and charm of the Galilean idyll are, unfortunately, terribly marred by the gloomy figures to which they introduce us. It is to be feared that the beautiful, the 'divine' dream, as he would say, which the eminent scholar experienced in the very country of the Gospel, will have the fate of the 'Jaconda' of Da Vinci, and many of the religious pictures of Raphael and Michael Angelo. Such dreams are admirable, but they are bound to fade. But, conceding the rank of historical documents to the Gospels—that is, the first three Gospels, and particularly the more primary and important of them (namely, the Gospel according to Mark), the Jesus who rises up and comes