Page:God and His Book.djvu/138

128 out from those old Judaising writings is truly no idyllic personage, no meek dreamer, no mild and amiable moralist ; on the contrary, he is very much more of a Jew fanatic, attacking without measure the society of his time, a narrow and obstinate visionary, a half-lucid thaumaturge, subject to fits of passion, which caused him to be looked upon as crazy by his own people. In the eyes of his contemporaries and fellow-countrymen he was all that, and he is the same in ours. Only, far from imputing it to him as a matter for incrimination, we perceive, in the mental derangement under which he laboured, the determining condition of his pre-eminence, the intimate cause of his influence on the world."

Jules Soury clearly considers Christ to have been insane But, most likely, a mad sinner required a mad saviour. Man is so irreclaimably mad that no sane deity would have taken the trouble to have redeemed him. The redemption is as insane as the redeemer. Nobody knows for certain whether it was for all the world or only for the elect. Nobody knows exactly what they are to be redeemed from, for hell is altering its name and changing its temperature and getting pretty well exploded. Although the world is every day becoming more sure that there is no hell and ought to be none, to keep men out of this sheol they pay many millions a year to hundreds of thousands of professional impostors and chartered necromancers. A sane man is not at home in this world. He is lost among the fools, like a grain of corn in a bushel of chaff. For ages the world burned or hanged all its wise men; now it neglects and starves them. Hell, poor noodle! Who or what would be at the trouble of keeping up a good hot hell for you? Hell indeed! All that you require is the conversion of the universe into an asylum for mediocre and credulous imbeciles. These are bitter words; but they are not the words of a Timon or a Coriolanus, of a pessimist or a misanthrope. They are written in sorrow, not in anger. They are written, not because they are amiably pleasant, but because they are terribly true. The blight destroys the apple-blossom, and the mildew the corn; but ecclesiasticism has nearly ruined mankind. The priest, by his