Not only to the myth-theory but to every attempt at ejecting historical falsity from religion there has been offered the objection that religion “does good”; that mankind needs “some religion or other”; and that to “undermine faith” does social harm, even if it be by way of driving out delusion. This position is not at all special to orthodoxy. It was taken up by Middleton; by Kant, when he shaped a “practical” basis for theistic belief after eliminating the theoretic, and counselled unbelieving clergymen to use the Bible for purposes of popular moral education; by Voltaire when he combated atheism after bombarding Christianity; and by Paine when he wrote his Age of Reason to save the belief in God.

Insofar as the general plea merely amounts to saying that mankind cannot conceivably give up its traditional religion at a stroke; that liberal-minded priests are better than illiberal, for all purposes; and that in a world dominated by economic need it is impossible for many enlightened clergymen to secure a living save in the profession for which they were trained, I am not at all concerned to combat it. For the liberal priest, enlightened too late to reshape his economic career, I have nothing but sympathy, provided that he in no way hampers the intellectual progress of others. Insofar, again, as the plea for “religion” is merely a plea for a word, or a thesis that all earnest conviction about life is religion, it is quite irrelevant to the present discussion. The rationalists who feel they cannot face the world without the label of “religion” for their theory of the cosmos and of conduct will be in the same position whether they believe in a “historical Jesus” or not; and those who must have a humanist “liturgy” of some sort in place of the ecclesiastical are apparently not troubled by problems of historicity. What we are concerned with is the notion that to deny the historicity of Jesus is somehow to imperil not only ethics but historical science.

M. Loisy puts the last point in his suggestion, in criticism of Drews, that he who thinks to break down either all the traditional or the “liberal” orthodoxies by denying the historic actuality of Jesus will find he has “only furnished to their defenders the occasion to persuade a certain not uncultivated public that the divinity of Christ, or at least the unique character of his personality, is as well guaranteed as the reality of his life and his death.”1 Had M. Loisy then forgotten that his own attempts to elide from the documents a number of details which he saw to be mythical have given occasion to the defenders of the faith to assure a not uncultivated public that the disintegration of the gospels destroyed all ground for belief in any part of them?2

We on this side of the Channel might meet such challenges, grounded on the susceptibilities of the “public,” with the demand of our great humorist, Mr. Birrell: “What, in the name of the Bodleian, has the general public got to do with literature? The general public ... has its intellectual, like its lacteal sustenance, sent round to it in carts.”3

But we must not turn the jest to earnest. There are plenty of honest laymen to play the jury; and to them let it be put. The issue between us and M. Loisy, as he virtually admits, must be fought out by argument. It is perfectly true, as he says, that “in principle, nothing is more legitimate, more necessary, than the comparative method; but nothing is more delicate to handle.”4 Every issue, then, must be vigilantly debated. But the obligation is reciprocal. In these inquiries we have found M. Loisy many times in untenable positions, and resorting to inconsistent arguments. The tests which he applies to a mass of tradition are equally destructive to most of what he retains.

Let illicit employments of the comparative method be discredited by all means; but let us also have done with a criticism which on one leaf claims that Jesus gave a “homogeneous” teaching which his disciples could not have “combined,” and on the next avows that “the gospel ethic is no more consistent than the hope of the kingdom.”5 And when the myth-theorists are called upon to make no unwarranted assumptions, let us also have an end of such assertions as that “twenty-five or thirty years after the death of Jesus the principal sentences and parables of which the apostolic generation had kept memory were put in writing.”6 This is pure hypothesis, unsupported by evidence.

The issue between us and M. Loisy, once more, is not one in which merely he assails the myth-theory as outgoing its proofs: it is one in which his positions are at the same time assailed all along the line, and particularly at its centre, as incapable of resisting critical pressure. By all means let us seek that “the science of religion should be applied without preoccupations of contemporary propaganda or polemic.” The present writer reached the myth-theory not by way of propaganda but as a result of sheer protracted failure to establish a presupposed historical foundation. Professor Smith disclaims all criticism of “Christianity.” And if Professor Drews be blamed for avowing a religious aim, the answer is that he would otherwise be assailed as “irreligious,” alike in his own country and elsewhere. The myth-theory has to meet other foes than M. Loisy.

It is remarkable that Professor Schmiedel, who has gone nearly as far as M. Loisy in recognizing in detail the force of the pressures on the historical position, makes the avowal: “My inmost religious convictions would suffer no harm, even if I now felt obliged to conclude that Jesus never lived,”7 though as a critical historian he “sees no prospect of this.” He further avows that his religion does not require him “to find in Jesus an absolutely perfect model,” and that in effect he does not find him so.8 And he wrote in 1906 that “for about six years the view that Jesus never really lived has gained an ever-growing number of supporters,”9 adding that “it is no use to ignore it, or to frame resolutions against it.” It is accordingly with no kind of polemic motive as against so entirely candid a writer that I suggest certain criticisms of his emotional positions as tending unconsciously to affect his judgment of the critical problem.

It is after the avowals above cited that he writes:—10

It would, I think, be difficult to over-estimate the amount of psychic bias involved in that pronouncement, which contains a theorem no more fitly to be taken for granted than any concrete historic proposition. The Professor, it will be observed, does not specify a single teaching of Jesus as new, while admitting that some were not. What he says is, in effect, that other utterances of Jesuine doctrines do not “warm the heart”; that those of Jesus do; and that they “for the first time” caused certain doctrines to “take effect and influence the lives of mankind in general.” What doctrines then are meant, and what effects are posited? And why do other utterances of the doctrines not “warm the heart”?

Presumably the doctrines in question are those of mutual love, of forgiveness of enemies, of doing as we would be done by. Concerning the gospel doctrine of reward the Professor makes a disclaimer; and concerning the doctrine that God cares for men as for the lilies and the birds he pronounces that it is “to-day not merely untrue: it is not even religious in the deepest sense of the term.”11 It is not then clear that he would acclaim the doctrine that to help the distressed is to succour the Lord. In any case, the detailed religious prescription of beneficence was not merely a Jewish maxim: it was an article of Egyptian religion;12 and it can hardly be in respect of such teaching that the Professor affirms a new “influence on the lives of mankind in general.”

Is it then in respect of mutual love and the forgiveness of enemies? If so, when did the change begin? Among the apostles? Among the Fathers? Among the bishops? Among the Popes? To put the issue broadly, was there more of good human life in Byzantium than in pagan Greece; or even in the Rome of the Decadence and the Dark and Middle Ages than in the Rome of the Republic? Was it because of Christian goodness that the decline of Rome was accelerated instead of being checked? And, to come to our own day, is the World War an evidence for an ethical change wrought by the teaching of Jesus—a war forced on the world by a Germany where there are more systematic students of the gospels than in all the rest of Europe? I leave it to Professor Schmiedel and Professor Drews to settle the point between them. They would perhaps agree—though as to this I am uncertain—on the Jesuine doctrine that morality is “nothing more than obedience to the will of God”; and that “every deed is to be judged by the standard, Will it bear the gaze of God?”13 In any case I will affirm, for the consideration of those who on any such ground cling to the notion of something unique in the teaching of Jesus, that humanity is likely to make a much better world when it substitutes for such a moral standard, which is but a self-deluding substitution of God for the conscience that delimits God, the principle of goodwill towards men, and the law of reciprocity, articulately known to the mass of mankind millenniums before the Christian era, and all along disobeyed, then as now, partly because religious codes intervene between it and life.14

If it be admitted—and who will considerately deny it?—that the moral progress of mankind is made in virtue of recognition of the law of reciprocity, the case for the general moral influence of Christianity is disposed of, once for all. If the affirmation be still made, let it confront the challenge of rational sociology,15 founded on the survey of all history—and the World War. Professor Schmiedel’s large affirmation is vain in the face of all that. His real psychic basis, which in my judgment determines his critical presuppositions, lies in the phrase: “warms my heart.” And that phrase is a tacit confession of religious partisanship, the result of his Christian training.16

The more the moral teaching of the gospels is comparatively studied, as apart from their myths of action and dogma, the more clear becomes its entire dependence on previous lore,17 and its failure even to maintain the level of the best of that. The Sermon on the Mount is wholly pre-Christian.18 It is a Christian scholar who points out that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is fully set forth in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a century before the Christian era. In his view, those verses19 “contain the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature.”20 Why then does it not warm the heart of Professor Schmiedel equally with the doctrine of the gospels? Simply because he was brought up to assign pre-eminence to the teaching of Jesus—God or Man. And here we have, in its fundamental form, that unchecked assumption of “uniqueness” which secretly dictates the bulk of the denials of the myth-theory. Canon Charles explicitly traces the Jesuine teaching to the verses in question:

One puts with diffidence the challenge, Was it then high and noble for the Teacher to give out as his own the teaching of another, instead of acknowledging it? Is it not incomparably more likely, on every aspect of the case, that the older teaching was thus appropriated by gospel-makers bent at once on giving the Divine One a high message and on securing acceptance for it by putting it in his mouth? Is not this the strict critical verdict, apart from any other issue?

The bias which balks at such a decision is the sign of the harm done to intellectual ethic by the inculcated presupposition. It ought to “warm the heart” of a good man to realize that the ideas which he has been taught to think the noblest were not the “unique” production of a Superman, but could be and were reached by Jews and Gentiles—for they are Gentile also—whose very names are unknown to us. A doctrine of forgiveness arose in prostrate Jewry precisely because rancour had there reached its maximum. As a doctrine of asceticism rises in a society where license has been at the extreme, so the phenomena of hate breed a recoil from that. The doctrine of non-resistance was current among the Pharisees of the period of the Maccabean revolt; and the Testaments of the Patriarchs is the work of a Pharisee. And the gospels have nevertheless taught all Christians to regard the Pharisees collectively, with the Scribes, as a body devoid of all goodness. There is, be it said—not for the first time—a pessimism in the Christian conception of things; a pessimism which denies the element of goodness in man in the very act of ascribing it as a specialty to One, and relying on his “influence” to spread it among men incapable of rising to it for themselves. The story of Lycurgus and Alcander is the best ancient example to the precept, quite transcending that of the good Samaritan,22 and it is one of the antidotes to the Christian pessimism which stultifies its own parable by denying in effect that The Samaritan could think as ethically as The Jew.

It is pessimism, yet again, that accepts the verdict: “Christianity is the truth of humanity.”23 Were it not that Dr. Schmiedel endorses it, I should have been inclined to use a stronger term. This too is myth-making. It would be strange indeed if any depth of truth were sounded by men who had not the first elements of a conscience for truth of statement, truth of history: whose very notion of truth was a production of fiction. The “truth of humanity” is something infinitely wider than the structure raised by the “prophets” and “apostles” of the Jesus-cult, out of pre-existing materials, some two thousand years ago; and humanity will outlive that presentment of its cosmos and its destinies as it has outlived others. If it should carry something of the one with it, so does it from the others—even as the one drew from its predecessors; and it will certainly jettison more than it will keep. I have not noted in the Testaments of the Patriarchs any such nullification of its doctrine of forgiveness as is embodied in the promise of future perdition for Chorazin and Bethsaida, or in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, to say nothing of the Jesuine doctrine of future torment. The hate that breathes in “Ye brood of vipers”; in the continual malediction against Scribes and Pharisees as universally hypocrites, “sons of Gehenna,” making their proselytes twice as bad as themselves; and in the Johannine “your father the devil”—all these are “Christian” specialties, turning to naught the Jewish precept of forgiveness.

And I can “see no prospect” of a long currency for Professor Schmiedel’s panegyric of fictitious sayings in Acts24 as “of the deepest that can be said about the inner Christian life.” If that be so, what amount of profundity goes to the whole construction of the faith? How long is it to be maintained that the secret or inspiration of good life lies in the ideas of men for whom the framing of false history was a pious occupation? The main ethical content of the Christian system, the moral doctrine by which the Church has lived down till the other day, is the ethic-defying doctrine of the redemption of mankind by a blood sacrifice—a survival of immemorial savagery. That is still the specifically “evangelical” view of Christianity. After living by the doctrine through two eras, the slowly civilizing conscience of the Church has itself begun to repudiate it; and we have the characteristic spectacle of its defenders declaring that the very terms of the historic creed form a libel framed by its enemies. Taught at last by human reason that the doctrine of sacrifice is the negation of morality, they pretend that that doctrine is not Christian. Without it, their Church would never have taken its historic form. To eliminate it, they have to suppress half their literature, prose and verse. The accommodations by which the fundamental immorality has been modified in the interests of saner morality are but the dictates of human experience; and these dictates are in turn pretended to be the revelation of the faith that flouted them.

Unless the world is again to retrogress collectively in its civilization, this polemic will not long avail to obscure historic issues. It is not merely the “religion” of Professor Drews, it is the emancipated human reason, that denies the mortmain of ancient Syria over the field of ethical thought, and claims the birthright of modern man in his own moral law. Not one day has passed since the penning of the Apocalypse without men’s hating each other in the name of Jesus. Wars generations long have been waged for interpretations of the lore. Hatred and malice and all uncharitableness stamp all the Sacred Books; and the literature of the Fathers imports into the dwindling intellectual life of the West all the rancour of battling Judaism. In our own day, Professor Schmiedel is malignantly assailed in the name of the divinity of the figure of which he claims to prove the exemplary humanity, his reasoned argument winning him no goodwill from the supernaturalists. And around him there figure virulent partisans, incapable of his candour, so little capable of love for enemies that they cannot conduct a debate without passion, perversion and insolence. A multitude of those who acclaim the gospel Jesus as the supreme Teacher reveal themselves as below the standards of normal candour.

From such pretenders to moral authority, the seeker for truth turns to the layman similarly concerned, and to those professional scholars who are capable of debating without passion, and in good faith. Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy are still, it is to be hoped, types of many. The problem is in the end, unalterably, one of historical science; and only by the use of all the methods of sound historical science will it ever be solved.

It is not merely in regard to the study of Christian origins that sociological problems are vitiated by the habitual passing of À priori judgments on issues never critically considered. When an expert hierologist like Dr. Budge tells us repeatedly that in ancient Egypt a “highly spiritual,” “lofty spiritual” and “elevated” religion went hand in hand with a system of sorcery of “degrading” savagery,25 we are led to inquire how the estimates of altitude are reached or justified. There appears to be no answer save that Dr. Budge holds certain theories about the universe, and, finding these more or less akin to the esoteric theology of Egypt, laurels his own opinions in this fashion. But Dr. Budge is no more entitled than any one else to settle such questions without rational discussion, and the reason of some of us revolts at the concept of a conjoined sublimity and imbecility as a spurious paradox. It is but a convention of supernaturalist apriorism, figuring where it has no right of entry. In precisely the same fashion, Dr. Estlin Carpenter credits to the Aztecs a “lofty religious sentiment,” avowed to be “strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual.”26 The “lofty” is again a wreath for the writer’s own philosophy of religion, in terms of which the act of the “good Samaritan,” performed a million times by unpretending human beings, was imaginable only by a supernormal Jew, and unmatchable in pagan thought.

In a word, these moral pretensions had better be withdrawn from the area of historical discussion proper. Involving as they do the inference that “lofty” religious conceptions are not merely of no moral value but potent sanctions for all manner of evil, they very effectually stultify themselves. But rationalism needs not, and should not seek, to turn such blunders to its account. As M. Loisy claims, the ground of historic criticism is not the place for such polemic, which tends only to confuse the scientific issue. That is hard enough to solve, with the best will and the best methods.