Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of
Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realised by
it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He was the first to
conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his time there had been
gods and men, and, feeling through the mysticism of sympathy that in
himself each had been made incarnate, he calls himself the Son of the one
or the Son of the other, according to his mood. More than any one else
in history he wakes in us that temper of wonder to which romance always
appeals. There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of
a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own
shoulders the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done
and suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins of
Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was Emperor of
Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those whose names are
legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs: oppressed nationalities,
factory children, thieves, people in prison, outcasts, those who are dumb
under oppression and whose silence is heard only of God; and not merely
imagining this but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment
all who come in contact with his personality, even though they may
neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find
that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their
sorrow revealed to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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