It appeared to me that Scaurus dealt with Mark more severely than he would have dealt with Plato. Plato regards “justice,” not as obedience to the written laws, but as “doing that which is best for all.” If therefore retribution of good and evil comes on the welldoer and on the evildoer, severally, as being “the best thing” for each and for all, this is “justice.” But Scaurus quoted Mark, “In the moment when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have any charge against anyone, that your Father also in heaven may forgive you your trespasses,” and then said, “This is not just. If I forgive my slave for robbing me or for cruelly maiming one of his fellow-slaves, does it follow that Jupiter should forgive me for theft or murder? Not in the least. He ought to punish me twice over, first, for unjustly forgiving crime, and then for being a criminal myself.” Here Scaurus was thinking of remitting penalty, whereas Mark meant bearing the burden of sin. And, although the matter was not then as clear to me as it is now, I could see how a man wronged, and prosecuting the wrong-doer, not as offending against society and justice but as offending against himself—a man that does not wish to “do the best thing” for offenders and for the community—creates for himself an image of a God bad and selfish and unforgiving like himself; so that either he trembles before his bad God and is a slave; or else he regards himself as the favourite of a bad God, and becomes confirmed in his own badness. On the whole, though I was forced to admit the justice of many charges that Scaurus brought against Mark—and especially the charge of disproportion, and of neglecting great doctrines while emphasizing small details of narrative—still I was satisfied that Mark did contain a gospel, namely, the good tidings of the forgiveness of sins. Scaurus called Mark’s gospel a mere frame. It seemed to me that it would have been less untrue to call it a picture in which the principal figure was not clearly seen because of intervening objects and inferior figures. Or it might be called a drama in which the leading character is too often absent from the stage; or, when present, he speaks too little, while minor characters are allowed to speak too much. CHAPTER XXI SCAURUS ON THE CROSS Scaurus continued, “I pass over a good many columns in Mark before I come to anything of the nature of a precept. Then I find the following, ‘There is nothing outside the man, entering into him, that can defile him.’ Now you might suppose that this would have been good news, addressed as it is, to the needy multitude. For it would have enabled them (you may say) to eat pork like their Greek neighbours and would have saved them trouble and expense in preparing food.