“A third fact,” said Scaurus, “is that the Christians, from a very early period, used the word ‘_yoke_’ in a depreciatory sense to mean the ‘bondage’—as they called it—of the Law of Moses. Paul calls the latter ‘_the yoke of bondage_.’ The Christians, at their first public council, speak of it as ‘_a yoke_’; and a Christian writer named Barnabas says that ‘the new law’ is ‘_without the yoke of necessity_.’ I suspect that among the Greeks and Romans the servile associations of ‘yoke’ have also tended to the disuse of the term among the Christians of the west. You may object that the associations of ‘cross’ are still more disgraceful than those of ‘yoke.’ But I do not think they would be so for Christians, who regarded the disgrace of the cross as a step upward to what they call ‘the crown of life.’ Indeed I am rather surprised that Matthew’s tradition ‘Take my yoke upon you’ has been retained at all, even by a single evangelist.” Most of this was new to me. But, even if it was true—as seemed to me not unlikely—the same conclusion followed as above. The mistake derogated from Mark, not from Christ. Indeed Scaurus’s interpretation seemed to me to exalt Christ. For might not some people, of austere and fanatical minds, find it easier to “_take up the cross_,” that is, to lacerate and torture themselves, than to “_take up the yoke_,” that is, to make their lives subservient to the community in a spirit of willing self-sacrifice? Indeed Scaurus himself said, “If I am right, the Christians have lost by this misunderstanding. When I say ‘lost,’ I mean ‘lost in respect of morality.’ For some may ‘_take up the cross_’ like the priests of Cybele, finding a pleasure in gashing themselves—such is human nature. But it is not so exciting a thing to ‘_take up the yoke_’ if it implies making oneself a drudge for life to commonplace people.”