“As a mental model the Christ was elaborated by whole races of men, and worked at continually, like the Apollo of Greek sculpture. Various nations wrought at this ideal, which long-continued repetition evoked from the human mind at last as it did the Greek god from the marble. “Egypt labored at the portrait for thousands of years before the Greeks added their finishing touches to the type of the ever-youthful solar god. It was Egypt that first made the statue live with her own life, and humanized her ideal of the divine. Hers was the legend of supreme pity and self-sacrifice so often told of the canonical Christ. She related how the very god did leave the courts of heaven and come down as a little child, the infant Horus born of the Virgin, through whom he took flesh or descended into matter, < crossed the earth as a substitute/ descended into Hades as the vivifier of the dead, their vicarious justifier and redeemer, the first-fruits and leader of the resurrection into eternal life. The Christian legends were first related of Horus, or Osiris, who was the embodiment of divine goodness, wisdom, truth, and purity—who personated ideal perfection in each sphere of manifestation and every phase of power. This was the greatest hero that ever lived in the mind of man—not in the flesh—to influence with transforming force; the only hero to whom the miracles were natural because he was not human. The canonical Christ only needed a translator, not a creator, a transcriber of the ‘sayings’ and a collector of the ‘doings’ already ascribed to the mythical Christ. “The humanized history is but the mythical drama made mundane. The sayings and marvellous doings of Christ being pre-extant, the ‘spirit of Christ,’ the ‘secret of Christ,’ the ‘sweet reasonableness of Christ’ were all pre-Christian, and consequently could not be derived from any ‘personal founder’ of Christianity. They were extant before the great delusion had turned the minds of men and the figure-head of Peter’s bark had been mistaken for a portrait of the builder. “The Christ of the Gospels is in no sense an historical personage or a supreme model of humanity—a hero who strove, and suffered, and failed to save the world by his death. It is impossible to establish the existence of an historical character even as an impostor. For such an one the two witnesses, astronomical mythology and Gnosticism, completely prove an alibi. The Christ is a popular lay figure that never lived, and a lay figure of pagan origin—a lay figure that was once the Ram and afterward the Fish; a lay figure that in human form was the portrait and image of a dozen different gods.