Thus we have come to have a public which buys the books of the Brownes--men and women who have habituated their minds to a scorn of those rational processes which would tell them that certain assumptions entail certain consequences. They want to hunt with the hounds, and also to run with the hares. Browne’s masterpiece of dual allegiance, however, relates, as we shall see, not so much to the Carpenter as to the Apostle to the Gentiles. But he is not yet ready for that bit of double-dealing. He first must say:[168] “What really marked Jesus as one unlike any preacher who had come before him was not so much what he said, as the particular authority on which he said it.” (The particular authority of a preacher of ethics?) “Every other prophet had uttered his heresies in the name of God.... But this carpenter from Nazareth, for all his meekness and humility, spoke only in his own name. ‘Take _my_ yoke upon ye,’ he said. So did he speak, not as the mouthpiece of God, but as one vested with an almost divine authority of his own.... Such a tone would have sounded blasphemous ... even in a prince or a learned man.... But it ... created and sustained the impression that he was a transcendent person, and bestowed upon him the power to take cringing serfs and make them over into towering men. Only because he believed in himself so firmly ... could he make others accept his words. His tone was not that of a mere prophet, but almost that of God Himself. “It was not merely that he could perform what were thought to be miracles.... It was more that he could carry himself with the divine assurance of an ‘Anointed One.’”[169] Strange conduct, surely, for One who preached merely ethics; who went about crying, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” and meant only that the Kingdom of Good Moral Conduct was at hand. Why not say that He meant “The Kingdom of Eugenics is at hand!” and be done with it? And what can Browne mean by an “almost” divine authority, or a tone “almost” that of God Himself? It would seem that Christ was the Son of God, or was not; that He claimed to be the Messiah, or did not claim to be the Messiah. Browne, ignoring the law of the excluded middle term, attempts to insert a middle term by means of the word “almost.” And he adds: “Whether Jesus himself was convinced he was the Messiah is a problem still unsolved.... Charlatans and madmen, arrant knaves and driveling fools, had time and again been hailed by the hysterical mob as the Awaited One. Is it any wonder therefore that an exalted person like this young carpenter, Jesus, should have been hailed likewise?”[170]