If this meant anything to the author it would mean that he himself was a believer in the divinity of Christ. He seems here to be chiding the Jerusalem mob, to say nothing of Christ’s pious devotees of today, for not being sufficiently aware of the spiritual nature of the miraculous Messiah’s mission. But no. Browne is thinking of a “gentle, loving, helpless youth”; of a spirit “innately puritanical,” a heretic who was outwardly “distinctly a conforming Jew” with an insistent pacificism, who adopted a tone that would have “sounded blasphemous even in a prince,” and surely was astonishing in a teacher of ethics. “The priests,” Browne goes on, “... were afraid of Jesus ... not merely because his heresies endangered their own position.”[173] “Had he been stronger in body no doubt he would never have joined the school of John the Baptist and become a saver of souls. Instead, he would have joined the Zealots, fighting with the sword against Rome.... From the beginning his strength must have been not the strength of the body but of the soul; and towards the end even that strength must have ebbed low in him.”[174] “And then he died. But he died only to come to life again, to come to a life more enduring, more wondrously potent than had ever been vouchsafed to him in the days before his shameful death. Indeed, he literally came to life again ... according to those who had most earnestly followed him.”[175] “It was enormously difficult to prove that he had really been the Promised One. No doubt that was why the disciples began to piece together those genealogies we find in the Gospels. No doubt that, too, was why those extravagant legends concerning the conception, birth, childhood, and ministry of Jesus began to be devised. Uncharitable critics may say the disciples resorted to fraud in these matters--but it was all intensely pious and well-intentioned fraud. Before the ordinary Jew could be made to accept Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus simply had to be proved a descendant of David.... The disciples may not have been even remotely conscious that they were departing from the truth.”[176] Thus Browne seeks to destroy all reason for admiring, and at the same time pretends to continue to admire. Such passages need no comment. Being no uncharitable critic myself, I will merely remark that the world now learns for the first time that the ordinary Jew can apparently be made to accept Jesus as the Messiah by means of the genealogies which are a part of the gospel story as it has come down to us. And what happened in Europe after this? 3. ST. PAUL AS SCAPEGOAT “On a sudden--at least, so it seemed to those who had not marked the mounting of its steady ground swell,” Browne proceeds, “that little Nazarene sect,” the followers of Christ after the Crucifixion, “became a high sea that broke and rolled across the whole Roman Empire ... sweeping over one land after another until finally it had inundated the whole face of the West and half the face of the East.