Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur
Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There
are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life,
written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by
Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge,
ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au
Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar
Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The
Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with
blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that
M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea,
in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied,
sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator
who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple
authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the
third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided
by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the
Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in
the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature.
The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses every page of The Brook
Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something
perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called
"blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution
makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies
of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and
Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently
"blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation
or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions,
and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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