On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his
cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a
half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original
Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George
Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Néant,
Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the
light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have
quoted the mystic Joachim Flora--of the Third Kingdom--who said that
the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui
vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a
man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it
away. Jesus cast his cross away--his spiritual ambition--believing
that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then
to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe.
The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they
love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts
company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is
not going, as he had contemplated, to give himself up to Hanan, the
High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical
sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in
Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is
a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to
the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the
mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda:
"The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the
"rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book
is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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