The Eliminator Part 14

We require no display of spiritual pyrotechnics. Enough for us that there is truth, and that we have the intellect to perceive it-that there is right, and we have the will to obey it. Neither a human G.o.d nor a divine man can enlighten us further than this. There are freedom and impulse for us to attain the highest degree of illumination of which we are capable. The human aspiration soars beyond the path of the lightning. In every n.o.ble idea, every worthy desire, we have a mediator with G.o.d. The more silent the work, the more certain that the principle of all life is performing it. In this is our eternity, and there is nothing beyond.

CHAPTER XI. THE IDEAL CHRIST

_"What think ye of Christ? Whose son was he?"-Matt. 22: 42._

NEARLY a quarter of a century ago (1868) a very remarkable pamphlet was published by request of the Free Religious a.s.sociation, written by that remarkable man, the Rev. Samuel Johnson, a Unitarian minister and an author of no little repute. The subject was _The Wors.h.i.+p of Jesus._ It had a very limited circulation, and the stereotype plates were destroyed in the great Boston fire, and it is now very difficult to find a copy.

Mr. Johnson takes the ground that "Christianity is a temporary step in the divine growth of man through the wors.h.i.+p of the ideal; and this hope lies, not in pausing on this step as final, nor in proving the names and personalities a.s.sociated with it to be as valid for ever as they have been in the past, but in that which underlies and governs the whole process-_the law of religious idealization._

"This is no speculation; it is the positive law of progress, as history presents it. To wors.h.i.+p ideals is the condition of spiritual life. To lose belief that there is somewhere a better than ourselves is to gravitate downward to what is worse than ourselves. We grow better by definite homage to a best. And this wors.h.i.+p of ideals is a process of idealization.... Man's power of growth, therefore, resides in the ability to s.h.i.+ft his veneration....

"Ideals prove themselves to be idealizations, that they may point him on to higher levels. This is religious progress....

"So a time comes when every religion that centres in an individual's prerogative of divinity falls under criticism, and is, so far, referred to temporary causes. Christianity cannot escape this law. As a distinct religion it is but Christism, and pa.s.ses away, like Jehovism, before a broader faith. Whether what succeeds it be called Theism or Pantheism, this terminology of systems fails to express its scope. It is free wors.h.i.+p of the one infinite and eternal life of the spiritual, moral, and physical universe....

"How, then, did the concentration of the religious sentiment upon Jesus originate? Not, as the Church insists, in the undeniable rights of a perfect Being to the everlasting allegiance of mankind, for there is no evidence of his perfection, intellectual or spiritual, but in the fact that the religious sentiment, at a certain stage of its historical progress, demanded a single human centre, and knew how to satisfy its own demand by its own process of idealization.

"The ideal itself was sent in the soul of the age. It was bound to do what it would with its materials by its own divine gift. It was the creative force of the time. It is not the whole truth to say with Merivale, then, that( the religion of Christ seized and developed, with a divine energy, the latent yearnings of mankind for social combination, having for its essence, in a human point of view, the doctrine of the equality of man/ Rather did that religion catch a spirit of universality already abroad in the age-not latent, but mighty to transform society, to inspire both Hebrew Messiah and Gentile philosopher, _to make its G.o.d in its own image_, and to transform the little Jewish sect at last into a Church of civilization....

"And this, at least, is sure; always there is a man for the hour.

Somehow or other, a great demand will find satisfaction. But the man is not what the hour reports him when it has crowned him with all that faith and fancy can bestow, and set up, through him, its own special demand as valid for all time. Future ages will revise, from a freer standpoint, the image it transmits for their adoration....

"The earliest types and emblems of Christ-wors.h.i.+p betray this powerful element in its origination. Jesus is represented in the form of the old deities and in conjunction with them. Between the images of Mercury Criophorus and Apollo Nomius, and that of the 'Good Shepherd/ the transition is so gradual that it is hard to decide whether the picture is pagan or Christian. In the Catacombs Jesus sits as Pluto on the judgment-seat, with Mary as Proserpine, while Mercury leads in souls.

Still earlier emblems of Jesus, the Lamb, the Fish, the s.h.i.+p, the Cross, the Dove, are all a.s.sociated with older heathen mysteries or mythological beliefs, as are also the Christian festivals and rites.

"And so the idealization of Jesus went on steadily and consistently till it reached deification. The early Christian 'apologists' ridiculed the human G.o.ds of the old polytheism, yet they did but concentrate the same principle more perfectly in the form of their Christ. Hebrew monotheism was indeed too strong in Paul to allow of his finding in Jesus more than a man in whom the fulness of the G.o.dhead dwelt. But this hovers very close upon the larger desire of the nations. And later, in the Gospel of John, the Gentile current has absorbed the Hebrew and the call for a G.o.d-man is boldly met. A life of Jesus is here dramatically constructed, not out of historical facts, nor even traditions, but out of that preconceived ideal of an incarnate word attaching itself, in its longing for actual and living substance, to the growing prestige of his name....

"The records of Jesus' life have had to be idealized also; and these are not, like his person, so dim and veiled as to leave the religions imagination a certain margin of freedom, however inadequate, but a definite statement of doctrines, doings, and claims; so that science, philosophy, art, and morality have been taught to bow in his name to the limitations of half-developed times and men.

"It is not denied that by leaving out what we dislike we can find in the New-Testament Jesus as n.o.ble an ideal as we will, though it can be only of a purely interior individualism, unrelated to practical and political functions. But we cannot ignore the many sources, apart from the real life of Jesus, from which this feast of good things has been derived.

The New Testament is, in fact, not so much the record of a life as the fruit of two ancient civilizations, the Oriental and Greek, of whose confluence Christianity itself was the product....

"It is urged that we destroy the basis of religious unity when we take away this historical and personal centre of faith. Men absolutely need, it is said, that concrete form, that individuality, under which the divine is represented to them in the Christ. There would be more cause for this anxiety if it could be shown that they have ever possessed such a centre. But what have they had, after all, but a common name for ever-changing ideals? The belief that all eyes were turned to a common authoritative centre was an illusion, which had its uses, indeed, but becomes a breeder of strife in proportion as men learn the rights of free inquiry. 'Wors.h.i.+p the Christ! follow Jesus!' cry the ages. But who is Jesus? and what is the Christ? The Jesus of Matthew is one, the Christ of John is another, the 'second Adam' of Paul is a third. The moral as well as the theological contents of the name vary with the ages and the sects that appeal to it. As the Christ of Luther was not the Christ of Augustine, nor his the Christ of James, so the Christ of the Unitarian is one, of the Calvinist another. Whom the one will save, the other will destroy; what to the one is moral wrong, to the other is divine right; what love would require in the one, justice would foreclose in the other. What common centre can the liberal Bible scholars and the panic-stricken, text-ridden Revivalists find in the name of Christ? All the warring sects have been 'standing up for Jesus;'

and which of them knows what Jesus was? The farther you get back toward the original, the less sure do you feel of your own knowledge, and the less right should you feel from what you know in part to a.s.sume that you have found the appointed centre of religious thought. It would be easy to show that unity is impossible so long as it is sought to found it on the claims of a person to that position, since the mysterious irrationality of such an office must keep the speculative faculties of mankind in ceaseless self-contradiction and strife. It would be easy to show that this claim of Jesus has been the perpetual root of dogmatic warfare-that all barbarism of the Christian Church in past ages has come of jealousy about the honor due the person of the Christ." We offer no apology for these long extracts from Mr. Johnson's inimitable little book of ninety pages. "He being dead yet speaketh," and his words give no uncertain sound. He was in advance of the times, and if his brethren in the Unitarian ministry would regard Jesus, whom they almost deify, as an _ideal_ (quite imperfect) that has come down to us from pagan peoples, and cease to court the favor of the orthodox, they would have more self-respect and more real regard from the thinking men of the age.

We might as well now come directly to the question whether the Jesus of the Gospels was an _ideal_ rather than a historical individual-an _impersonation_ rather than a person. And here we take the broad ground that whether there was a real man or not makes no difference whatever, because the writings themselves are largely _ideal_, and so make the man what he was not. No two persons wors.h.i.+p the same G.o.d, the "personified Infinite." The conception of G.o.d must itself be limited and incomplete, and therefore inadequate and largely ideal. No two persons believe in the same Jesus, so there must be as many ideals as there are believers.

The habit of exaggerating, of deifying those whom we have been taught to regard as the greatest and best, is a well-known disposition of the human mind. Indeed, "the function of the Church is the cultivation of the ideal." This is so palpable that the legends of all religions recognize this principle to such an extent that most of them represent their "saviors" as having been born of virgin mothers. Catholics flock to their temples and in parrot-like utterances wors.h.i.+p an ideal Jesus and an equally ideal Virgin, and thus cultivate only the ideal side of their nature. It is very much easier to excite the imagination than to convince the understanding; and this is the real secret of the strength of Catholicism and of the weakness of Protestantism. Catholic wors.h.i.+p is mainly spectacular, an appeal to the senses, and is therefore attractive alike to the uneducated and the educated. They believe the Gospels _literally_, because they have had the princ.i.p.al incidents recorded in them set forth before their eyes from their very birth, and they cannot be reasoned out of what they have never been reasoned into.

But we are told that Jesus must have been a real person or he never could have exerted the influence that he has for the last eighteen hundred years upon so many millions of people. Let us see: If Jesus ever dwelt upon this earth, it must have been several hundred years ago. Not one of the many millions who have wors.h.i.+pped him since his few years of sojourn here but have done so in view of what they have heard of him or read of him. They never saw him and never heard his voice. He wrote nothing, and never authorized any one else to write anything. After the lapse of nearly two centuries the four Gospels appeared. Very little is told of him there. If you take out what is repeated concerning him therein, you would not have, in length, what would make a modern sermon; and that would be found full of contradictions, absurdities, and impossibilities. Those who have believed on him have believed on what they called _testimony_ concerning him; and that testimony would have produced the same effect whether true or false if they really _believed_ it. The real existence of an alleged person is not essential to excite admiration if it is really _believed_ that he existed. The Swiss loved and honored William Tell just as much as if he had not in these latter years been proved a myth. The world's history teems with the heroic deeds of many n.o.ble persons (impersonations) who never had an existence, and the literature of the race would greatly suffer by striking out all that is fict.i.tious. The reason that the ideal Christ has exerted so much greater influence than any other impersonation is because so many skilful artists have bestowed their best labor upon it, and because the figure is so ancient and contains so many features that commend themselves to the human mind and heart.

We find in _Natural Genesis_, by the English poet Gerald Ma.s.sey, a pa.s.sage which so beautifully portrays our own view of this subject that we cannot forbear copying it:

"It has often been said that if there were no historic Christ then the writers who represented such a conception of the divine man must have included amongst them one who was equal to the Christ. But the mythical Christ was not the outcome of any such conception. It was not a work of the individual mind at all, but of the human race-a crowning result of evolution _versus_ any private conception of a hero. This was the hero of all men, who never was and was never meant to be human, but from the beginning was divine; a mythical hero without mortal model, and equally without fault or flaw. This was the star-G.o.d who dawned through the outermost darkness; this was the moon-G.o.d who brought the message of renewal and immortality; this was the sun-G.o.d who came with the morning to all men; this in the Kronian stage was the announcer of new life and endless continuity at the opening of every cycle, and in the psychotheistic phase the typical son of the Eternal as manifester and representative in time.

"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 repet.i.tion evoked from the human mind at last as it did the Greek G.o.d from the marble.

"Egypt labored at the portrait for thousands of years before the Greeks added their finis.h.i.+ng touches to the type of the ever-youthful solar G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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="" subst.i.tute/="" 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="">

"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 G.o.ds.

"The imagery of the Catacombs shows that the types there represented are not the ideal figures of the human reality. They are the sole reality of the centuries after the Christian era, because they had been in the centuries long before. The symbolism, the allegories, the figures, and types remained there just what they were to the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, The iconography of the Catacombs absolutely proves that the lay figure, as Christ, must have sat for the portraits of Osiris, Horus the child, Mithras, Bacchus, Aristaeus, Apollo, Pan, the Good Shepherd. The lay figure or type is one all through. The portraits are manifold, yet they all mean the mythical Christ under whatsoever name.

"The typical Christ, so far from being derived from the model man, has been made up from the features of many G.o.ds, after a fas.h.i.+on somewhat similar to those 'pictorial averages' portrayed by Mr. Galton, in which the characteristics of various persons are photographed and fused in a portrait-a composite likeness of twenty different persons merged in one that is not _anybody_.

"It is pitiful to track the poor faithful gleaners who picked up every fallen fragment or scattered waif and stray of the mythos, and to watch how they treasured every trait and tint of the ideal Christ to make up the personal portrait of their own supposed real one. His mother, like the other forms of the queen of heaven, had the color of the _mater frugum_, the complexion of the golden corn; and a Greek Father of the eighth century cites an early tradition of the Christians concerning the _personnel_ of the Christ to the effect that in taking the form of Adam he a.s.sumed features exactly like those of the Virgin, and his face was of a _wheaten color_, like that of his mother. That is, he (the seed) was _corn-complexioned_, as was the mother of corn, like Flava Keres, Aurea Venus, the Golden Lakshmi, the Yellow Neitli; and the son was her seed, which in Egypt was the corn brought forth at the vernal equinox, and which was continued in the cult of Rome as the 'bread-corn of the elect.'

"In the chapter of 'knowing the spirits of the East' the Osirified a.s.sumes the type of the virile and hairy Horus, the divine hawk of the resurrection. This is called the type under which he desires to appear before all men; and it is said, 'his hair is on his shoulder when he proceeds to the heaven.' This long hair of the adult Horus reaching down to the shoulders is a typical feature in the portraits of the Messiah, the copy of the Kamite Christ made permanent by the art of the Gnostics.

The halo of Christ is the glory of the sun-G.o.d seen in his phantom phase when the more physical type had become psychotheistic. Hence it is worn by the child-Christ as the _karast_ mummy. It is the same halo that illumined Horus and Iu-em-hept, Krishna and Buddha, and others of whom the same old tales of deliverance and redemption were told and believed.

Yet the dummy ideal of paganism is supposed to have become doubly real as the man-G.o.d standing with one foot in two worlds-one resting on the ground of the fall from heaven, and the other on the physical resurrection from the earth."

It is a well-known fact that many early Christian sects absolutely denied the existence of Christ in the flesh, regarding him as a phantom.

It is very difficult to decide whether the apostle Paul believed in a real or an ideal Christ. He wrote his Epistles before the Gospels were written, and therefore could have learned nothing from that source.

Concerning the various appearances of Jesus after the resurrection, he says: "Last of all, he was seen of me, as by one born out of due time,"

and this seems to bear out the conjecture that Jesus was an ideal, inasmuch as it was not in the flesh that he saw him, and his refusal to know him after the flesh indicates his strong preference for him as an idea, and not as a person. Paul makes no mention of any miracle but that of the resurrection, and that was manifestly a spiritual rather than a physical fact. Moreover, he was a Pharisee, and it is difficult to see how he could have "gloried in the cross" had he taken the cross in a literal sense. He casts no reproach on the Jews for causing Jesus to suffer, and never speaks of the crucifixion as a crime, nor shows a particle of sympathy or compa.s.sion with the sufferer. He seems to have been the real founder of Christianity, and might have had in view the direct action of the solar divinity with whom Christ had become a.s.sociated.

A careful a.n.a.lysis of the Pauline Epistles will show, we think, that the Christ of Paul was an idea. And here it is important to bear in mind that those who attributed to him at least ten Epistles he never wrote would not scruple to alter, amend, interpolate, and change portions of the Epistles he actually did write. Those who formed the system of Christian ecclesiasticism never could afford to have a conscience. Those Fathers of the second century who formed the foundations of the Catholic hierarchy were most unscrupulous men.

Of the _Gnostics_, Mr. Gerald Ma.s.sey speaks as follows:

"The ancient wisdom of Egypt and Chaldea lived on with the men who knew, called the Gnostics. They had directly inherited the gnosis that remained oral, the sayings uttered from mouth to ear that were to be unwritten, the mysteries performed in secret, the science kept concealed. The continuity of the astronomical mythos of Equinoctial Christolatry and of the total typology is proved by the persistence of the type-the ancient genitrix, the two sisters, the hebdomad of inferior and superior powers, the trinity in unity represented by _Iao_ the tetrads male and female, the double Horus, or Horus and Stauros, the system of aeons, the Karaite divinities, Harpocrates and Sut-Anubis, Isis and Hathor. Theirs was the Christ not made flesh, but the manifester of the seven powers and perfect star of the pleroma. The figure of eight, which is a sign of the Nnu or a.s.sociate G.o.ds in Egypt, who were the primary Ogdoad, is reproduced as a gnostic symbol, a figure of the pleroma and fellow-type of the eight-rayed star. The 'Lamb of G.o.d' was a gnostic sign. 'Lord, thou art the Lamb' (and 'our Light') was a gnostic formula. The 'Immaculate Virgin' was a gnostic type. On one of the sard stones Isis stands before Serapis holding the sistrum in one hand, in the other a wheatsheaf, the legend being 'Immaculate is our Lady Isis,'

which proves the continuity from Kam.

"It was gnostic art that reproduced the Hathor-Meri and Horus of Egypt as the Virgin and child-Christ of Rome, and the icons of characters entirely ideal which served as the sole portraits of the _historical_ Madonna and Jesus the Christ. The report of Irenaeus sufficed to show the survival of the true tradition. He complains of the oral wisdom of the Gnostics, and says rightly they read from things unwritten-i. e. from sources unknown to him and the Fathers in general. Chief of these sources was the science of astronomy. He testifies that Marcus was skilled in this form of the gnosis, and enables us to follow the line of unbroken continuity, and to confute his own a.s.sertion that Gnosticism had no existence prior to Marcion and Valentinus; which shows he did not know, or else he denied the fact, that the Sutt.i.tes, the Mandaites, the Essenes, and Nazarenes were all Gnostics; all of which sects preceded the cult of the carnalized Christ. Hippolytus informs us that Elkesai said the Christ born of a Virgin was _onian_. The Elkesites maintained that Jesus the Christ had continually transformed and manifested in various bodies at many different times. This shows they also were in possession of the gnosis, and that the Christ and his repeated incarnations were Kronian. Hence we are told that they occupied themselves 'with a bustling activity in regard to astronomical science.'

Epiphanius also bears witness that the head and front of the gnostic boast was astronomy, and that Manes wrote a work on astronomy, astronomy being the root of the whole matter concerning Equinoctial Christolatry.

"Nothing is more astounding, on their own showing, than the ignorance of the Fathers about the nature, the significance, the descent of Gnosticism, and its rootage in the remotest past. They knew nothing of evolution or the survival of types, and for them the new beginning with Christ carnalized obliterated all that preceded. Such a thing as priority, natural genesis, or the doctrine of development did not trouble those who considered that the more the myth the greater was the miracle which proved the divinity.

"Also, it has been a.s.serted from the time of Irenaeus down to that of Mansel that the Gnostic heretics of the second century invented a number of spurious Gospels in imitation of or in opposition to the true gospel of Christ, which has descended to us as canonical, authentic, and historic. This is a popular delusion, false enough to d.a.m.n all belief in it from the beginning until now. The ignorance of the past manifested by men like Irenaeus is the measure of the value of their testimony to the origines of Equinoctial Christolatry. They who pretend to know all concerning the founding and the founder know nothing of the foundations....

"Gnosticism, according to those who are ignorant of its origin and relations.h.i.+ps, was supposed and a.s.sumed to have originated in the second century; the first being carefully avoided, only proves that the A-Gnostics, who had literally adopted the pre-Christian types, and believed they had been historically fulfilled, were then for the first time becoming conscious of the cult that preceded theirs and face to face with those who held them to be the heretics. Gnosticism was no birth or new thing in the second century, it was no perverter or corrupter of Christian doctrines divinely revealed, but the voice of an older cult growing more audible in its protest against a superst.i.tion as degrading and debasing now as when it was denounced by men like Tacitus, Pliny, Julian, Marcus Aurelius, and Porphyry. For what could be more shocking to any sense really religious than the belief that the very G.o.d himself had descended on earth as an embryo in a virgin's womb, to run the risk of abortion and universal miscarriage during nine months in utero, and then dying on a cross to save his own created world or a portion of its people from eternal perdition? The opponents of the latest superst.i.tion were too intelligent to accept a dying deity....

"Never were men more perplexed and bewildered than the A-Gnostic Christians of the third and fourth centuries-who had started from a new beginning altogether, which they had been taught to consider solely historic-when they turned to look back for the first time to find that an apparition of their faith was following them one way and confronting them in another; a shadow that threatened to steal away their substance, mocking them with its aerial unreality; the ghost of the body of truth which they had embraced as a solid and eternal reality claiming to be the rightful owner of their possessions; a phantom Christ without flesh or bone; a crucifixion that only occurred in cloudland; a parody of the drama of salvation performed in the air, with never a cross to cling to, not a nail-wound to thrust the fingers into and hold on by, not one drop of blood to wash away their sins. It was horrible. It was devilish. It was the devil, they said, and thus they sought to account for Gnosticism and fight down their fears. 'You poor ignorant idiotai!' said the Gnostics, 'you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically.'-'You sp.a.w.n of Satan!' responded the Christians, 'you are making the mystery by converting our accomplished facts into your miserable fables; you are dissipating and dispersing into thin air our only bit of solid foothold in the world, stained with the red drops of Calvary. You are giving a Satanic interpretation to the word of revelation and falsifying the oracles of G.o.d. You are converting the solid facts of our history into your new-fangled allegories.'-'Nay,' replied the Gnostics, 'it is you who have taken the allegories of mythology for historic facts.' And they were right. It was in consequence of their taking the allegorical tradition of the fall for reality that the Christian Fathers considered woman to be accursed, and called her a serpent, a scorpion, the devil in feminine form."

The Gnostics are said by Gibbon to have been "the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name." They were finally forbidden by Theodosias I. to a.s.semble at their places of meeting or to teach their doctrines. Their books, too, were burned, so that we have now no full account of them. Only those who lied about them have been permitted a hearing.

The very fact that all the apparently historic events in the life of Jesus have an astrological and metaphoric character lifts him out of the category of physical humanity into that of the ideal. We may relegate him thither, and yet leave no vacant place in the arena of common life.

This would be in perfect keeping with ancient usage. Among the reputed founders of philosophic systems we have no evidence of the existence of such great teachers as Manu, Kapila, Vyasa, Kanada, or Gotama, and the founding of the princ.i.p.al commonwealths was ascribed to demiG.o.ds and fict.i.tious eponymous heroes. Rome, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and indeed every ancient city of note, was said to be established after that manner. Even leaders and teachers actually existing have been disguised by myth or the characteristics of the doctrine which they taught.

Confucius and Zoroaster are hidden from view by the character a.s.signed to them by later writers. Even Socrates as he appears and speaks in the Platonic _Dialogues_ is little else than a personification of the Academic philosophy. When we consider that he is closely a.s.similated to the sages and hero-G.o.ds of the other wors.h.i.+ps, and that every significant point in his history conforms to astrological periods and to similar characteristics in the pagan religions, we cannot well avoid the conclusion that he too is an _ideal_.

Mr. William Oxley of England, in his great work on Egypt, takes the ground that the account we have of Jesus in the Gospels is substantially drawn from Egyptian sources.

Amenoph III. was one of the greatest of the old Egyptian kings. Amongst other gigantic works, he built the temple at Luxor, much of which is buried in sand and covered over by native houses. It is on the walls of this temple that very remarkable sculptures are portrayed relating to the birth, etc. of Amenoph III.; they are on the inner wall of the sacred shrine, the holy of holies, and the sculptured scenes represent the annunciation, the conception, the incarnation, birth, and adoration of the divine man-child (Amenoph III.) born from Mut-em-Sa. The two latter syllables mean "the Alone," or Only One, and the whole t.i.tle means "the mother who gave birth to the Only One."