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 Association, written by that remarkable man, the Rev. Samuel Johnson, a Unitarian minister and an author of no little repute. The subject was _The Worship 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 worship of the ideal; and this hope lies, not in pausing on this step as final, nor in proving the names and personalities associated 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 worship 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 worship of ideals is a process of idealization.... Man’s power of growth, therefore, resides in the ability to shift 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 passes 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 worship 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 god 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-worship 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 Ship, the Cross, the Dove, are all associated 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 gods 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 Godhead 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 God-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 noble 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. ‘Worship 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 assume 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 worship the same God, the “personified Infinite.” The conception of God 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 worship 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 worship 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 principal 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 worshipped 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 noble persons (impersonations) who never had an existence, and the literature of the race would greatly suffer by striking out all that is fictitious. 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 Massey, a passage 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-god who dawned through the outermost darkness; this was the moon-god who brought the message of renewal and immortality; this was the sun-god 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 repetition evoked from the human mind at last as it did the Greek god from the marble.

“Egypt labored at the portrait for thousands of years before the Greeks added their finishing touches to the type of the ever-youthful solar god. 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 god 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 substitute/ 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 Christ.

“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 gods.

“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, Aristæus, 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 gods, after a fashion 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 assumed 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 assumes 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-god 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-god 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 compassion 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 associated.

A careful analysis 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 Massey 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 Æôns, 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 associate gods 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 God’ 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 Irenæus 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 assertion that Gnosticism had no existence prior to Marcion and Valentinus; which shows he did not know, or else he denied the fact, that the Suttites, 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 _œonian_. 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 asserted from the time of Irenæus 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 damn all belief in it from the beginning until now. The ignorance of the past manifested by men like Irenæus 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 relationships, was supposed and assumed 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 superstition 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 God 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 superstition 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 aërial 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 spawn 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 God. 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 assemble 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 principal commonwealths was ascribed to demigods and fictitious 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 assigned 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 assimilated to the sages and hero-gods of the other worships, 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 title means “the mother who gave birth to the Only One.”

One fact is established beyond all cavil, and that is that the New Testament is the product of an order of men well versed in astronomy, and who by the aid of that science produced, on lines laid down by the ancient Egyptian hierophants, a new version of the old myths and allegories. We have as a fact the actual names and dates plagiarized from an Egypto-Arabic source, which undoubtedly betrays its origin, and the interpretation of this, and numberless instances besides, in strict accordance with the astrological formula and system, with its Graeco-Egyptian zodiacal pictorial representations.

Oxley says: “_Apropos_ to this doctrine, I have in my possession two statuettes—one dating from the twenty-second dynasty, 900 B. c.—of Isis, crowned and nursing the babe Horus. On my return from Egypt through Italy, I obtained a statuette of Mary, crowned and nursing the babe Jesus, which is an exact copy of the Virgin and Child in the church of St. Augustine in Rome. _The figures are identical_.”

Face to face with such a fact, who dare assert that the Egyptian Isis and Horus are a myth, and that the Christian Mary and Jesus are really historical? Some simple-minded ones beguile themselves with the delusion that these Egyptian and other heathen beliefs are prophecies of the real Jesus who in the fulness of time came down from heaven and was born of a virgin. But against this we have not only the actual claim of several Egyptian kings to be the “son of God according to promise or prophecy” (sixteen hundred years before Christ was born), but we have the fact of a whole nation _for thousands of years_ resting their hopes of eternal salvation upon a belief that “the son of God, Osiris, came down from heaven, took upon himself the mortal form, was slain by wicked hands, rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven, where he became the great judge of all mankind.”

What adds to the difficulty is that _no dates_ are given in the writings of the early Christian authors, and, what is more, many of their names are evidently _noms de plume_; for instance, the arch-heretic _Arius_ and the great Nicene Council seem to resolve themselves simply into a controversy relating to the sun-god under the form of _Aries_ (the Ram or Lamb); and as to dates in connection therewith, they are simply Masonic points with an astronomical reference and symbolical meaning. In plain terms, nearly the whole of both the Old and New Testaments is an allegorical record of astral, solar, and planetary phenomena, with personages substituted for zodiacal signs; and with this key in hand the Hermetic student can unravel the allegories which are presented in such a form as to read like literal history.

Our English name for the zodiacal sign referred to is the Ram, but in Latin it is _Aries_, and _Nisan_ (which is the month of March). The “sacred year” of all systems commences with this month and sign; hence the _Arian_ heresy and the Council of _Nice_; which resolves itself into a descriptive personified account of a conjunction of planets about the definite fixing of the _first point of Aries_ as a basic point in time in history, and which point is used in astronomical science to this day. But the appearance of the Cross, with the letters I H S on the planispherical chart, gives the key to the solution of the mystery. The Church interprets these letters to stand for _Jesus Salvator Hominum_—i. e. Jesus the Saviour of Men. The initiates read them as _numerals_, which stand for 608; which is the exact period of a solar-lunar cycle—i. e. the number of years which pass before the sun and moon occupy the same relative positions in the heavens.

According to the astral theology of ancient religious systems, this cycle of 608 (or 600) years represented a Messianic period, at the completion of which a new messiah or avatar or savior was born upon the earth.

The one prior to Jesus was _Cyrus_, who gave orders for the building of the temple at Jerusalem just six hundred years before Christ. Manatheo speaks of a “Cyrus,” son of Cambyses, first king of the twenty-second dynasty, but no Cyrus appears in the Egyptian annals. The biblical Cyrus is only another form of Osiris, and is in reality a sun-savior. The Arabs used the same system, for their Mohammed comes in just about six hundred years after Christ, and their era commences with their commencement of a new year, which dates from 622 A. D. Even our latest era—_Anno Domini_—did not come into general use until about one thousand years after the event it is said to commemorate had passed. This epoch was introduced into Italy in the sixth century by Dionysius the Little, a Roman abbot, and it began to be used in Gaul in the eighth, but was not generally followed until the ninth century. From extant charters in England it is known to have been used a little before the ninth century, but it did not come into common use for a century later. Time was, for centuries after the alleged birth of Christ, calculated from January 1 in the 4th of the 194th Olympiad, the 753d A. u. c. of the foundation of Rome, and 4714th of the Julian period.

The astro-theological foundation of the New Testament being demonstrated, the actual date of the compilation of the matter becomes of secondary importance, inasmuch as celestial phenomena are as true today as they were when first used to symbolize the intellectual and spiritual nature of man. As all nations that have any pretensions to be considered civilized have had the same phenomena for their religious systems, and as the path of the solar orb has been utilized for the history of its various personifications, the question arises, Which out of the many messiahs or sun-saviors are true, and which are false? As has been already noted, the leading incidents in the memoirs of Osiris, Buddha, Chrishna, and Jesus are identical in conception, but more or less varied in expression according to the idiosyncrasies of the writers. The logical and true method is to regard one and all as allegorical symbols, clothed not merely with an eclectic intellectuality, but vested with a moral power that can affect the heart and conscience of men for good.

The parentage of Christianism is in Egyptian Osirianism, while that of what we understand as Judaism is attributable to Chaldean sources, both converging to a common centre and finding a new expression through two diverse orders, yet both equally versed in Cabalistic science, modified by the eclectic influences which were active at the period of their production.

The ecclesiastical party, for reasons which are well understood, never allowed the laity to be taught other than the literal and surface meaning, while the mystic brotherhoods were forbidden by the rules of their orders to make public the real meaning of the symbols, of which only the highest degree of initiates were allowed to know.

Mr. William Oxley further thinks that if it were possible to raise the veil that obscures the historic past it would be found that the divine-human ideal figure of Jesus Christ is the combination of the Western _Hesus_ and Eastern _Christus_. This accounts for the title, while the incidents in the life of the historic Apollonius of Tyana would supply material for the personal narrative. In fact, the nervous desire of ecclesiastical reviewers to suppress or explain away the too patent similarity between his and the Gospel life of Jesus is a half admission of there being a substratum of truth in the allegation.

Oxley says: “Against the claim for a very high antiquity in regard to even the Old Testament, we are confronted with the fact that all the Hebrew words used in its compilation have their roots in the Arabic language (or Aramaic, which closely borders upon the Arabic); and what is not less strange is, that many of the so-called apocryphal writings of the Christians are still extant in the same language. As Christian productions this fact is inexplicable, but considered as _Chrestonian_ tales or legends, it is easy to understand, seeing that they relate to the humanized deity of that geographical district.”

He concludes that Christianity, considered as a living spiritual truth, is the gradual development of a system of thought, and is the resultant of the highest and best conception of the human mind as an ideal of purity and every virtue that it is capable of expressing; and, further, that this ideal was presented to different nations long before the Christian one was known, and that it was the literalizing or personification of this _written ideal_ that afforded conditions for the superstructure of ecclesiastical systems, dependent on a separate caste of men set apart for the purpose of its support and propaganda. As these men were able to grasp and wield power over the intellect, and even persons, of their votaries, so in exact ratio the spiritual and intellectual ideal (which is not a monad, but universal) was lost, and the assumed historical personage is exalted at the expense of spiritual liberty and the birthright prerogative of humanity. In short, the supposed Founder of Christianity is not an historical personage, but an old ideal presented in a newer and better and higher form than its predecessors; and, further, this ideal is not dependent upon a past historical, but is held up as the standard of attainment by humanity; and as each realizes the truth within him or herself, then they will find that the real “Christ” is not and was not an historical person, but a spiritual life-giving principle within themselves.

The records of history show that a dramatic Christ has come down the stream of time from the earliest periods; from India through Egypt, China, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor, and Palestine, until the present time—from the Buddha of the Tauric constellations to the Aries and Pisces of the modern Christ; and all his manifestations possess the essential characteristics of the one sun-god. Midway between Buddhists and the Christians appears the sublimely idealistic mythology of Greece, shining all over with the glory of the solar legend. Very prominent in this system is the god-man Prometheus. The name is synonymous with _Logos_, which is used in the fourth Gospel in reference to Jesus, and signifies a demi-deity; and Prometheus means _Providence_, and is represented by the all-seeing Eye. We select him rather than other notable impersonations, for the purpose of referring to the wonderful Greek drama written by Æschylus (_Prometheus Bound_), which was acted in the theatre of Athens at least five hundred years before the Christian era. The plot was derived from material even then of great antiquity, and contains all the essential features of the modern “Passion Play” so beautifully portrayed upon canvas in our churches and eloquently described by our ministers of the present day. No author ever displayed greater powers of poetry in supporting through this Promethean play the august character of this divine sufferer. We give a few lines from Potter’s translation.:

“I will speak, Not as upbraiding them, but my own gifts Commending. ’Twas I who brought sweet hope To inhabit in their hearts; I brought The fire of heaven to animate their clay, And through the clouds of barbarous ignorance Diffused the beams of knowledge. In a word, Prometheus taught each useful art to man.”

He was called upon to explain how his goodness could have brought upon him such extreme suffering, and he says:

“See what, a god, I suffer from the gods! For mercy to mankind I am not deemed Worthy of mercy; but in this uncouth Appointment am fixed here, A spectacle dishonorable to Jove! On the throne of heaven scarce was he seated, On the powers of heaven He showered his various benefits, thereby Confirming his sovereignty; but for unhappy mortals Had no regard, but all the present race Willed to extirpate and to form anew. None save myself opposed his will. I dared, And, boldly pleading, saved them from destruction— Saved them from sinking to the realm of night; For which oflënce I bow beneath these pains, Dreadful to suffer, piteous to behold!”

None remained to be witnesses of his dying agony but the chorus of ever-faithful women, who bewailed and lamented him. The earth trembled and the whole frame of nature was convulsed, and the curtain fell on the sublimest scene ever presented to human sight—a _dying god!_ The preternatural darkness was exhibited on the stage, and the most agonizing and heartfelt sorrow manifested by the weeping audience. It was the “Passion Play.”

Let it be kept in mind that all of the incidents of the Gospels have been acted in the theatres or illustrated in the sacred rites and religious ceremonies of pagan peoples from time immemorial. Are not the Gospels a plagiarized and adapted _drama?_

We close this chapter with a further quotation from Mr. Johnson:

“I am not asserting that all this was pure fiction—that no one stood where men imagined they saw a God on earth. But I do recognize the extreme difficulty of satisfying a free and sincere mind as to how much or how little did ‘happen,’ and the extreme hardihood of asserting at this day that there was anything in the person or life of Jesus to vest in him the claim to be the enduring definitive centre of religious thought and association under any name or title whatsoever. Neither the character of the records nor the manner of their origination authorizes that postulate of perfection through which alone such claim could vest in any being. The veneration of ages for his name deserves respect as the satisfaction of a natural demand during a certain stage of human progress. But it does not prove him an exception to the law that the worship of personages must give way to the worship of principles—the centrality of an individual to the centrality of ideas—the divinity or ‘lordship’ of a man to the deity of the infinitely wise and good. It illustrates that law. Christism in due time passes, like polytheism, and a larger faith succeeds. Thus the theory refutes itself.

“The Christian idealization demands that all imperfections in the New-Testament Jesus shall be ascribed to the misapprehensions of the disciples and the ignorance of the biographers. It is confident that Jesus must have been greater than the record shows. But we do not know that he was even so great as the record shows. We are confidently told that such an ideal as can be there discerned presupposes its actual—that no man could have drawn such a character except from life. ‘Such a grand figure is not hewn out of air.’ But it is quite possible to carry this kind of divination too far.

“If a man could be that, why could not a man or an age conceive that it ought to be? All that can fairly be assumed is, that there must have been an impressive life (or lives) behind all the construction; and this is not denied. But the necessities of the religious life in that time produced Jesus. Why could they not magnify their own product and improve upon it ideally as they developed into new and larger demands? If we are to insist that the idealizing faculty cannot go beyond actuality, no meaning will be left to the word ideal, and no such faculty will remain. This is the irony to which the old belief comes....

“A pure and simple worship of the Infinite and Eternal is the necessity of philosophy; it is the goal of science; it is the true ground of trust and prayer and love, of philosophic Theism and spiritual Pantheism alike; it is the parent of prophets, of mystics, of reformers, of all true builders of man’s social unity and religious communion.”

No reasonable man can doubt that the Christ of Paul and the Gospels is largely, if not altogether, ideal; and in the succeeding chapter we proceed to give more specifically our reasons for thinking so.