foundation of the world been sacrified against their will to symbolize that mystery-no wonder if he came to believe that it was possible for him, singly and alone, to cause the sun of righteousness to rise with healing on its wings, to bring back the age of gold, a spring and fountain of eternal happiness, and some few years after his own death, to come flying through the air in person on clouds of glory to inaugurate an era of peace and happiness when all things should become new. For that was the gigantic delusion to which he sacrificed his life. If it were not so tragical, we, with our present knowledge of the vastness of the universe and our own insignificance, should be inclined to smile at the ludicrous want of a sense of proportion between the means and the end that such an idea displayed, and no doubt no Greek philosopher or even Greek lyric poet, with their instinctive sense of proportion and harmony, could ever have been betrayed into so glaring and fatal an error; but it should be remembered that Christ was most likely, in part at any rate, by birth a Jew, and that that people have always tenaciously held the savages’ view of creation, which causes individual Scotch Presbyterians to this day to believe that they can affect the local weather by the action of their own wills, and Protestants to declare when hard pressed and getting the worst of an argument, that they are God, and that it is impious to endeavour to confute them.
And if there be any truth in this theory of the Christian legend, it helps to explain a good many things in it. It may be, as the great folk-lorist Gubernatis has pointed out, that the finding of the piece of gold in the fish’s mouth is merely a form of the Sakuntala, Golden Locks, and Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes legends; but it may also be a fact, Christ having deliberately acted the legend by ground-baiting, and, if he did, we ought not exactly to accuse him of charlatanism, for the importance of the esoteric truth thereby symbolized may in his eyes have justified the trick; but we ought to remember, although a sufficient quantity has never yet been accumulated in any individual or even congregation, that by faith we can remove mountains—as Sharp-Eyes did. Symbolical, too, may have been the so-called miraculous draught or draughts of fishes, which, if they happened, were no miracle at all, they having been repeated in a much more remarkable form in the lake at Nostell Priory by the late Charles Waterton. We are not even informed how often Christ failed to divine the presence of the shoal of fish by observing their shadows in the water. In fishing with the grasshopper or spinning the minnow for large trout in the Oglio of Val Camonica, the success of the fisherman depends in great part upon his power of seeing the fish in the water as it follows the bait. This faculty depends upon the power of rapidly changing the eyes’ focus when viewing anything isolated in a transparent medium, and this, I believe, to the more or less perfect adjustment of range of vision in the right and left eye. In most people the range of sight differs more or less in the right and left eye, and where this is very much the case, it is often impossible to judge at a moment’s notice whether an object flying be
