sacrifice in effect implies an "honest triumphant pride." (Here of course the writer drops for a moment the religious view and divine meaning of the Passion, and looks towards Calvary from the simply human side as it appeared to casual bystanders; for here he has only to deal with what he conceives to be errors in the human conception of Christ's human character. "You the orthodox, and you the reasoners, assert through the mouths of your churches or philosophies that purely human virtues are actually predicable of Christ, and appeal for evidence to his life and death. Well and good; we will, to gain ground for argument with you, forget that the Passion is not, and admit that it is, what you would call a purely human transaction. Are then these virtues predicable of it even as such?) A good man who incurs risk of death by his goodness, is too "proud” to abjure that goodness and live; here is none of that you
suicide's cut at his own throat; if you are not of your nature heavenly, how shall any alien celestial quality be sewn or stuck on to you? in whose cast clothes will you crawl into heaven by rational or religious cross-roads? "Imputed righteousness" will not much help your case; if you "impute" a wrong quality to any imaginable substance, does your imputation change the substance? What it had not before, it has not now; your tongue has not the power of turning truth to a lie or a lie to truth; the fact gives your assertion a straight blow in the face. The mystic who says that man is God has some logical cause for pride; but the sceptic has no more than the cleric—he who asserts that reason, which is finite, can be final, is essentially as "humb1e" as he who admits that he can be "saved" by accepting as an gift some "imputed" goodness which is not in any sense his. For reason—the "spectre" of the Jerusalem—is no matter for pride; if you make out that to be the best faculty about you, you give proof of the stupidest modesty and hatefullest humility. Look across the lower animal reason, and over the dim lying limit of tangible and changeable flesh; and be humble if you can or dare, then; for if what you apprehend of yourself beyond is not God, there is none—except in that sad sense of a dæmon or natural force, strong only to create and to divide and to destroy and to govern by reason or religion the material scheme of things. Extra hominem nulla salus. "God is no more than man; because man is no less than God:" there is B1ake’s Pantheistic Iliad in a nut-shell.
