a gnat near at hand or a bird a long way off. Christ, like Waterton, very probably picked up the art of seeing fish deep down in the water from some savage fisherman, and then perfected himself by practice in his rambles about the Lake of Galilee. And speculating on the cause of his success, the aphorism ascribed to him would naturally occur of itself: “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light, but if thy eye be dark, how great is that darkness.” This theory of the Gospel legend would also explain the confidence with which Christ confronted death, and if there be any grain of truth in the Scripture account, the terrible collapse upon the cross itself. All at once the vision of death as a reality swept away the fine-spun reasonings and inductions of the Idealist, and he saw as if in a lightning-flash the vast gulf of nothingness, which was all that in reality he had to hope for, the dream of returning within a few brief years through clouds of glory was at an end, the grand idea of awakening the dead and bringing them back to earth in a bodily resurrection, as the prince with the help of Long, Broad, and Sharp-Eyes had recalled the frozen warriors to life in the enchanted castle of iron, had dissipated itself as a summer mist or a thin dream of dawning. Oh! the pity of it, that so genial, well-meaning and poetical an intelligence, bent upon benefiting the world at large, and sacrificing itself for the good of mankind, should in reality have sacrificed itself to so gigantic a delusion; oh, the double pity of it, that the sacrifice, so far from having any good results whatever, was destined to perpetuate the horrors of religious mania, of Christianity, of the savages’ barbarous conception of the universe for another two thousand years, and to deluge great part of the western hemisphere with tears and blood.
The idea, like all ill weeds, grew apace, and soon it was the whole creation—just imagine it!—from the earth-centre to the farthest limits of the Milky Way, that was groaning and travailing in pain together, and which man’s regeneration was somehow to set to rights. After this, the monster of religious arrogance grew beyond all bounds, the poisonous seed which would never have had a chance amongst a primitive and healthy people living in the open air, throve apace on the hot-bed of the expiring classic world which the toadstools of superstition converted little by little into the fetid ichor and gaudy corruption, covered by the long dark autumnal and winter night of the Middle Ages. But when, after centuries of pious fraud, it gradually began to dawn upon even the stupidest believer, after centuries of practical experience, that no amount of bottling even the purest faith in the most suitable human organism, would transform even the most ascetic of saints into blasting-powder and dynamite, religious arrogance, to preserve itself, suffered a gradual transformation. Human conduct must somehow certainly be all-important, and if faith was useless from an engineering point of view, it must be all the more effective in the moral and spiritual world, determining the condition of the individual soul after death and for all eternity. Thus religious vanity has managed, by hook or by crook,
