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THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SAINT BERNARD SHAW by Aleister Crowley

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O.T.O.
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(415) 454-5176 ---- Messages only.

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Page numbers from the 1st edition are indicated like this: {1}
at the bottom of each page.

Original footnotes are brought up to the point of citation in text and
enclosed thusly: <<footnote goes here>> There is evidence internally that several other footnotes were intended, but inadvertently left in the text instead of being set to the bottom of the page. These have been kept intact, and are usually recognizable by their form, e.g. "(Footnote re this passage: This short passage is too shocking to ...)"

Additional notes are marked in the same manner, and identified as to origin:
<<T NOTE: ..........>> --- note by the transcriber of pp. 1-143
<<WEH NOTE: .........>> --- note by Bill Heidrick

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"Jerusalem and the Mystical Sacrifice."

This section demands little comment; but it may be observed that Matthew says in chapter XXVII, verse 50, that `Jesus cried again with a loud voice' after the complaint that he was forsaken, as recorded by Mr. Shaw. It is not unreasonable to suppose that this last cry was the "It is finished" recorded by other evangelists. Now these words are not merely what they seem to be. They, or their equivalents "Konx Om Pax", were the technical cry of triumph used in the initiations of the ritual of the "slain god".
At the risk of tediousness and reiteration we must complain once more of the extraordinary bias shown by Mr. Shaw in his reading of the text. He is so determined to be not merely a secularist, but a secularist determined to read history into legend, that he omits altogether any incidents in the story of the Crucifixion which might upset that reading. It is really as bad criticism as that of the ingenious gentleman who quite correctly reported Jesus as having said (Matthew, XXII, 40) "Hang all the law and the prophets."
It is submitted that this method is utterly vicious. It would be just as reasonable to take an Arabian Night from the "Alf laylah wa laylah", remove all the evidently fabulous incidents, and conclude that "there is no reason to suppose that the remainder is not a true story." Quite right; it may be true, but there is no reason why we should suppose it to be so, and where, as in this case, there is really no particular point in the story except the fabulous elements, the universe of our discourse is, so to speak reduced to zero. Mr. Shaw is anxious to convert the world to the {52} belief that the Jesus of the Gospels was a socialist after Mr. Shaw's own heart, and his method is to take from a great mass of legend just those facts of the recorded life which suit his purpose, and just those recorded sayings which seem to bear out his contention. It would be possible to make a socialist out of Machiavelli or Hobbes, by a similar method of exegesis; and it might be rather amusing to go through the prefaces of Mr. Shaw and prove him a Tory. It would be quite easy.

"Not this Man but Barabbas."

Mr. Shaw says "The choice of Barabbas thus appears as a popular choice of the militant advocate of physical force as against the unresisting advocate of mercy." As Mr. Shaw admits, he has gained this conception of Barabbas not from Matthew, but from the other gospels. It, however, is not a `popular' choice! Read Matthew XVII, 20 <<WEH NOTE: XXVII,20>>: "But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. "And there seems no reason to suppose that Barabbas was chosen because he advocated physical force. It seems more likely that his name was taken simply as that of a wellknown man <<In this connection the reader is referred to Dr. J. G. Frazer's theory of the Book of Esther.>>, who happened to be popular in the way that brigands have always been from the beginning of the world. It is the romance of a brigand's life that commends him to the popular imagination. There is no reason why we should suppose that Barabbas was in any special sense an advocate of physical force. For there has never been in any country until of very late years any person so equally degenerate and imbecile as to advocate anything else as the ultimate ratio. {53} And of course if any other plan were adopted, it would be instantly upset by the first man who chose to pick up a stick. Jesus himself is the strongest possible advocate of physical force. He boasts (Matthew XXVI, 53.) "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of Angels?" His reason for not mobilizing the angels is simply (verse 56) "that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled." It is a mere postponement of the exercise of warrior power, for he says to the high priest, in verse 64. "Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." How are Satan and the unbelieving to be cast into the Lake of Fire except by superior force? It hardly seems the programme for the "Unresisting advocate of mercy."

The reader should get it entirely out of his head that Jesus is a forgiving kind of person. Even in the early part of his life he announces his mission in most uncompromising terms. In Matthew X, 34, 35, we read "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." And on the Cross he says: "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." Ignorance is the only excuse, He has a splendid chance to show nobility by forgiving Judas: and he missed it. {54} It is utterly incomprehensible to me how this superstition of `gentle Jesus' has endured. Even Shelley, a professed atheist, talks in "Prometheus Unbound" about `his mild and gentle ghost wailing for the faith he kindled,' though on a previous occasion he had written of the "Galilean Serpent". No strictures can be too severe for people who deliberately mutilate texts and emasculate characters. The hell-fire evangelists are a thousand times better as critics than the Renans. Bernard Shaw, by these remarks becomes intellectually inferior to Billy Sunday!

"The Resurrection"

No comment is here needed except as a further illustration of Mr. Shaw's carelessness. It is not said that Jesus was buried in the family vault of Joseph of Arimathaea. On the contrary it is (Matthew, XXVII, 60) "his own new tomb which he had hewn out in the rock." Which is a very different thing. It doesn't matter; but a man who drops eggs is not to be trusted to carry dynamite.

"The Date of Matthew's Narrative"

"One effect of the promise of Jesus to come again in glory during the lifetime of some of his hearers is to date the gospel without the aid of any scholarship. It must have been written during the lifetime of Jesus's contemporaries: that is, whilst it was still possible for the promise of his Second Coming to be fulfilled. The death of the last person who had been alive when Jesus said `There be some of them that stand here that shall in no wise taste death till they see the Son of man coming in his {55} kingdom' destroyed the last possibility of the promised Second Coming, and bore out the incredulity of Pilate and the Jews. And as Matthew writes as one believing in that Second Coming, and in fact left his story unfinished to be ended by it, he must have produced his gospel within a lifetime of the crucifixion. Also, he must have believed that reading books would be one of the pleasures of the kingdom of heaven on earth."
The whole argument of this paragraph appears to rest upon completely bad psychology, alike of the writer of the gospel and the readers for whom it was intended. If Matthew had been worrying about possibilities in the ordinary sense of the word, he would not have got very far with his gospel! The merest glance at Matthew's mind, the most casual and superficial appreciation of it, shows that he would have been simply amazed had any one offered to him such an argument as Mr. Shaw presents. The difficulties with regard to the Second Coming of Jesus have been pointed out often enough; and I have yet to see the Christian who was in the least disturbed by them. Very few apologists have even gone so far as to take the trouble to explain away the promise of Jesus that he would return. Such an explanation in any case is fairly easy, either on the obvious mystical tack, or by showing that the Transfiguration fulfills the promise in part, the apparitions to Stephen and to Paul in part; and so on. (Mr. Shaw seems to forget that it was thousands of years before anybody doubted that Moses <<T NOTE: wrote?>> the Pentateuch, although his own death and burial are described in it.)
It is a very poor argument too. There is no reason at all {56} why a man should not describe his own death and burial. (Especially is this so with Moses, who was buried by God himself, so that no man knew where his tomb was!!! (Deut. XXXIV, 5,6.) As luck would have it, I did it myself some years ago in my "Book of Lies", chapter 65! Would Mr. Shaw quote this as a proof that the book was not written by me, and not until after my death? It never occured to religious writers of such periods to try to guard themselves against any rational criticism. The thing practically did not exist; and to this day the vast majority of Christians are absolutely incapable of understanding any such arguments, which they regard as mere blasphemy. They do not worry about it, even so much as to say that the text is corrupt or interpolated, or may be interpreted after another manner. They simply ride over it without seeing it. The most powerful arguments do not even rock the boat. The type of mind is different, the plane of thought is different. It is not possible to find a common ground for intellectual discussion between Charles Bradlaugh and Charles Sprugeon, because Bradlaugh bases everything upon the mind, and Spurgeon merely remarks "The carnal mind is enmity against God."
Moreover, all attempts of this kind to date documents are absolutely unscholarly. A document may be composite, and incorporate older elements. We might as well try to date Mark Twain's "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur" by saying that the author shows so much knowledge of the intimate life of the king that he must have been a contemporary, or at the very least have been informed by eye-witnesses. There are fifty possibilities of error in all documents of this class, and Mr. Shaw ignores them in a {57} way that can only be called beyond amazement.
The only real way to date a book is to possess a dated copy. If I possess among (or rather above) my treasures a "Leaves from the Journal of our life in the Highlands", and that copy contain an indubitable signature of King Edward VII, authenticated by comparison with that signature in the archives of the state, one might be justified in believing that the book was genuine. The mere date upon the title-page would prove nothing. The volume might be a piracy of many years later, and all sorts of liberties might have been taken with the editing of such a book.
Any one with any knowledge of bibliography knows that this is not only possible but even likely. Witness the adventures of Burton's "Arabian Nights". We have a codex of Matthew which certainly belongs to the third or fourth century, but there is no real evidence whatever that that codex is derived from any previous codex. It may have been the first time that the manuscript ever appeared in that form.

"Class Type of Matthew's Jesus."

Most of the points in this section have been dealt with previously in various places, but we must draw attention to Mr. Shaw's final admission. "All this shows a great power of seeing through vulgar illusions, and a capacity for higher morality than has yet been established in any civilized community; but it does not place Jesus above Confucius or Plato, not to mention more modern philosophers and moralists." `All this', as has been shown, is by no means admissable. But it leaves us to expect a further revelation {58} in some other gospel which will place Jesus above Confucius and Plato. We shall see later whether this expectation is to be realized, or whether it is in the same class of promises as that of the Second Advent. We now turn to the gospel according to Mark.

Mark

"The Women Disciples and the Ascension"

There is little need of complaint in this section. Mark, as Mr. Shaw says, is brief, one may add mercifully brief; and Mr. Shaw also evidently agrees in the general opinion of scholars that Mark is on the whole a much more genuine document than Matthew. It is still composite, for the reasons already given in the case of Matthew. Most of the quotations which have been given above as evidence for this way of thinking have parallel passages in the older gospel.
We need only cavil at one point of interpretation. Mr. Shaw takes Mark's statement with regard to Joseph of Arimathaea, and not only misquotes it, but interprets it quite unjustifiably. Mr. Shaw says that Joseph is described by Mark as "One who also himself was looking for the kingdom of God" as if it were in the text; which however reads (Mark XV. 43) "An honourable counsellor which also waited for the kingdom of God". Why should this suggest to Mr. Shaw that he was an `independent' seeker? On the contrary, it is perfectly compatible with the statement of Matthew that he `also himself was Jesus' disciple'. Mr. Shaw in this preface is making a special point of distinguishing between the gospels, but it is evident that he has not been writing with his authority in front {59} of him. The phrase `also himself' is in Matthew XXVII, 57, and in Luke XXIII, 51. It is evident that Mr. Shaw is trusting an excellent but not quite perfect memory. It is an extremely small point; but it goes to prove a big one, that Mr. Shaw is careless again and again, and therefore an untrustworthy guide, where such extreme accuracy is required as is here the case.
Another example follows immediately in Mr. Shaw's very next paragraph. "Mark earns our gratitude by making no mention of the old prophecies, and thereby not only saves time, but avoids the absurd implication that Christ was merely going through a predetermined ritual, like the works of a clock, instead of living. In point of fact, the gospel begins with the fulfilment of a prophecy (Mark, 1, 2, to 4) "As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." There are also references to prophecy in Mark XII, 10, 35, and 36, and Mark XV, 27 28. Mr. Shaw's statement is generally true; but not as accurate as it ought to be in a work of this kind.
We must protest against a later statement in this paragraph of Mr. Shaw's. The ritual through which Jesus was going `like the works of a clock' is universal. It is not absurd at all. We are all going through this ritual at this hour. If it were not so, the ritual could never have taken hold of the imagination of man in every civilization in the way in which it has done. The ritual is merely a dramatic statement of the most evident and important facts of nature {60}
Mr. Shaw says that it is impossible to discover whether Jesus `means anything by a state of damnation beyond a state of error`. It is true that the passage quoted does not make this clear; but damnation in the regular Christian sense is constantly referred to in other parts of the gospel.
Mr. Shaw concludes "On the whole Mark leaves the modern reader where Matthew left him." It is not here, then, that we are to look for any facts which will `place Jesus above Confucius and Plato.' Perhaps we may have better luck with Luke.

"Luke."

"Luke the Literary Artist."

There is nothing to alter in Mr. Shaw's account of Luke. It may be helpful, however, to add that many biblical scholars surmise that Luke was a Greek physician. This Gospel is in fact very suggestive of the Greek romances of the decadence. The importance of this characterization of Luke is that one would justifiably reprimand even a servant girl who attached any historical value to such a work. The gospel was evidently retained because of its appeal to the Greek colonists of Asia Minor, where Christianity had made tremendous strides. We can agree with the ordinary scholar that Matthew primarily intended to convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah who they had been expecting. Matthew starts from the crack of the pistol: "The Book of the Generations of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham." Luke has to explain to his readers in Chapter I, verse 5, that Herod was king of Judaea, and when he comes to genealogy does not stop at Abraham, but ends {61} (III, 38) "which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God." We also note that Luke's Gospel is addressed by name to a certain Theophilus, evidently a Greek.

"The Charm of Luke's Narrative."

Mr. Shaw might have emphasized even more than he does the extravagance of Luke's imagination. Not content with a miraculous birth for Jesus, he plagiarizes the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis (chapters XVII and XXI) in order to make a miracle out of the birth of John the Baptist! Mr. Shaw explains with admirable conciseness and clarity the difference in the characterization of Jesus given by Luke, but he does not tell his readers the reason, which is simply that given above, that it was addressed to a different audience.
This disposes of the cavil of the freethinker about `conflicting gospels', but it also disposes of the claim of the orthodox as to inspiration. It is perfectly comprehensible that a life of the Kaiser written by the court historian at Potsdam should differ markedly from that compiled in the office of the "Daily Mail". But if an argument of this sort is advanced to explain discrepancies, the canon of truth has been abrogated and that of expediency put in its place. When we find a cure-all advertising in the `Daily Cough-drop' that will cure consumption, and in the "Strand Mercury" that it will cure specific disease, sensible people begin to doubt whether it will cure anything at all. In the most favourable case, they pay no heed to the advertisement, but inquire into the matter by means of analysis and clinical {62} experiment. It is therefore absolutely unsafe for the orthodox to bring forward the explanation given above for the contradiction in the gospel narrative.

"The Touch of Parisian Romance."

If for `Parisian' Mr. Shaw had written `Greek' there would be a truer characterization. There is really nothing else to be said. But Luke has no sense of anything at all except his art, and art of any kind always bears the seed of mysticism within it. It is extraordinarily amusing to find James Thomson in the "City of Dreadful Night" indulging in qabalistic speculations in the second section of that magnificent poem, the greatest of its kind that was ever written<<The poet follows a man who goes to a church, where Faith dies, a villa, where Love dies, and a squalid house, where Hope dies: and repeats eternally this mournful cycle.
"I ceased to follow, for the know of doubt
Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:
He circled thus for ever tracing out
The series of the fraction left of Life;
Perpetual recurrence in the scope
Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope<<< Life divided by that persistent three = LXX = .210
333 >>> >>. We should like, however, to add one remark, Mr. Shaw here admits that Luke can record a mystical view of the kingdom, yet still thinks of it as entirely material. What then becomes of his argument about the date of Matthew's Gospel? {63}

"JOHN"

"A New Story, and a New Character."

Mr. Shaw's characterization of Jesus is a fairly sound one. He says that he "gives the impression of an educated not to sasophisticated mystic." The statement is, however, masked and overlaid by details of discrepancies.
He does not sufficiently emphasize the great discrepancy. John does not begin with Jesus at all. He begins with the Logos. The gospel starts in chapter I, verses 1-5. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men." We learn the other half of the story later, Verses 9 to 14, "That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God".
Here are two main points. There is an eternal Light or Word which is capable of being made flesh. That is to say, John is concerned with an avatar, exactly like an Indian or a Gnostic. John's object is simply to prove that Jesus is that avatar. Hence John the Baptist is introduced to us entirely as a prophet, not in the least as a religious reformer. Read John, chapter I, verses 6 to 8. "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The {64} same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but he was sent to "bear witness of that Light."
John I, 15 to 16. "John bare witness of him and cried, saying, This is he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."
John, I, 19 to 27. "And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No, Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias. And they which were sent were of the Pharisees. And they asked him, and said unto him, Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet? John answered them, saying, I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not."
Immediately that John sees Jesus he bears witness that he is this avatar. John, I, 29 to 37. "The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me. And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel. {65} therefore am I come baptizing with water. And John bare record, saying, I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. And I knew not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God. Again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples: and looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God!"
One of these disciples who followed Jesus proceeds to spread this statement. John, 1, 41. "He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is being interpreted, the Christ." This is a very remarkable verse. Two Jews are talking; one of them says that the Messiah has been found; naturally a Jew would have understood no other allusion. It is to be noted that John everywhere speaks of `the Jews' as an alien race. The author of his Gospel was certainly not a Jew himself. This fact alone is sufficient to dispose of the imbecile identification of him with `the beloved disciple'. The character of the latter was invented by John to please certain elements of psychology which were peculiarly dear to Greeks. But John immediately explains to his readers that Messiah merely means Christ, which is rather like explaining that the Prince of Wales is Balder the Beautiful. It is impossible in this brief essay to go into the entire story of the Christ idea, but it is as different from that of Messias as Parzival is from Horatio Nelson. The error has arisen from the etymological accident that both words mean `annointed'. {66} The Christ is a purely mystical conception, which is not only a person but a spiritual attainment. It comes from the Gnostics and then from Chaldea, India, and China. Even the most enlightened of the Jewish prophets, occupied as they were with the material prosperity of their country, show no glimmering of the Christ idea. The whole theology, philosophy, and eschatology connected with Christ are utterly different from anything in Judaism, except the high Qabalah, which was by no means accepted in a general way, some authorities (though not the best) going so far as to say that it had not yet been invented, but that it was a mediaeval forgery, or at the very best never antedated Rabbi Schimeon, who is credited with the Zohar, the date of which is given as the first century A.D. (Footnote: The date of the Qabalah. In the text of the Old Testa-ment (Gen. XVII 5. XVII. 15) the numerical value of the name Abram is increased by five, and it becomes Abraham, while that of Sarai is reduced by five to Sarah, in connexion with the promise of a son. Some sort of Qabalah, deriving mystic truths from numerical considerations, therefore certainly existed at the date of the writing of the Book of Genesis. Students will note that this sort of trickery with words is common. It can hardly be an accident of trickery that MITHRAS the sun-god adds to 300, and is later spelt MEITHRAS 365, as is also his secret name ABRAXAS. With regard to 360 and 365, consult the authorities on the ancient calenders.)
It is evident from all this that John was writing to an extremely specialized class of persons. A few of the old sayings and doings of Jesus are retained; but the characteristics of the Oriental `holy man' have practically vanished. The parables of {67} the Synoptics disappear completely, and are replaced by a single parable (John X, 1-6) which is hardly a parable at all, but a metaphor. The sayings of Jesus are totally different from those recorded by the synoptics. Even the `Sermon on the Mount' and the `Lord's Prayer' are omitted. Nor are there any practical injunctions as to life. The conversation of Jesus is plain Greek mysticism with hardly a tinge of anything else. He is almost as anti-semitic as Mr. Hilaire Belloc. He does not even keep the Jews' passover, as he does in other gospels. He has a perfectly ordinary supper. (John XIII, 1, 2,)

"John the Immortal Eyewitness"

Mr. Shaw takes it for granted that John is at least in part the writer of the gospel bearing his name, but the evidence for this view is almost comically indirect. It rests principally upon the 24th verse of chapter XXI: "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true." The identification of John is simply that the disciple who `testifieth of these things' is also the disciple whom Jesus loved. (John XXI, 20.) But there is no evidence whatever except ecclesiastical tradition that this disciple was John, unless we admit the minute literary point that the writer of the gospel is careful "not" to make the identification. This is presumed to be John's modesty. But the grounds for an actual identification are astonishingly small. The good folk of Georgia would hardly convict a negro of chicken-stealing on such evidence.
It may be further remarked that this argument for John's authorship somewhat defeats itself. In the verse quoted above, it appears much more likely that the book was written by some one {68} claiming to be a disciple of John, and using in all probability both his conversation and manuscript in the preparation of the document. This gospel is composite from much more contradictory elements than the other gospels. For it attempts to combine with a more or less Jewish story not the sayings of a wandering ascetic, but the speculations of a Gnostic or an Essene.
The orthodox identify this John with the author of Revelation, and here again we are plunged into the most extraordinary whirlpool of contradiction. It is of course perfectly possible for a writer to develop from his earlier manner to his later manner, to alter his views, to increase his knowledge; but it is very rare to find such development in a simple fisherman. The extreme sophistication of intellect is essentially Greek or Phoenician. There is nothing at all like it in any Hebrew documents of this period. It is evidently of a piece with the Bruce Papyrus<<WEH NOTE: This "papyrus" is the Codex Brucianus, Bruce MS. 96. Bod. Lib. Oxford. It contains the principal surviving collection of Gnosticism of the Valintinian line, quite different from the descriptions found in Patristic sources. The Codex also contains magical and mystical works, including the attribution of the Greek alphabet to Astrology. Only parts of it have been translated from the Coptic and published, notably "A Coptic Gnostic Treatise contained in the Codex Brucianus", Charlotte A. Baynes, 1933. Crowley probably read of it in G.R.S.Mead.>>.
It seems perfectly clear that the gospel is a clumsy dovetailing of some manuscripts of the general character of Mark with a merely mystical treatise. The effect is that of using that charming book of extracts "The wisdom of Bernard Shaw", to fill up the dialogue of `Kipps'. It seems an impossibility, at least to such minds as mine, to regard this gospel in any other light.
Mr. Shaw disregards the views of the experts as to the date of the gospels on the ground that the experts quarrel among themselves. In agreeing with him, it appears sufficient to base one's amiability on the fact that, no matter how old any document may be, one cannot positively affirm that part of it may not have been copied from some earlier document, perhaps contemporary {69} with the events described in it. The only exception to this rule would be the case of a plain historical statement whose accuracy was confirmed in all points from other sources.
An amusing example of recent date is the `prophesy of the Abbot Johannes'. Here the course of the European war was described in simple symbolism. Down to the Battle of the Marne, the account exhibited praiseworthy accuracy. After that point it went off the rails. It was easy to conclude that the prophecy was not ancient, but had been written immediately after the Germans had been rolled back from Paris. There was less doubt in this case because the person responsible for the `prophesy' had been known for many years as a charlatan, and as a literary composer and jester of considerable ability. Something of the same sort of argument appears to underlie Mr. Shaw's contention as to the date of the gospel. His argument is rather long to quote verbatim, but it is mainly that John expected to live until the Second Coming of Christ; and he says "John was certainly not the man to believe in the Second Coming and yet give a date for it after that date had passed." The conclusion appears to be that John was alive and not dead when he wrote the gospel.
Mr. Shaw is naif enough to offer us his personal impression, as a student of literature, that this gospel was written by an eyewitness. He says: "John's claim to give evidence as an eyewitness whilst the others are only compiling history is supported by a certain verisimilitude which appeals to me as one who has preached a new doctrine and argued about it, as well as written stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art backed {70} up by knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not forget that the best dramatic art is the operation of a divinatory instinct for truth." Would it be too much to ask Mr. Shaw to trouble himself to dream the Derby Winner three times running? This remark may seem unduly indignant, but there is really little to choose.
Browning asks how we are to distinguish between "Washington's oracle and Sludge's itch O' the elbow when at whist he ought to trump". How are we to distinguish between the story of an eyewitness and that of a clever literary artist, who is trying to persuade us that he is an eyewitness? How many war stories have been written in Fleet Street and in New York City by men who have never heard a shot fired? As a general rule `fake' stories read more convincingly than genuine ones because the liar is naturally at great pains to appear plausible. The `impression' of a literary critic is the very least argument that ought to be brought forward.
But we may go a little further than this. It may easily appear to some that the passage of which Mr. Shaw makes so much is to be interpreted in a precisely opposite sense. Let us quote it in full. (John XXI, 21 to 23) "Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do? Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me." It is at least possible to interpret this passage as an attempt to avoid the very consequences which Mr. Shaw fears. "I therefore assume as a matter of common sense that, interpolations apart, the gospels are derived from narratives written in the first century A.D. I include John, because though it may be claimed that he hedged his position by claiming that Christ, who specially {71} loved him, endowed him with a miraculous life until the Second Coming, the conclusion being that John is live at this moment, I cannot believe that a literary forger could hope to save the situation by so outrageous a pretension."
It may appear to some that all this is beating the air. Let us put up a perfectly simple and natural scene and look whether this is not almost inevitable. The scene is laid, let us suppose, in one of the Seven Churches that are in Asia, probably Ephesus. A fishing boat has come in from Patmos, and one of the sailors, who is a Christian, comes to the house of the `angel' of the church, stupefied and heartbroken. "I bring the most terrible news", he says to the `angel'". John is dead; and Christ has not yet returned!" All present are thunderstruck. Jesus has not fulfilled his promise. The whole of their faith has broken away from under them. It is a spiritual earthquake. "Falsus in uno, falsus in omni." The entire theory of Christianity has broken down. The hope in which they have all been living, for the sake of which they have endured ostracism and even martyrdom, is annihilated with a single blow. Fortunately there is a young man present, who in his worldly life has been trained by the sophists in the School of Retoric. "Be of good cheer, Brethren," he exclaims. "Jesus never said that John would tarry until he came again. Jesus said not unto him; `he shall not die' but if I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" Much virtue in If! The Brethren immediately cheer up. Instructions are given that the matter be explained on these lines to the whole church, and all goes merrily as before. Is not this an adequate explanation?{72}
Agree with the paleographers that John is a composite document of late date, and all the difficulty disappears. On the other hand, what adversary is there but Mr. Shaw's `hunch' that the gospel was written by an eyewitness?
Not but that Mr. Shaw at his initiation was taught to be cautious! "I therefore assume as a matter of common sense that, interpolations apart, the gospels are derived from narratives written in the first century A.D." Remove the interpolations, which may mean removing nearly everything, and it remains `common sense' to suppose that there was some sort of contemporary document used in the compilation.
Let us do the same thing with `Macbeth'. Macbeth and Banquo must obviously be discarded because they are mixed up with evidently fabulous elements such as witches; remove Lady Macbeth as a mere artistic attempt to give feminine interest to the story; remove Duncan and his thanes as `mere interpolations' only provided in order to give Macbeth somebody to murder, and conclude by saying that "A certain verisimilitude hints, and common sense declares, that Shakespeare was an eyewitness of the scenes which he describes."

"The Peculiar Theology of Jesus."

There is little to say on this section, which deals principally with the attitude of Jesus, though Mr. Shaw might have gone much further in emphasizing the constant quotation of the mystic commonplaces of that and every other period, which punctuate the reiterated claims of Jesus to be the Christ, the avatar of Vishnu, or whatever else you like to call the Father.{73}
But there is one astonishing statement. "John has no grip of the significance of these scraps which he has picked up; he is far more interested in a notion of his own that man can escape death and do even more extraordinary things than Christ himself; in fact he actually represents Jesus as promising this explicitly, and is finally let into the audacious hint that he, John, is himself immortal in the flesh. Still, he does not miss the significant sayings altogether." The overwhelming audacity of this statement makes one gasp for breath. John fills chapter after chapter with these sayings. He even interpolates them in the most unexpected places. Between the exit of Judas, for example, and the end of the Supper we have no less than four chapters, totalling 117 verses. Something like 20% of the whole gospel! And John has `no grip of the significance of these scraps which he has picked up'. One stands stupended.
It is perfectly true that these mystic passages are totally incompatible with the other ideas mentioned to such minds as Mr. Shaw's. But that is merely an argument for the composite nature of the gospel. There is a somewhat similar case however, observable today. We have the Tao Teh King, a mystical treatise at once abstruse and simple, the most admirable of all the ancient classics of mysticism. But in practise the Taoists of to-day are mere fetichists. It might be argued that John was such a person, that he quoted his classic as a matter of form without understanding it. But the document still remains in every reasonable sense of the word composite.{74}

"John Agreed as to the Trial and Crucifixion."

The substance of this section hardly justifies the title. Mr. Shaw is mostly concerned to ask why Jesus did not defend himself, and gives the evident reply that Jesus believed himself to be John Barleycorn. Mr. Shaw points out that all the gospels agree on this point. "The consensus on this point is important, because it proves the absolute sincerity of Jesus's declaration that he was a god. No impostor would have accepted such dreadful consequences without an effort to save himself. No impostor would have been nerved to endure them by the conviction that he would rise from the grave and live again after three days." Fortunately he saves himself by continuing "If we accept the story at all we must believe this.
But why should we accept the story at all? What is unnatural in a man, especially a militant man who drives money changers out of temples, is natural enough if applied to the Sun or to the Seed. If the words and deeds of Jesus are simply those of the principal actor in the drama of John Barleycorn, we need be no more surprised than we are when we hear a lady of doubtful reputation (and it is said there were no less than four such on the stage in the bad old days about one hundred years ago) explain to the villain that she prefers death to dishonour.
Mr. Shaw reiterates his view with regard to the date, "and I think it unreasonable to doubt that all four wrote their narratives in full faith that the other promise would be fulfilled too, and that they themselves might live to witness the Second Coming." But all four are by no means agreed about the Second Coming. Matthew (chapter XXIV) gives all sorts of premonitory symptoms, {75} evidently expanded from the account in Mark, and both say that "this generation shall not pass until all these things be done." But Luke's wording differs considerably. The word `generation' could, moreover be taken to mean `race' John omits this passage altogether. In any case it seems quite clear that if the church could accept the gospels despite this alleged difficulty, the evangelists, who are far less critical and sophisticated than those Fathers of the Church, many of them eminent Greek scholars well trained in dialectics, who made the canon of Scripture, may have ignored it. There is no reason for supposing that the writers of the gospel were in any way conscious of the trouble that they were going to cause in the purlieux of the Tivoli, to say nothing of the shores of Lake Pasquaney N.H., U.S.A. some chiliads later! <<T NOTE: Crowley had an important mystical vision here which he referred to as the "Star-Sponge Vision." In this vision he saw the interconnectedness of all things and described the night sky as "nothingness with sparkles, but oh, what sparkles!.">>
Here we are, by the way, at the end of John, and we cannot find that Mr. Shaw has redeemed his promise to place Jesus above Confucius and Plato.

"Credibility of the Gospels"

In this section Mr. Shaw indulges in his characteristic whimsicality. He gives various examples of things generally believed which never happened, and things generally disbelieved which did happen. He points out quite admirably that life itself is the miracle of miracles, and concludes in a totally sceptic mood that there is no reason why any given person should believe any given thing. His section ends as follows: "I am convinced that ia dozen sceptics were to draw up in parallel columns a list of the events narrated in the gospels, which they consider credible <<Credible is a silly word. It only means `consonant with the main content of our knowledge of the Universe.' Hence any fact which when established requires an extension of that knowledge is antecedently incredible.

Now the canon of credibility varies widely because the knowledge of men varies widely. If I describe the fall of a man from a plank thirty feet above the street, and say `a second later his head struck the flagstones', not one person in ten thousand would see anything peculiar or surprising. Yet the truth of the statement would imply the uprooting of the whole banyan tree of metaphysics. I should have described a `miracle' of just the same kind as Joshua's prestidigitation of the Sun and the Moon. <<T NOTE: The rate of acceleration of a falling body is 32 feet per second per second.>> >> and {76} incredible respectively, their lists would be different in several particulars. Belief is literally a matter of taste."
Mr. Shaw's question is just like the famous `Have you left off beating your moth-in-law'? No sceptic with a grain of sense would fall into so silly a trap. All Mr. Shaw's writings show that he is totally incapable of understanding the scientific type of mind. Huxley has stated the Canon of Belief so admirably that it would be the grossest impudence on my part to attempt to better it. One must simply refer Mr. Shaw to the pages of that great man, in my opinion as eminent in philosophy as he was in science. But one may say briefly that the scientific mind is concerned entirely with the weighing of evidence. Mr. Shaw says "Belief is not dependent on evidence and reason." Every scientific man that ever weighed a precipitate would deny this flatly. It is true only of the belief of the vulgar and the untrained mind. {77}
He goes on to say "There is as much evidence that the miracle occurred as that the Battle of Waterloo occurred, or that a large body of Russian troops passed through England in 1914 to take part in the war on the western front." This statement (which is of course perfectly accurate) reveals a lamentable state of mind. It does not occur to Mr. Shaw for a single moment to inquire into the quality of the evidence. The Russian story was not believed for a second by any one who happened to know that Archangel is only served by a single line of railway. It was not believed by any one who was in a position to know the facts. It was believed by people whose minds were such that if they saw a railway carriage with the blinds drawn, it was a natural conclusion that the carriage contained several hundred thousand Russians.
In other parts of this paper are given examples of modern belief in miracles. Credulity is entirely a matter of education, incidentally, at times, of very specialized education. There were plenty of so-called educated people who thought aeroplanes impossible. But engineers who had studied the subject thoroughly were not among them. So far as any such person was incredulous, it would be a very modified incredulity. He would say, "The problem cannot be solved unless we can get an engine developing a certain ratio of power to weight, and unless we can get a material of a certain proportion of strength to weight; and I rather doubt whether we shall be able to find such." This sort of incredulity is perfectly reasonable, and is immediately destroyed by new evidence. The common incredulity or credulity of the ignorant and prejudiced classes is simply not worth discussion. "Belief is {78} literally a matter of taste"; but only among people who are so intellectually inferior that they have never taught themselves to think.

"Fashions of Belief"

Mr. Shaw develops his thesis in an extremely amusing manner, doubly amusing, for thereby he illustrates yet another lacuna in his mind. He has not studied the Middle Ages, and he has not the key to the language in which they wrote. In order to elucidate this we must make a somewhat lengthy excursus on the subject of the science and philosophy of that period of history.
In the first instance, it should be mentioned that the system of what we may call numerical hieroglyphics, which is about to come under our consideration, dates very much further back than what we call the Middle Ages. Its origin is in fact lost in antiquity. The Book of Revelation is full of numerical symbolism. Witness the problem of `the number of the beast', over which so many people have gone mad. Note also the four beasts, and the seven seals, and four and twenty elders, and the seven heads, and the ten horns, and foursquare city of God with its twelve gates, and twelve foundations, its length and breadth, and height of twelve thousand furlongs, and its wall of cubits twelve by twelve. Any one who supposes that John meant these numbers as numbers knows nothing of numbers.
But John is after all much later than Daniel, who is almost as full of numbers. He too, has various beasts to correspond to the four quarters, and he too has mystical times like seventy weeks and three score and two weeks and one thousand, two hundred {79} and ninety days, and one thousand, three hundred and five and thirty days.
In profane history too, we have elaborate systems of numbers like that of Pythagoras, and we have the Jewish Qabalah and the Greek Qabalah, this last so important that no less an authority than Dr. S.H. Perry has said, "Nothing matters but the Greek Qabalah." The oldest book in the world, The Yi King, is based entirely upon what is really a numerical foundation, the combination of two things taken first three and then six at a time.
The imagination of the earliest philosophers was exercised by the question, What are Numbers? Simple numerical relations excited them tremendously. `Magic squares' were considered really magical. It struck them as enormously significant that the number nine should always remain the result of adding together the digits of any number which was divisible by nine. In one of the "Oracles of Zoroaster" it says, "The number nine is sacred, and attains the summit of perfection." and again, "The mind of the Father said `Into three'; and immediately all things were so divided."
Now then let us try to discover what the ancients meant by the number four. They noticed that you could not make a magic square of any four numbers, though you can of one, or nine, or sixteen, or twenty-five, up the series as far as you care to carry it. They also noticed the four quarters, and of course a hundred other things. From all these consideration [sic], they got the idea of four as expressing principally dominion and limitation and resistance and so on, until ultimately the number four became an extremely complex concept, of which its definition as one more than three and one less {80} than five was the smallest part; Consequently `four beasts about the throne of God' means that his power extended in every direction. It does not mean that there were four of them.
We have chosen an exceptionally simple case to illustrate a general truth. Mr. Shaw is only telling a fraction of the truth when he says that sevens were all the rage. All the numbers were all the rage, but each had its special significance. Seven was considered the perfect number, or rather one of the perfect numbers, because it united the spiritual three, which was what may be called the first expansion or explanation of one, and the four, which represented the first expansion or explanation of two
One, of course, is the originally perfect number, because, however much you multiply it by itself it remains one, while two is the original imperfect number, because it implies conflict. One is therefore spirit, two represents matter; and seven consequently becomes a harmonization of spirit and matter, the number in which they again unite. Similarly twelve is `perfect', as another form of harmonizing three and four.
There was a bad aspect to seven, because ten was the completion of the units, and a map of the universe having been constructed on the basis of these ten numbers, and the first three being given to the Trinity, the remaining seven were called the Inferiors. Thus in the Qabalah we have `ten hells' grouped in seven palaces!
It is therefore to be understood that when a medieval philosopher spoke of seven anything or twelve anything, he did not mean that if you counted them there would be seven or twelve. He was characterizing them in an extremely elaborate and subtle manner, which no other words could have expressed. He was conveying {81} an idea beyond words, just as every great poet does. So also the criticisms levelled by Freethinkers at the Doctrine of the Trinity have been merely examples of ignoratio elenchi; and Christians were unable to defend it because they too had no idea of what the Fathers of the Church meant by it. Criticisms by Christians of other worships, with their strange rites, have been equally foolish for the most part. The founders wisely shrouded their truth in hieratic symbol.
The schoolmen were extraordinarily clever at these hieroglyphs. Instead of laughing at them, we should try to understand them. We may take for instance the lines beginning "Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque priores". Which are not even Latin, but which contain in themselves practically the whole of the laws of thought even as they are known to-day. Every single letter in the modern form of the verses stands for an important truth!<<WEH NOTE: These names and words form part of a set of mnemonics used by students of logic to memorize syllogism modes and structues. The vowels in the words signify the valid moods of each figure of the syllogism, and some of the consonants show how to reduce the modes of some syllogistic figures to the simple form. The "s", "p", "m" and "c" consonants show how to reduce imperfect moods to perfect moods. Crowleys' selection is known as the Ist Figure and modernly rendered: Barbara Celarent Darii Ferio. The other two figures are Cesare Camestres Festino Baroco and Darapti Felapton Disamis Datisi Bocardo Ferrison. For more information, see Osterle's "Logic", pp. 147-150.>> We are much too ready to assume that our ancestors were fools.
But to return to Mr. Shaw's `fashions of belief', he says to us; "The number seven is the stamp of superstition". It may be so among the superstitious, but it is not so among men of science, a class of persons with whom Mr. Shaw should really try to get acquainted. Has he never heard of the Periodic Law, which dates from 1828, the division of the elements on a sevenfold basis? He says that "We will believe in nothing less than millions." It is perfectly true that we have millions in astronomy and bacteriology, but we still have two arms and two legs. There are still seven holes in our heads, and the number of the main bodies of the solar system has not increased from seven to millions but {82} only from seven to nine.

"Credibility and Truth."

Mr. Shaw continues his diatribe in this section. He says, "The modern man who believes that the earth is round is grossly crediculous. Flat earth men drive him to fury by confusing him with the greatest ease when he tries to argue about it." Mr. Shaw's acquaintances do seem to be very unsophisticated people. The charm of their conversation must be amazing. Most schoolboys know the evidence of astronomy, the evidence of exploration, the evidence from eclipses, the evidence of the disappearance of a ship at sea <<T NOTE:below the horizon>>, the evidence even perhaps from the Bedford Canal experiment <<WEH NOTE: I am not acquainted with this one, but the Bedford Canal was probably a dead-level and straight waterway. If one sighted a transit on the tip of the mast of a boat going away on it, the curvature of the earth would cause the mast tip to dip.>> Mr. Shaw continues, "The things he believes may be true, but that is not why he believes it: he believes it because in some mysterious way it appeals to his imagination." Imagination has nothing to do with it; if he knows it at all, it is because he has been taught it, and if he has been taught it properly he should remember the reasoning which ought to have been given him at the time.
Mr. Shaw admits that he "can laugh at the earlier estimates of the number of angels that can be accommodated on the point of a needle." This simply means that Mr. Shaw's knowledge of the subject is derived entirely from the report of some flippant journalist. If he had studied the question first-hand, he would have known that it was not only serious, but vitally important to philosophy. There is nothing in all this talk of credulity and incredulity. It is all a question of knowledge and ignorance. As Huxley pointed out, belief is a pathological state of mind. {83} Either you know or don't know, and if you don't know you had better say so. If it is necessary to speak at all on subjects where doubt exists, you should give the arguments on all sides fully and fairly, and if your judgement incline to one side rather than the other you should explain with the utmost care your reasons, and even then you should be very cautious.
Mr. Shaw admits later in this section, "A Mahometan Arab will accept literally and without question parts of the narrative which an English Archbishop has to reject or explain away." Can Mr. Shaw not see the reason for this? It is that the English Archbishop has been educated in certain ways which make it impossible for him to accept certain obvious fables for truth. The Mohammedan has not that knowledge, and therefore simply believes what he is told. We know that Joshua did not cause the sun to stand still in the valley of Ajalon. We cannot even hedge by saying that he caused the earth to stand still, because as Mr. Wells has admirably shown in the story of the man who could do miracles, to check the revolution of the earth would send everything on its surface flying into space, and even if another miracle prevented this, we should require a third miracle to prevent astronomers discovering the traces of the perturbation. But an Arab, knowing nothing of mechanics, is not in the least surprised. He can stop a camel; indeed, he often finds it hard to make it go; and he sees no reason why the sun should not be stopped in an equally simple manner.
It must be admitted that Mr. Shaw has whittled at the branch he is sitting on as much as he dare. His final paragraph is as follows: "Every reader takes from the Bible what he can get. In {84} submitting a precis of the gospel narratives I have not implied any estimate either of their credibility or of their truth. I have simply informed him or reminded him, as the case may be, of what these narratives tell us about their hero." The first sentence is splendid! He stumbles over his own toe, and admits that any other critic may be justified in proving Jesus to have been a Vedantist or a Thug, as he is himself trying to make him out a Socialist. The second sentence is admirably cautious; but Mr. Shaw is basing his argument on the truth of certain sections--carefully selected sections--of the Bible. It is useless to try to couch his statement in the form "This perhaps imaginary person is said by some unknown party to have said so and so." The cogency of his argument depends very much, at least in the minds of most people who will read him, upon the substantial truth of some part of the gospel story.
The last sentence in the passage quoted above is the one which we are principally at pains to deny. It has been our endeavor to show that Mr. Shaw has by no means given an accurate account of what the gospels tell us about Jesus.

"Christian Iconolatry and the Peril of the Iconoclast."

Mr. Shaw now asks, "Whether, if and when the medieval and Methodist will-to-believe the Salvationist and miraculous side of the gospel narratives fail us, as it plainly has failed the leaders of modern thought, there will be anything left of the Mission of Jesus." He is himself one of the leaders of modern thought, and has evidently considered this question with extraordinary {85} care. He abandons the worship of Jesus, he abandons the stories about Jesus, and he argues that the aloofness produced by the idolatry given to him has made him unreal and unimportant. He proposes to play Pygmalion by turning this image into a political force, "a rallying centre for revolutionary influences".
It appears that here is a confusion of thought. Why not use Shelley or Karl Marx or Mr. Shaw himself? Here are real persons who really did suffer for the faith that was in them. Why then choose Jesus, simply on account of the prestige of Jesus, which depends entirely upon that worship of him, and those stories about him, which Mr. Shaw has expressly rejected in order to bring his image to life! To parallel: I admit that the advice of Polonius is neither better nor worse because I have discovered (being a crank) that Shakespeare did not write it; and when I am asked why I should bother my head about the advice, I say reverently "Shakespeare wrote it."
I hate to beat a dead horse--but if Mr. Shaw claims that it is Pegasus?

"The Alternative to Barabbas."

We have now reached a point when argument is thrown aside, and the petitio principii is in full swing. "Now those who, like myself, see the Barabbas social organization as a failure, and are convinced that the Life Force (or whatever you choose to all it) cannot be finally beaten by any failure, and will even supersede humanity by evolving a higher species if we cannot master the problems raised by the multiplication of our own numbers, {86} have always known that Jesus had a real message, and felt the fascination of his character and doctrine.
"Not that we should nowadays dream of claiming any supernatural authority for him, much less the technical authority which attaches to an educated modern philosopher and jurist. But when, having entirely got rid of Salvationist Christianity, and even contracted a prejudice against Jesus on the score of his involuntary connection with it, we engage on a purely scientific study of economics, criminology, and biology, and find that our practical conclusions are virtually those of Jesus, we are distinctly pleased and encouraged to find that we are doing him an injustice, and the nimbus that surrounds his head in the pictures may be interpreted some day as a light of science rather than a declaration of sentiment or a label of idolatry."
May we submit in reply to this firstly that there are quite a number of people (from Laotze to Charles Bradlaugh) who are quite sound about Barabbas and the Life Force, yet who have not know or felt what they are here asserted to have done? Nor do the vast majority of students of economics (and the rest of it) find that their practical conclusions are virtually those either of Jesus or of Mr. Bernard Shaw.
As to the fascination of his character and doctrine, I wish to call the very special attention of the reader to the fact that the purely literary value of a `gospel' of any kind or its translation is of as much importance as the brightness of a spoon bait in salmon fishing. The great classics of religion rarely travel beyond their own climate, as Frazer and fifty others have {87} shown; but they never travel far beyond their own language. The Qu'ran in English is mere ditchwater for the most part; in Arabic it is sublime poetry. The same is true of most Indian and Chinese Classics.
Hence Protestantism is due to the accident that the translation called the Authorized Version was done by scholars of that period of the marvellous flowering of English which not only gave us Marlowe and Shakespeare and Malory, but such masters of translation as North for Plutarch, Florio for Montaigne, Urquhart and Motteux for Rabelais, and a dozen more. Previous translations, like Wicklyffe's, possessing small literary value, never took hold of the hearts or imagination of the people. The German translation, it is said, is also exceedingly fine: which accounts for the vogue of Lutheranism in that country.
Mr. Shaw imagines the Bible to be out of date, as he imagines himself to be superseding Shakespeare. How the twentyfirst century will laugh!
No; the Bible is great literature--in parts; and will stand as such while Shakespeare stands.
But its doctrine will never convince Islam, until a translator arises who can match Mohammed's sonorous and exquisitely balanced prose, with its internal rimes and its incomparable rhythm, that is at once like the thunder, and like the simoom, and like the whisper of the desert wind. And there is many an immoral and indecent book which lives by such virtue; we may admire the manner of such while we reprehend the matter.
Mr. Shaw goes on to announce in summary form the doctrines {88} which he has selected as being those of Jesus. We shall deal with these by the simple process of printing parallel passages, at the risk of recapitulation. It will be seen that nearly every statement made by Mr. Shaw is categorically contradicted by Jesus himself in one or other of his sayings.
1. "The kingdom of heaven is within you."
Matthew XIII 47 to 50. "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just." It is quite evident from this passage that the conception of the kingdom is that of the ordinary Protestant.
Luke XIII, 24 to 28. "Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are: Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. But he shall say, I tell you, I know not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity."
John XIV, 2, 3. "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there {89} ye may be also." There is no question whatever of any spiritual kingdom in either of these passages. Dozens of others could be quoted, but I picked in two instances such as contain the actual expression `kingdom of heaven'.
2. "You are the son of God; and God is the Son of man."
Matthew XXIII, 33. "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can we escape the damnation of hell?". If Mr. Shaw is right God is a viper.
Mark VII, 21 to 23. "For from within, out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, and evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness." This can hardly be called compatible with either of Mr. Shaw's statements.
John III, 3<<WEH NOTE: Actually John III, 13>>. "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." Jesus here insists that he is the only son of God. There are plenty of other such passages.
John VIII, 23. "And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath: I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world": another text on the same line, distinguishing Jesus from other men.
John VIII, 41, 42, and 44. "Ye do the deeds of you father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. Jesus said unto them, if God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceed forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a {90} murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." No contradiction can be more categorical than this.
3. "God is a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not an elderly gentleman to be bribed and begged from."
Matthew VI, 11. "Give us this day our daily bread."
Matthew VII, 11. "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?"
Mark II, 24.<<WEH NOTE: should be XI, 24>> "Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."
John XV, 7. "If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you."
John XVI, 23. "And in that day ye shall ask me nothing, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you." Nothing much is said about bribery, but the implication is always that we have to keep on good terms with God. The bribe suggested is always belief in Jesus.
4. "We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbour without injuring or helping yourself."
Matthew VII, 23, "And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
John XVII, 9. "I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine." It is to be noticed in the latter passage that Jesus is quite satisfied {91} with the `elect'. He will not even use his obviously great influence with the Father to save one other soul.
5. "God is your father: you are here to do God's work; and you and your father are one." This is little more than a paraphrase of sentence 2 above.
6. "Get rid of property by throwing it into the common stock."
Matthew XXVI, 9, 10. "For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me." Here we have a direct prohibition of the course recommended by the Shavian Jesus.
Mark X, 29, 30. "And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my sake, and the gospel's. But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions: and in the world to come eternal life."
Luke XVIII, 29, 30. "And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and the world to come life everlasting." These passages show clearly that material rewards were to be looked for by the disciples.
7. "Dissociate your work entirely from money payments." It is not clear upon what passage in the gospels Mr. Shaw relies.
8. "If you let a child starve you are letting God starve." {92}
Again one is at loss to discover Mr. Shaw's authority
9. "Get rid of all anxiety about to-morrow's dinner and clothes, because you cannot serve two master: God and Mammon." This is partially contradicted by the texts quoted above in reference to material rewards. The passages from which Mr. Shaw gets this doctrine have been explained elsewhere as part of the regular formula of the wandering ascetic.
10. "Get rid of Judges and punishment and revenge."
Matthew XII, 36, 37. "But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned."
Matthew XVIII, 7, 8. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life half or maimed rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire."
Matthew XIX, 28. "And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, that ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel."
Mark III, 28, 29. "Verily I say unto you. All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation." {93}
Mark XVI, 16. "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."
Luke XI, 32. "The men of Nineve shall rise up in the judgement with this generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here."
Luke XVIII, 7, 8. "And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"
John III, 36. "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."
John V, 26 to 29. "For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of Man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in which all that are in the grave shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation."
John IX, 39. "And Jesus said, For judgment I am come {94} into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind."
John XII, 31. "Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out."
John XII, 48. "He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day." Mr. Shaw may object that these passages refer mostly to divine judgement, but surely that has proved a far more terrible weapon against the unfortunate than any merely human oppression and injustice.
11. "Love your neighbour as yourself, he being a part of yourself."
Matthew X, 14, and 15. "And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city." This is not loving your neighbours to any marked extent! Professor Huxley has dealt exhaustively with the Gadarene Swine, showing that if Jesus himself loved his neighbours, he was at least a little careless about their property, which was in this instance their sole means of livelihood.
12. "And love your enemies: they are your neighbours."
Luke XIII, 26, 27, and 28. "Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham and {95} Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out." It is useless to urge that Jesus intended us to love our enemies in this world, while permitting their eternal damnation in another. The doctrine of supernatural punishment for one's enemies is but the invention <<As Jung shows, the unfulfilled wish of the slave manifests itself in his dreams, and actually in his myths.>> of the coward and the slave.
13. "Get rid of your family entanglements. Every mother you meet is as much your mother as the woman who bore you. Every man you meet is as much your brother as the man she bore after you. Don't waste your time at family funerals grieving for your reltives: attend to life, not to death: there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and better. In the kingdom of Heaven, which as aforesaid, is within you, there is no marriage nor giving in marriage, because you cannot devote your life to two divinities: God and the person you are married to."
It is difficult to find passages to contradict Mr. Shaw's assertions, but he has subtly misrepresented the meaning of the passages on which he founds the doctrine. Take the obvious passage in Luke XIV, 26. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." It seems to follow from this that everybody is to be `loved as your neighbour' except yourself and your family. Such a statement can only be interpreted reasonably in light of Eastern asceticism. It is the characteristic formula of renunciation demanded of every disciple {96} by every `holy man'. Mr. Shaw, in his wildest moments would not seriously suggest that we should all kick our mothers out of doors, and ask the rest of the town to take her place. Moreover, we find that Jesus himself took pains to have his mother adopted by the beloved disciple (John XIX, 25-27). As to the general point of the supposed conflict between the interests of the individual and the state, we find that it was just those civilisations which Chrisianity corrupted which held the doctrine to which Mr. Shaw would unquestionably subscribe. We here quote the great authority of Dr. J.G. Frazer. "Greek and Roman society was built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to the community, of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the commonwealth, as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained from infancy in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to public service and were ready to lay them down for the common good; Or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occurred to them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only object worth living for, in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into insignicance [sic]. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the present life, which he regarded merely as a probation for a better and eternal. The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of <<T NOTE: Page -97- of the typescript edition is in a different typeface. Perhaps the typing is a modern retyping of an illegible page of the original. The evidence for this lies in the fact that the last line is short 19 characters of a complete line, and the much clearer print. The right margin is also considerably larger than other pages.>> <<WEH NOTE: No, this page 97 was part of the first edition in this form. Probably it was simply found to be in error and replaced on a handy typewriter before mimeographing.>> {97} the patriot and he who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven.<<WEH NOTE: This doctrine stems from Augustine's "City of God", introduced to compensate for the sack of Rome.>> Thus the centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a future life, and however much the other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism: for civilisation is only possible through the active cooperation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country, and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman Law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the march of civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had turned at last. It is ebbing still." Dr. J.G. Frazer Attis, Adonis, Osiris, I.300.
We leave the matter here. We deny that the propositions given above are characteristic of Jesus, since we have been able to produce Jesus himself to refute them; but as they interest Mr. {98} Shaw, who finds `experience and science' driving him more and more to consider them favourably, we must take them as worthy of our most serious study.
Mr. Shaw tempers the wind to the shorn lamb saying, "We shall waste our time unless we give them a reasonable construction." He then says, "We must assume that the man who saw his way through such a mass of popular passion and illusion as stands between us and a sense of the value of such teaching was quite aware of all the objections that occur to an average stockbroker in the first five minutes."
There is nothing whatever in the sayings of Jesus to show that he saw his way through any mass of popular passion and illusion. Everything that he said was perfectly commonplace to those people of his time who knew any mysticism. But esoteric doctrine having more or less slept in the west, despite such people as Boehme and William O`Neill (in whom persons not genealogically inclined may be pleased to recognize William Blake) until the Great Revival, initiated by certain persons whom I will not specify, through the medium of Eliphaz Levi, Anna Kingsford, and H.P. Blavatsky, the whole world into which Mr. Shaw was born was undoubtedly in the material bondage of which he complains.
The man who saw through the milestones was then not Jesus but Mr. Shaw himself, and no doubt he is aware of all the objections that occur to the average stockbroker. But how does he deal with this matter? "It is true that the world is governed to a considerable extent by the considerations that occur to stockbrokers in the first five minutes; but as the result is that the world is so {99} badly governed that those who know the truth can hardly bear to live in it, an objection from an average stockbroker constitutes in itself a prima facie case for any social reform." This is not exactly answering the stockbroker, who after all is a man as Mr. Shaw is, and perhaps may know a different world, possibly a less pleasant world in some ways, than that which Mr. Shaw inhabits. However, in the next section some of these objections are specified.

"The Reduction to Modern Practice of Christianity."

In this section Mr. Shaw, in approved manner of all Utopians, spreads his wings and soars. One fears that on the hard ground of the facts of life he might seem as awkward as Baudelaire's albatross when it landed on the deck. Here, says Mr. Shaw, there are a few difficulties; and with one flap of his wings leaves them a million miles below him. "The disciple cannot have bread without money until there is bread for everybody without money; and that requires an elaborate municipal organization of the food supply, rate supported." I am not sure that Mr. Shaw's organization would not mean that somebody took some thought for the morrow.
"Even in Syria in the time of Jesus his teachings could not possibly have been realized by a series of independent explosions of personal righteousness on the part of the separate units of the population." On my reading of the gospels Jesus was not a fool, not a socialist; the only evidence I can find of any tendency to socialism is his objection to washing; and he never contemplated for a moment that the entire population should follow the religious life. He was perfectly familiar with the immemorial Eastern distinction between the householder and the ascetic, and if he had {100} heard Mr. Shaw's opinions he would have understood them as little as I do myself. When Mr. Shaw says that `a man who is better than fellows is a nuisance', he is merely a nuisance! No one was ever so obviously better than his fellows than Mr. Shaw.

"Modern Communism."

The identification of the apotheosis of Capitalism with the Trust is a familiar fallacy. Co-operation is one thing and communism is another. The sole object of creating trusts is to secure greater inequality in the distribution of the common wealth, not less; and if this incentive were removed the whole fabric would fall to pieces. The object of concentrating power is not to give everyone a square deal. The little man is frozen out simply because he threatens to interfere with the game of despoiling the people. There is certainly economy in what Mr. Shaw misleadingly calls `communism in production'. But it is the economy of wolves who hunt in packs in order to pull down their quarry. It is such sophistries that make political economy the morass we know it. And it might further be observed that this `communism in production' over which Mr. Shaw gloats has been the very means by which the self-respecting apprentice, with a secure future, has been turned into what that brilliant young "Angel of the Revolution", Gerda von Kothek, calls `factory-fodder'.

"Redistribution."

In this section there is little to criticize but the rhetorical and exaggerated form of the statement made in it. {101}

"Shall He Who Makes, Own?"

In this section are repeated the elementary commonplaces of John Stuart Mill. One wonders that it was worth while to demolish the "maker's right" theory. The section ends as follows: "If God takes the dreadnought in one hand and a steel pen in the other, and asks Job who made them, and to who [SIC] they should belong by maker's right, Job must scratch his puzzled head with a potsherd and be dumb, unless indeed it strikes him that God is the ultimate maker, and that all we have a right to do with the product is to feed his lambs." Please, do not count me in among the lambs! My constitution, already impaired by the task of answering earlier objections, might be fatally affected by a protracted diet of either of the products in question!

"Labour Time."

In this section Mr. Shaw refers to the doctrines of the Manchester School as if they were inevitable. It is not possible to argue the whole question in so limited a space as is at our disposal. But it is anyhow obvious that some arrangement of state enforcement of a minimum wage is an alternative, though possibly not a wholly satisfactory one.

"The Dream of Distribution According to Merit."

Here Mr. Shaw becomes exceedingly humorous; and we are somewhat disposed to laugh with him. Life is not a Sunday School, but a battlefield; and the conflict between evolution and ethics has not yet been wholly decided in favour of the latter. Some {102} of us may even think that it can never be. For the progress which made ethics possible was the result of the variations brought about by evolution, and the result of ethics in checking the operations of evolution is in some ways to discourage variation, and so to cause the stagnation of society.
A secure social order inevitably favours mediocrity; and it further causes the atrophy of the manly virtues. War has to be artificially replaced by sport, which is a very poor substitute, just as religion lost its excitement and fascination when human sacrifice was replaced by symbolic offerings. However, sport is better than nothing; and when society is threatened, it is the sportsman (if any one) who saves it. The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton; and the people who rushed to the colours in the war now raging were the cricketers and golfers and footballers--the amateurs, not the professionals. The people whose minds were full of money and trade and beer had to be conscripted.

"Vital Distribution"

"In the end you are forced to ask the question you should have asked at the beginning. What do you give a man an income for? Obviously to keep him alive. Since it is evident that the first condition on which he can be kept alive, without enslaving somebody else is that he shall produce an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we may quite rationally compel him to abstain from idling by whatever means we employ to compel him to abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any other crime". Would it be impertinent to ask Mr. Shaw to write a short essay upon the {103} differences in the meaning of his expression "We may compel him to abstain from idling", and this other "We may enslave him"? (Note: I am not arguing that some such process is avoidable; I am pointing out the confusion of thought of Mr. Shaw, the characteristic British quality of thinking that if you call whipping `paternal chastisement', it doesn't hurt.)
I am bound to say that personally I regard a leisured class as the only possible field for the highest types of wheat to grow. The socialistic idea that every one should work menially for an hour or so every day would check the entire race. Any mechanical labour degrades; it is necessary that it should be performed, and must therefore always produce a degraded class. To equalize men in this matter is to bring them all down to the level of the dock labourer.
My parents spent several thousand pounds on giving me a public school and University Education. On its completion I found that I knew nothing. I thereupon spent fifty thousand pounds of my own to pursue it; and I still know nothing. That is a good start, however; and I have great hopes. But certainly I never could have arrived even at my present stage if I had had to spend a couple of hours a day in cleaning out somebody's drains. For one thing, all the higher kinds of work require a fineness and delicacy both of manual and mental energy such that a life of leisure is absolutely necessary to their proper functioning. The surgeon's hands, or the pianist's would be ruined forever if he had to chop wood for a month. (How, by the way, is society to `compel' people without first `judging' them?) {104}
When it comes to the artistic element, and Mr. Shaw will be the first to agree that the artist is the salt of the earth, the case becomes extreme. Idling is actually necessary to a great many artists as a peculiar mental state which ultimately produces ideas. I am personally acquainted with one artist who can only be forced to work by the boredom of prolonged idleness. If you gave him some healthful employment he would be a perfectly commonplace man. All the subtler qualities of humanity depend on leisure. To `compel' artists to `work' would be as reasonable as to sow seed in a field and keep on plowing it all through the year.
These facts are perfectly familiar to Mr. Shaw. He says indeed "We all know as well as Jesus did that if we had to take thought for the morrow as to whether there shall be anything to eat or drink it will be impossible for us to think of nobler things, or live a higher life than that of a mole, whose life is from beginning to end a frenzied pursuit of food." One of the conditions, however, of thinking of nobler things is to abstain from thinking of ignoble things. It is impossible to appreciate literature if you rot your mind by habitually reading newspapers. Just as in currency the baser always ousts the better, so in life one must have an absolute gold standard, or one comes down to inconvertible notes in a terribly short space of time. The aspirations of the mind must be continuous, unwearying, unsparing of self, and an hour lost can never be recovered.
Mr. Shaw apparently fails to recognize the extraordinary devotion to great things which is shown by nine in every ten of leisured men of good family. The parasites of whom he complains usually {105} spring from the Plutocracy; and the remedy is not to make it impossible for a man like Lord Dunsany to give up his whole time to his art, but to re-establish in the aristocracy the standard of honour and worthy ambition. Mr. Shaw says: "Until the community is organized in such a way that the fear of bodily want is forgotten as completely as the fear of wolves already is in civilized capitals, we shall never have a decent social life. Indeed, the whole attraction of our present arrangements lies in the fact that they do relieve a handful of us from this fear; but as the relief is effected stupidly and wickedly by making the favoured handful parasitic on the rest, they are smitten with the degeneracy which seems to be the inevitable biological penalty of complete parasitism, and corrupt culture and statecraft instead of contributing to them, their excessive leisure being as mischievous as the excessive toil of the labourers."
I made a little attempt of my own to solve the problem nine years ago in an essay entitled Thien Tao. May I be pardoned if egotism prevails upon me to quote the essential passages?
"The condition of Japan was at this time (What time? Here we are in trouble with the historian at once. But let me say that I will have no interference with my story on the part of all these dull sensible people. I am going straight on, and if the reviews are unfavourable, one has always the resource of suicide) dangerously unstable. The warrior aristocracy of the Upper House had been so diluted with successful cheesemongers that adulteration had become a virtue as highly profitable as adultery. In the Lower House brains were still esteemed, but they had been interpreted {106} as the knack of passing examinations.
The recent extension of the franchise to women had rendered the Yoshiwara the most formidable of the political organizations while the physique of the nation had been seriously impaired by the results of a law which, by assuring them in case of injury or illness of a lifelong competence in idleness which they could never have obtained otherwise by the most laborious toil, encouraged all workers to be utterly careless of their health. The training of servants indeed at this time consisted solely of careful practical instruction in the art of falling down stairs; and the richest man in the country was an ex-butler who, by breaking his leg on no less than thirty-eight occasions, had acquired a pension which put that of a field-marshal altogether into the shade.
As yet, however, the country was not irretrievably doomed. A system of intrigue and blackmail, elaborated by the governing classes to the highest degree of efficiency, acted as a powerful counterpoise. In theory all were equal; in practice the permanent officials, the real rulers of the country, were a distinguished and trustworthy body of men. Their interest was to govern well, for any civil or foreign disturbance would undoubtedly have fanned the sparks of discontent into the roaring flame of revolution.
And discontent there was. The unsuccessful cheesemongers were very bitter against the Upper House; and those who had failed in examinations wrote appalling diatribes against the folly of the educational system
The trouble was that they were right; the government was {107} well enough in fact, but in theory had hardly a leg to stand on. In view of the growing clamour, the official classes were perturbed for many of their number were intelligent enough to see that a thoroughly irrational system, however well it may work in practise, cannot forever be maintained against the attacks of those who, though they may be secretly stigmatized as doctrinaires, can bring forward unanswerable arguments. The people had power, but not reason; so were amenable to the fallacies which they mistook for reason, and not to the power which they would have imagined to be tyranny. An intelligent plebs is docile; an educated canaille expects everything to be logical. The shallow sophisms of the socialist were intelligible; they could not be refuted by the profounder and therefore unintelligible propositions of the Tory.
The mob could understand the superficial resemblance of babies; they could not be got to understand that the circumstances of education and environment made but a small portion of the equipment of a conscious being. The brutal and truthful `You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear' had been forgotten for the smooth and plausible fallacies of such writers as Ki Ra Di.
So serious had the situation become, indeed, that the governing classes had abandoned all dogmas of Divine Right and the like as untenable. The theory of heredity had broken down, and the ennoblement of the cheesemongers made it not only false, but ridiculous.
We consequently find them engaged in the fatuous task of defending the anomalies which disgusted the nation by a campaign of glaring and venal sophistries. These deceived nobody, and {108} only inspired the contempt, which might have been harmless, with a hate which threatened to engulph the community in an abyss of the most formidable convulsions."
Now attend to the solution!
"What," said Juju, "O great Tao, do you recommend as a remedy for the ills of my unhappy country?"
The sage replied as follows: "O mighty and magniloquent Daimio, your aristocracy is not an aristocracy because it is not an aristocracy. In vain you seek to alter this circumstance by paying the noxious vermin of the Dai Li Pai Pur to write fatuous falsehoods maintaining that your aristocracy is an aristocracy because it is an aristocracy.
As Heracleitus overcame the antinomy of Xenophanes and Paramenides, Melissus and the Eleatic Zeno, the Ens and the Non-Ens by his Becoming, so let me say to you; the aristocracy will be an aristocracy by becoming an aristocracy.
"Ki Ra Di and his dirty-faced friends wish to level down the good practice to the bad theory; you should oppose them by levelling up the bad theory to the good practise
"Your enviers boast that you are no better than they; prove to them that they are as good as you. They speak of a nobility of fools and knaves; show to them wise and honest men, and the socialistic ginger is no longer hot in the individualistic mouth."
Juju grunted assent. He had gone almost to sleep, but Kwaw, absorbed in his subject, never noticed the fact. He went on with the alacrity of a steam-roller, and the direct and purposeful {109} vigour of a hypnotized butterfly. "Man is perfected by his identity with the great Tao. Subsidiary to this he must have balanced perfectly the Yang and the Yin. Easier still is it to rule the sixfold star of intellect; while for the base the control of the body and its emotions is the easiest step.
"Equilibrium is the great law, and perfect equilibrium is crowned by identity with the great Tao."
He emphasized this sublime assertion by a deliberate blow upon the protruding abdomen of the worthy Juju.
"Pray continue your honourable discourse!" exclaimed the half-awakened Daimio.
Kwaw went on, and I think it only fair to say that he went on for a long time, and that because you have been fool enough to read thus far, you have no excuse for being fool enough to read farther.
"Phenacetin is a useful drug in fever, but woe to that patient who shall imbibe it in collapse. Because Calomel is a dangerous remedy in appendicitis, we do not condemn its use in simple indigestions.
"As above so beneath! said Hermes the thrice greatest. The laws of the physical world are precisely paralleled by those of the moral and intellectual sphere. To the prostitute I prescribe a course of training by which she shall comprehend the holiness of sex. Chastity forms part of that training, and I should hope to see her one day a happy wife and mother. To the prude equally I prescribe a course of training by which she shall understand the holiness of sex. Unchastity forms part of that training, {110} and I should hope to see her one day a happy wife and mother.
"To the bigot I commend a course of Thomas Henry Huxley; to the infidel a practical study of ceremonial magic. Then, when the bigot has knowledge and the infidel faith, each may follow without prejudice his natural inclination; for he will no longer plunge into his former excesses.
"So also she who was a prostitute from native passion may indulge with safety in the pleasure of love; she who was by nature cold may enjoy a virginity in no wise marred by her disciplinary course of unchastity. But the one will understand and love the other.
"I have been taxed with assaulting what is commonly known avirtue. True; I hate it, but only in the same degree as I hate what is commonly known as vice.
"So it must be acknowledged that one who is but slightly unbalanced needs a milder correction than who so is obsessed by prejudice. There are men who make a fetish of cleanliness; they shall work in a fatter's shop, and learn that dirt is the mark of honourable toil. There are those whose lives are rendered wretched by the fear of infection; they see bacteria of the deadliest sort in all things but the actual solutions of carbolic acid and mercuric chloride with which they hysterically combat their invisible foeman; such would I send to live in the bazaar at Delhi, where they shall haply learn dirt makes little difference after all.
"There are slow men who need a few month's experience of the hustle of the stockyards; there are business men in a hurry, and {111} they shall travel in Central Asia to acquire the art of repose.
"So much for the equilibrium, and for two months in every year each member of your governing classes shall undergo this training under skilled advice.
"But what of the Great Tao? For one month in every year each of these men shall seek desperately for the Stone of the Philosophers. By solitude and fasting for the social and luxurious, by drunkenness and debauch for the austere, by scourging for those afraid of physical pain, by repose for the restless, and toil for the idle, by bullfights for the humanitarian, and the care of little children for the callous, by rituals for the rational, and by philosophy for the credulous, shall these men, while yet unbalanced, seek to attain to unity with the Tao. But those whose intellect is purified and co-ordinated, for those whose bodies are in health, and whose passions are at once eager and controlled, it shall be lawful to choose their own way to the One Goal: videlicet, identity with that great Tao which is above the antithesis of the Yang and Yin."
"Even Kwaw felt tired, and applied himself to sake-and-soda. Refreshed, he continued: "The men who are willing by this means to become the saviours of their country shall be called the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools who mistake names for things. There shall be masters of the Synagogue, but they shall never seek to dominate. They shall most carefully abstain from inducing any man to seek the Tao by any other way than that of equilibrium. They shall develop individual genius without considering whether in their {112} opinion its fruition will tend to the good or evil of their country or of the world; for who are they to interfere with a soul whose balance has been crowned by the most holy Tao?
"The masters shall be great men among men; but among great men they shall be friends
"Since equilibrium will have become perfect, a greater than Napoleon shall arise, and the peaceful shall rejoice thereat; a greater than Darwin, and the minister in his pulpit give open thanks to God.
"The instructed infidel shall no longer sneer at the church-goer, for he will have been compelled to go to church until he saw the good points as well as the bad; and the instructed devotee will no longer detest the blasphemer, because he will have laughed with Ingersoll and Saladin.
"Give the lion the heart of the lamb, and the lamb the force of the lion; and they will lie down in peace togeather [sic]."
Kwaw ceased, and the heavy and regular breathing of Juju assured him that his words had not been wasted; at last that restless and harried soul had found supreme repose."
There is of course another solution to the problem of human sorrow, and that is indeed one which the wandering ascetics of the world have known. Whoever said "The kingdom of heaven is within you" certainly knew it.
Man is only a very little lower than the angels. He is far more independent of circumstance than most people are aware. Happiness is not so utterly beyond his reach as those who do not climb mountains are sometimes apt to suppose. {113}
But there are remedies nearer than the mighty pyramid of Chogo Ri, and the tented pavilion of the massif of Kangchenjanga. You have only to draw a little of the hypochloride of cocaine into your nostrils, and you become full of intense virility and energy, a devourer of obstacles; to smoke a few pipes of opium, and you rise to the cloudless and passionless bliss of the philosopher; to swallow a little hashish, and you behold all the fantastic glories of fable, and them a thousandfold; or to woo a flask of ether, breathing it as if it were the very soul of the Beloved, and you perceive all Beauty in every vulgar and familiar sight.
Every one of these drugs gives absolute forgetfulness of all misfortune; nay, you may contemplate the most appalling catastrophes imminent or already fallen upon you: and you care no more than Nature Herself.
The only drawback to the use of drugs is that toleration is so soon set up, and the effect diminished; while for weaklings there is always the danger of the formation of a habit, when the treacherous servant becomes master, and takes toll for the boon of his ephemeral heavens by the bane of an abiding hell. These remarks have only been introduced to emphasize that happiness is an interior state; for every one of these drugs gives happiness supreme and unalloyed, entirely irrespective of the external circumstances of the individual. It would be folly to fill the apartment of an opium-smoker with the masterpieces of Rembrandt or Sotatsu, when a dirty tower or a broken chair suffices to flood his soul with more glories than it can bear, when he realizes that light itself is beautiful, no matter on what it may {114} fall, and when, if you asked him what he would do if he were blind, he would condescend from heaven to reply that darkness was more lovely still, that light was but a disturbance of the serenity of the soul, a siren to seduce it from the bliss of the contemplation of its own ineffable holiness.
But why should we talk of drugs? They are only counterfeit notes, or at best the Fiat notes of a discredited government, and we are seeking gold.
This pure gold is ours for the asking; its name is mysticism.
We may begin by reassuring ourselves. The gold is really in the vaults of the Treasury. The mystic quest is not a chimaera. The drugs assure us of that. They have not put anything supernatural into us; they have found nothing in us that was not already there. They have merely stimulated us. All the peace, the joy, the love, the beauty, the comprehension, they gave us; all these things were in us, bone of our bones, and flesh of our flesh, and soul of our soul. They are in our treasury, safe enough; and the chief reason why we should not burglariously use such skeleton keys as morphia is that by so doing we are likely to hamper the lock.
We see then that we are but so very little lower than angels that the most trifling stimulus raises us to a plane where we enjoy without consideration even of what it is that we enjoy. Raise humanity by a matter of five per cent, and the problem is solved! Our trouble is due entirely to the law that action and reaction are equal and opposite. We have to pay for the pleasure with pain. We sat up all last night, and now we must go to bed early; we {115} drank too much champagne, and now it is the turn of Vichy.
The question then has always been whether we can overcome this law of duality, whether we can reach--one step--to that higher plane where all is ours. Mysticism supplies the answer.
The mystic attainment may be defined as the Union of the Soul with God, or as the realization of itself, or--there are fifty phrases for the same experience. The same, for whether you are a Christian or a Buddhist, a Theist or (as I am myself, thank God!) an Atheist, the attainment of this one state is as open to you as is nightmare, or madness, or intoxication. Religious folk have buried this fact under mountains of dogma; but the study of comparative religion has made it clear. One has merely to print parallel passages from the mystics of all ages and religions to see that they were talking of the same thing: one gets even verbal identities, such as the "That Tao which is Tao is not Tao" of the Chinese, the "Not That, Not That" of the Hindu, the "Head which is above all Heads, the Head which is not a Head" of the Qabalist, the "God is Nothing" of the Christian, and the "That is not which is" of a modern atheistic or pantheistic mystic <<T NOTE: Crowley himself, presumably>>.
Mysticism, unless it be a mere barren intellectual doctrine, always involves some personal religious experience of this kind; and the real strength of every religion is consequently in its mystics. The conviction of truth given by any important spiritual experience is so great that although it may have lasted for a few seconds only, it does not hesitate to pit itself against the experience of the lifetime in respect of reality. The mystic doubts whether he the man exists at all, because he is so certain {116} of the existence of him the God; and the two are difficult to conceive intellectually as coexistent! <<T NOTE: Refer to Crowley's article "Berashith" in Collected Works vol. II.>>
Now the extreme state of Being, Knowledge, and Bliss which characterizes the intermediate stages of mystic experience, is a thousandfold more intense than any other kind of happiness. It is totally independent of circumstance. We could bring a cloud of witnesses from the ends of all the earth; but one, the Persian bard Al Qahar <<WEH NOTE: Crowley under one of his pen names>>, whose masterpiece is the Bagh-i-Muattar, must suffice.
"Whether Allah be or be not is little odds so long as His devotees enjoy the mystic rapture. ----Whether He exists or no, whether He love him or no, Al Qahar will love Him and sing His praises."
"The perfect lover is calm and equable; storms of thunder, quakings of the earth, losses of goods, punishment from great men, none of these things cause him to rise from his divan, or to remove the silken tube of the rose-perfumed huqqa from his mouth."
It is therefore unnecessary to fret over social problems and the rest of it; the root of the cause is duality, the antithesis of the Ego and the Non-Ego; and the cure is Realization of the Unity. Why treat symptoms, when we can eradicate the disease, especially as in this case the symptoms are sheer hullucinations [sic] on the part of the patient?
It is the old story of the man in the railroad car with a basket, and the importunate stranger. "Say, stranger, `scuse me, but may I ask what you have in that basket?" "Mongoose," "What `n Hades is a mongoose?" "Mongoose eats snakes." "But what do you want with a mongoose?" "My brother sees snakes." (A pause) "But, say, {117} stranger, them ain't no real snakes." "This ain't a real mongoose."
Socialism, and religion, and love, and art, are all phantastic things, good to lull the ills of life, dreams pitted against dreams. But the only cure is to attack the cause of all the trouble, the illusion of duality.
Now to do this is a matter of common knowledge: or if not, it is no fault of mine, for I have written two million words or more upon the subject, and this is no place to add to their number; but it is very decidedly the place to observe that both the goal and the means are constantly advocated not only by the Jesus of John, but even here and there by him of the Synoptics. Most of His instructions to his disciples to `take no thought for the morrow' to `abandon father and mother and all other things', `not to have two cloaks', `not to resist evil', are the ordinary rules of every eastern and western mystic. He must have nothing whatever to divert his mind from its concentration.
The whole secret of `Yoga' is given in Matthew VI, 22. "The light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." This is a perfectly simple statement of the virtue of what the Hindus call "Ekagrata", "one-pointedness".
The gospel of John, too, is full of dithyrambs expressing the results of mystic practice. "I and my Father are one"; "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life"; "I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." Kappa Tau Lambda. <<T NOTE: k.t.l.>>
It may be remarked incidentally that a great deal more can be made out on this line by studying the Greek original, when {118} the technical value in mystical phraseology of the words employed is noted. (See the Commentaries on Matthew and John of the Hon. P. Ramanthan C.M.G., whose mystic name is Sri Parananda.)
The Evangelists have been very stupidly accused of copying such passages from Chinese and Indian classics, on the grounds of absolute identity of idea, and even close verbal parallelism. It might be difficult to rebut the charge if all this were talk in the air. If I happen to begin a poem, "The purple pigs lament the music of Madrid; They cook the nightingale with limping eyes of kid" it is fair to assume that I am plagiarizing Missinglinck's "Les cochons rouges pleurent un musique espan~ol; leurs yeux de suede boitent a cuire le rossignol", because it is unlikely that two such complex pieces of pure nonsense should occur to two independent thinkers--unless, indeed, they were German metaphysicians. But fifty men may observe independently that still water reflects images, and record it; no question of copying arises.
There is, it is true, an universal tradition of the means and of the end of mysticism, and we may perhaps think that Jesus, like other mystics, had his teacher; but there is no necessity for any such supposition. During an experiment made by me with a certain drug in a certain hospital in the English Midlands, the matron, who was one of the subjects, had not even a smattering of the history or even of the terminology of mysticism; yet she passed through trance after trance in the traditional order, and described her experiences in the very same language as Laotze and Boehme, and Sri Sabhapaty Swami, and all the rest, of whom she had never heard so much as the names. {119}
One remedy for the ills of life is therefore by dealing with the subjective mind, by training it to independence of the senses, by cleansing the soul of the contamination of illusion; and whether we think that this is the best way, or the only way, or regard it in its turn as mere delusion, there can be no reasonable doubt in the mind of any student of comparative religion that this way is the way pointed out by at least one of the figures in the Gospels who is included in the comprehensive word Jesus.
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The root of the trouble is the standardization of the common good or wealth, in the minds of the vulgar. This illusion is produced principally by the efforts of the cheap press, which works always on the assumption that the possession of purchaseable treasures is the only good desirable by men. Thus the poor have been taught to envy the bilious and atrabilious millionaire, instead of the artist, the saint and the athlete.
The cure for the whole misery of poverty is the development of the appreciation of those things that are really worth while.
The Greeks and Chinese throve--the latter still thrive--because having attended to necessaries such as the production of corn and wine, they devoted their surplus energies not to the production of that kind of luxury which can only be enjoyed by few, but to the creation of beauty. Beauty is at the door of every man who can appreciate it: and with that comes happiness.
O foolish men! who hath bewitched you? Wish no more to have, but will to be!