men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them." By which rule a wealthy Christian would give at least half his property to the first beggar, as he would wish the beggar to do to him were their situations reversed. This might be natural enough in a community hourly expecting the end of the world and their own instalment in palaces whose splendour would be proportioned to their poverty in this world. But when this delusion faded the rule reverted to what Hillel said, and no doubt Jesus also, as we find it in the second verse of "Didache," the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. It is a principle laid down by Confucius, Buddha, and all the human "prophets," and one followed by every gentleman, not to do to his neighbour what he would not like if done to himself. But it is removed out of human ethics and strained ad absurdum by the second-adventist version put into the mouth of Jesus by Matthew. I have dwelt on this as an illustration of how irrecoverably a man loses his manhood when he is made a God.

Irrecoverably! In the second Clementine Epistle (xii. 2) it is said, "For the Lord himself, having been asked by some one when his kingdom should come, said, When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female." Perhaps a humorous way of saying Never. Equally remote appears the prospect of recovering the man Jesus from his Christ-sepulchre. Even among rationalists there are probably but few who would not be scandalized by any thorough test such as Jesus is said, in the Nazarene Gospel, to have requested of his disciples after his resurrection, "Take, feel me, and see that I am not a bodiless demon!" Without blood, without passion, he remains without the experiences and

faults that mould best men, as Shakespeare tells us; he so remains in the nerves where no longer in the intellect, insomuch that even many an agnostic would shudder if any heretic, taking his life in his hand, should maintain that Jesus had fallen in love, or was a married man, or had children.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE MYTHOLOGICAL MANTLE OF SOLOMON FALLEN ON JESUS.

It is no part of my aim to prove miracles impossible, nor to consider whether one or another alleged wonder might not be really within the powers of an exceptional man. In the absence of any apostolic allusion to any extraordinary incident in the life of Jesus, and his own declaration (for the evangelists could not have invented a rebuke to their own narratives) that miracles were the vain expectation of a people in distress and degradation, such records have lost their historic character. As Gibbon said in the last century, it requires a miracle of grace to make a believer in miracles, and even among the uncritical that miracle is not frequent. In the New Testament belief in miracle has its natural corollary in a miraculous morality,—a dissolution of earthly ties, a severance from worldly affairs, a non-resistance and passiveness under wrongs, which are in perfect accord with persons moving in an apocalyptic dream, but not with a world awakened from that dream.

But at the root of the unnatural miracles is the natural miracle-the heart of man. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as the miracle-working poet reminds us; our little life is surrounded with a sleep, a realm of dreams,-visions that give poetic fulfilment to hopes born of hard experience. No biblical miracle in

its literal form is so beautiful and impressive as the history of its origin and development as traced by the student of mythology. The growth, for example, of a simple proverb ascribed to Solomon "He that trusteth in his riches shall fall, but the just shall flourish as a green leaf" into a hymn (Ps. lii.); the association of this Psalm, by its Hebrew caption, with hungry David eating the shewbread of the temple, and the king's slaying the priests who permitted it; the use of this legend by Jesus when his disciples were censured for plucking the corn on the Sabbath (with perhaps some humorous picture of a great king in Heaven angry because hungry men ate a few grains of corn, crumbs from his royal table) pointed with advice that the censors should learn that God desires charity and not sacrifice; the development of this into an early Christian burden against the rich, which took the form of an old Oriental fable,* to which a Jewish connotation was given by giving the poor man in Paradise the name of Lazarus (i. e. Eleazar, who risked his life to obtain water for famished David, a story that may have been referred to by Jesus along with that of the shewbread); the transformation of this parable into a quasi-historical narrative representing the return of Lazarus from Abraham's bosom, his poverty omitted; the European combination of the parable and the history by creating a St. Lazarus ("one helped by God"), yet appointing him the helper of beggars (lazzaroni): these items together represent a continuity of the human spirit through thousands of years, surmounting obstructive superstitions, holding

*Ormazd entrusted Zoroaster for seven days with omniscience, during which time he saw, besides many other things, "a celebrity with much wealth, whose soul, infamous in the body, was hungry and jaundiced and in hell, and I saw a beggar with no wealth and helpless and his soul was thriving in paradise."-Bahman Yast. Sacred Books of the East, Vol. V,

p. 197.

still the guiding thread of humanity through long labyrinths of legend.

To fix on any one stage in such an evolution, detach it, affirm it, is to wrest a true scripture to its destruction. Few can really be interested in Abimelech and the shewbread; no one now believes that a rich man must go to hell because he is rich, nor a pauper to Paradise because of his pauperism; and none can intelligently believe the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus without believing that in Jesus miraculous power was associated with the unveracity and vanity ascribed to him in that narrative. But take the legends all together, and in them is visible the supersacred heart of humanity steadily developing through manifold symbols and fables the religion of human helpfulness and happiness. The study of mythology is the study of

nature.

The theory already stated (ante I), that illegitimacy or irregularity of birth was a sign of authentication for "the God-anointed," finds some corroboration in the claim of the Epistle to the Hebrews that Jesus, like Melchizedek, was without father, mother, or genealogy. His double nature is suggested: "Our Lord sprung out of Judah" (vii. 14), yet (verse 16), as priest, he has arisen "not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an indissoluble life." The writer admits that what he writes about Melchizedek is "hard of interpretation," and perhaps it so proved to the genealogist (Matt. i.) who apparently was animated by a desire to make out a carnal-law inheritance of the throne, yet not so legitimate as to exclude divine interference at various stages. In the forty-two generations only five mothers are named,-all associated either with sexual