I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I
looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions
were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I
looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the
least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands
clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder
and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils,
passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a
sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--
and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own,
not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious
use of the A FORTIORI. His "how much more" is piled one upon
another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used
ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive.
But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque;
it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled
into the sea.
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