that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious—­such people as the Irish—­are weak, unpractical, and behind the times.  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.  Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them.  That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence.  We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel.  The maniac is generally a monomaniac.  Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other.  The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.

I take in order the next instance offered:  the idea that Christianity belongs to the dark ages.  Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history.  And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the dark ages, was the one path across the dark ages that was not dark.  It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilisations.  If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple:  it didn’t.  It arose in the Mediterranean civilisation in the full summer of the Roman Empire.  The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast.  It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again:  repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top.  This is the amazing