The religious genius of a single individual had created Christianity.  But from the very beginning it was misunderstood; the salvation of the world was linked to the person of a man who had aspired to be an example to the whole race.  The term, “Son of God,” was understood in the sense of the hero-cult of antiquity; possibly the Jewish faith in a Messiah, the politico-national hope of the Children of Israel, was a good deal to blame for this.  A historical event was translated into metaphysic.  The only truly religious man was made the centre of a new mythology and naively worshipped.  It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact that the whole of the first millenary was inwardly irreligious; it concealed its want of metaphysical intuition behind the falsification of historical events.  The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion of the Protestant) theology laboured to obtain an intellectual grasp of the doctrine of a unique historical salvation of humanity and frame it into a dogma.  And thus occurred that unparalleled misunderstanding (a misunderstanding which never clouded the mind of India) which based religion, the timeless metaphysical treasure of the soul, on the historical record of an event which had happened in Asia Minor, and had come down to us in a more or less garbled—­some say entirely falsified—­version.  This was the great sin of Christianity:  It regarded a historical event, revealing the very essence of religion, and consequently capable of being formulated, as a divine intervention for the purpose of bringing about the salvation of the world, instead of recognising in the sublime figure of the founder of the Christian religion a great, perhaps even perfect, incarnation of the eternally new relationship between God and the soul.  It promulgated the strange thought that only the one soul, the soul of the founder, was divine, and instead of teaching the divinity of humanity, it taught the divinity of this one man only—­Jesus became a God who could no longer be looked upon as the perfect specimen and prototype of the race, but before whom it behoved man to kneel and pray for salvation.  Perhaps it was not possible to understand the new doctrine in any other way; before men can conceive the idea of their divinity, they must have become conscious of their souls.

This complete misunderstanding and externalising of religion which took place in the first millenary, and which can never now be retrieved, is fundamentally pagan, antique.  The record of the salvation of the world, achieved by a hero once and for all time, the historification of the divine spark which is daily re-born in the soul, entirely corresponds to the Greek myths of gods and demi-gods which before their new, symbolical interpretation, were taken quite literally.  I am not now concerned with the problem of how far the antique heroes and Eastern mysteries directly influenced the conception of the figure of Christ; I only wish to emphasise the profound contrast between