gospels are compilations from unknown writers, while the fourth gospel is a much later work.  And how colourless, imitative, is the New when compared to the Old Testament,—­echoing with the antiphonal thunders of Jehovah and his stern-mouthed Prophets!  The passage in Josephus touching on Christ is now known to have been interpolated.  Authentic history does not record the existence of Christ.  Not one of His contemporaries mentions him.  That tremendous drama in Galilee was not even commented upon by the Romans, a nation keen to notice any deviation from normal history.  The Jewish records are doubtful, written centuries after His supposed death.  And they are malicious.  What cannot happen in two centuries?  Hyzlo reflected sadly upon Moslemism, upon Mormonism, upon the vagaries of a strange American sect at whose head was said to be a female pope.

The similarity of circumstances in the lives of Buddha and Christ also annoyed him.  Both were born of virgins, both renounced the world, both were saviours.  There were the same temptations, the same happenings; prophecies, miracles, celestial rejoicings, a false disciple, the seven beatitudes—­a reflection of the Oriental wisdom—­an expiatory death and resurrection.  The entire machinery of the Christian church, its saints, martyrs, festivals, ritual, and philosophies are borrowed from the mythologies of the pagans.  Sun-worship is the beginning of all religions.  To the genius of the epileptic Paul, or Saul,—­founders of religions are always epilepts,—­a half Greek and disciple of the Pharisee Gamaliel, who saw visions and put to the sword his enemies, to Paul, called a saint, a man of overwhelming personal force, to this cruel anarchist, relentless, half-mad fanatic and his theological doctrines we owe the preservation and power of the Christian Church.  At first the Christians were the miserable offscourings of society, slaves, criminals, and lunatics.  They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the parasites they were.  A series of political catastrophes, a popular uprising against the rotten emperors of decadent Rome, and the wide growth of the socialist idea—­these things and an unscrupulous man, Constantine the Great, put the Christians firmly in the saddle.  And soon came cataracts of blood.  If the tales of the imperial persecutions are true, then hath Christianity been revenged a million fold; where her skirt has trailed there has been the cruel stain of slaughter.  It must not be forgotten, too, that immorality of the grossest sort was promised the deluded sectarians, compared with which the Mahometan paradise is spiritual.  And the end of the world was predicted at the end of every century, and finally relegated to the millennial celebration of Christianity’s birth.  When, in 1000 A.D., this catastrophe did not occur, the faith received its first great shock.