He summoned to his memory a cloud of witnesses, all contradictory.  Josephus was barred.  Philo Judaeus, who was living near the centre of things, an observer on the scent of the spiritual, a man acquainted with the writings of Rabbi Hillel, and the father of Neoplatonism—­never mentions Jesus, nor does he speak of any religious uprising in Judea.  The passage in Virgil, which has through the doubtful testimony of monkish writers been construed into a prophecy of a forthcoming Messiah, Hyzlo, who was a scholar, knew to have been addressed to a son of Virgil’s intimate friend.  Tacitus, too, has been interpolated.  Seneca’s ideal man is not Jesus, for Jesus is Osiris, Horus, Krishna, Mithra, Hercules, Adonis,—­think of this beautiful young god’s death!—­Buddha.  Such a mock trial and death could not have taken place under the Roman or Jewish laws.  The sacraments derive from the Greeks, from the Indians—­the mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, from the Haoma sacrifice of the Persians, originally Brahmanic.  The Trinity, was it not a relic of that ineradicable desire for polytheism implanted in the human bosom?  Was the crucifixion but a memory of those darker cults and blood sacrifices of Asia, and also of the expiating goats sent out into the wilderness?  What became of that Hosanna-shouting crowd which welcomed Christ on Palm Sunday?  And there never were such places as Gethsemane and Calvary.  Alas! the Son of Man had indeed no spot to lay his head.  And why had He made no sign when on earth!  Brother Hyzlo wept bitter tears.

But he wiped them away as he considered the similarity of the massacre of the Innocents in Judea and the massacre of the male children ordered by the wicked Indian Rajah of Madura, who feared the Krishna, just conceived by divine agency.  Yes, the chronicles were full of these gods born of virgins, of crucifixions,—­he could remember sixteen,—­of these solar myths.  He caught tripping in a thousand cases the translations of our holy books.  The Ox and Ass legend at the Nativity he realized was the Pseudo-Matthew’s description to Habakkuk of the literal presence:  “In the midst of two animals thou shalt be known;” which is a mistranslated Hebrew text in the Prayer ascribed to Habakkuk.  It got into the Greek Septuagint version of the Prophet made by Egyptian Jews before 150 B.C.  It should read, “in the midst of the years,” not “animals.”  “Ah!” cried Hyzlo, “in this as in important cardinal doctrines have the faithful been the slaves of the learned and unscrupulous pious forgers.  Even the notorious Apollonius of Tyana imitated the miracles of Christ—­all of them.  And what of that wicked wizard, Simon Magus?”

The very repetition of these miracles in all races, at all epochs, pointed to the doctrine of recurrence.  But back of all the negations, back of the inexpugnable proof that no such man or God as Christ existed, or was known to his contemporaries, Jewish and Roman, there must have been some legend which had crystallized into a mighty religion.  Was He an agitator who preferred His obscurity that His glory might be all the greater?  There must have been a beginning to the myth; behind the gospels—­though they are obviously imitated from the older testaments, imitated and diluted—­were unknown writings; previous to these there was word of mouth and—­and ...?