As far as sociology is concerned, we must either abandon our reason, or abandon Christ.
He is pre-eminently, the prophet of unreason — the preacher of rabble-rabies. All that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies, — all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces. Lazarus, the filthy and diseased vagrant, is his hero of heroes; and Dives, the sane, energetic citizen, is his ‘awful’ example of baseness and criminality. He praises “the humble” and he curses the proud. He blesses the failures, and damns the successful. All that is noble, he perverts — all that is atrocious he upholds. He inverts all the natural instincts of mankind, and urges us to live artificial lives. He commands the demonetization of virtues that aggrandize a people, and advises his admirers to submit in quietness to every insult, contumely, indignity; to be slaves, de-facto. Indeed, there is scarce one thought in the whole of his Dicta that is practically true.
O, Christ! O, Christ! Thou artful fiend! Thou Great Subverter! What an amazing Eblis-glamour, thou hast cast over the world? Thou mean insignificant-minded Jew!
Why is it that our modern philosophers are so mortally afraid to boldly challenge the ‘inspired’ utopianism of this poor self-deluded Galilean mountaineer, — this preacher of all eunuch-virtues — of self-abasement, of passive suffering?
The sickly humanitarian ethics, so eloquently rayed forth by Jesus Christ and his superstitious successors, in ancient Judea, and throughout the moribund Roman empire, are generally accepted in Anglo-Saxondom as the very elixir of immortal wisdom, the purest, wisest, grandest, most incontrovertible of all ‘divine revelations,’ or occult thaumaturgies. And yet when closely examined, they are found to be neither divine, occult, reasonable, nor even honest; but composed, almost exclusively of the stuff that nightmares are made of; together with a strong dash of oriental legerdemain.
Through a thousand different channels, current politico-economic belief is dominated by the base communistic cabala of the ‘man of many sorrows;’ yet as a practical theorem, it is hardly ever critically examined. Why is it that the suggested social solutions promulgated by Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, and other Asiatic cataleptics, are accepted so meekly by us, upon trust? If these men were anything, they were crude socialist reformers with misshapen souls, preachers of ‘a new heaven, and a new earth,’ that is to say, demagogues — politicians-of-the-slums; and out of the slums, nothing that is noble can ever be born.
As agitators, Jesus and his modern continuators shall be exclusively considered in these pages. However, it must be distinctly understood that the spiritual and temporal in all cosmogonies, are so intricately interwoven, that it is almost impossible to completely divorce them. Like the Siamese twins, Gods and Governments are inextricably bound together; so much so indeed, that if you kill one, the other cannot live. Hence the open or secret alliance, that has always existed between the politician and the priest.
Whatever their primitive purity (or impurity), all operative creedal philosophies are essentially civil and military codes, police regulations. ‘Religion is a power, a political engine, and if there was no God, I would have to invent one,’ said the great Napoleon. In letter and in spirit, Christianity is above all things a political theory, and a theory that often takes the form of raging hysterics.
Religions are the matrix in which public institutions are generally moulded. This has ever been well understood by the dominant leaders of mankind, from Numa to Brigham Young, from Solon to Loyola, from Constantine to the lowest Levite hireling, who gets paid in dimes and cents for his unctuous mock — dithyrambs.
