THE HI8TOEIGAL 
 
 BRYANT
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 THE HISTORICAL 
 
 MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 BY 
 WILBUR F. i^BRY ANT 
 
 . . . l*be stood upon Achilles' tomb, 
 <And heard Troy doubted: time 'will doubt of Rome. 
 
 Byron.
 
 Copyright 
 
 WILBUR F. BRYANT 
 1907 
 
 Published 
 
 1908 
 
 Jacob North & Co., Printers 
 Lincoln., Neb.
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 To my children, Ita, Ethel, Eugene, Donovan Kleon 
 and George, this little book is dedicated with the precious 
 legacy of my faith. 
 
 THE AUTHOR.
 
 QUOTATIONS 
 
 Satan c'st Chrislianisme. Voltaire. 
 
 Christiani, Genus Hominum superstitionis novae el maleficae. 
 Suetonius. 
 
 The greatest and most sublime of reformers. Loria. 
 Sokrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ like a God. 
 John fames Rousseau. 
 
 Well might the sun in darkness hide, 
 
 And shut his glories in, 
 When God, the mighty Maker, died, 
 For man, the creature's, sin. 
 
 Isaac Walts. 
 
 The records of humanity present nothing that can be compared, 
 however remotely, with the life of Jesus. Ranke. 
 Ring out the darkness of the land, 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be. 
 Tennyson. 
 
 The blessed word evolution will not account for everything. 
 Oman. 
 
 And behold I am with you all the days, even to the consum- 
 mation of the age. Christ Plimself. 
 
 Do not disgrace yourself as a philosopher by presuming to judge 
 on questions you have never examined. Newton. 
 
 Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and 
 the monkey, the interval which separates is immense. Buffon. 
 
 Their first lawgiver taught them that they were all brothers, 
 when once they had committed themselves so far as to renounce 
 the gods of the Greeks, and worship the crucified sophist and live 
 according to his law. Lucian. 
 
 And if Christ is not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in 
 your sins. Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ are 
 perished. If in the life only we have hope in Christ, we are of 
 all men most miserable. Paul. 
 
 A Jewish peasant changed the religion of the world, and that 
 without force, without power, without support, without one nat-
 
 QUOTATIONS 
 
 ural source, or circumstance of attraction, influence or success. 
 Such a thing hath not happened in any other instance. Paley. 
 
 Much profane wit has been expended on the miraculous means 
 of Jonah's deliverance. ... It requires less faith to credit this 
 simple excerpt from Jonah's biography than to believe the numer- 
 ous hypotheses that have been invented to deprive it of its historic 
 character. McClintock and Strong. 
 
 If a heathen come in, and hear you speak with several tongues, 
 will he not say that you are mad? and certainly, it is little better 
 when atheists and profane persons do hear of so many discordant 
 and contrary opinions in religion ; it doth avert them from the 
 church, and maketh them to sit down in the chair of the scorners. 
 Bacon. 
 
 The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing re- 
 ligion as she descended from heaven, arrayed in her native purity. 
 A more melancholy duty is imposed upon the historian. He must 
 discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she 
 contracted in her long residence upon earth, among a weak and 
 degenerate race of beings. Gibbon. 
 
 Holy Scripture and nature are both emanations from the Divine 
 word; the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter, the 
 executrix of God's command. ... I believe that the intention 
 of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary to 
 salvation : such as neither science nor other means could render 
 credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not 
 think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our 
 senses, our speech, our intellect, would have us put aside the use 
 of these, to teach us such things as with their help we could find 
 out for ourselves. Galileo. 
 
 Sic etiam, secundum ipsos, in sacris libris, plurima in re scien- 
 tifica vel historica errore afficiuntur. Sed, inquiunt, non ibi de 
 scientiis agi ant historia, verum de religione tantum ac re ntorum. 
 Scientiae illic et historia integumenta sunt quaedam, quibus ex- 
 perientiae religiosae et morales obteguntur ut facilius in vulgus 
 propagarentur ; quod quidem vulgus cum non aliter intelligent, 
 perfcctior illi scientia out historia non utilitati sed nocumento 
 fuisset. Encyclical on Modernism. 
 
 In the sacred books there are many passages referring to science 
 or history where manifest errors are to be found. But the subject 
 of these books is not science or history, but religion and morals.
 
 QUOTATIONS 7 
 
 In them history and science serve only as a species of covering 
 to enable the religious and moral experiences wrapped up in them 
 to penetrate more readily among the masses. The masses under- 
 stood science and history as they are expressed in these books, 
 and it is clear that had science and history been expressed in a 
 more perfect form, this would have proved rather a hindrance 
 than a help. Translation of the foregoing. 
 
 That such a person as Jesus Christ existed, and that he was 
 crucified, which was the mode of execution in that day, are his- 
 torical relations strictly within the limits of probability. He 
 preached most excellent morality, and the equality of man ; but 
 he preached also against the corruption and avarice of the Jewish 
 priests, and this brought upon him the hatred and vengeance of 
 the whole Jewish priesthood. The accusation which these priests 
 brought against him was of sedition and conspiracy against the 
 Roman government, to which the Jews were then subject and 
 tributary; and it is not improbable that the Roman government 
 might have some apprehensions of the effect of his doctrines as 
 well as the Jewish priests. . . . Between the two, however, 
 this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life. Thomas 
 Paine.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 
 
 Dear Donovan: 
 
 Because of your serious temperament, this letter is ad- 
 dressed to you. Possibly some parts of it may not be 
 understood now. But, when vixit is all which remains 
 of the writer, read this as the words of your departed 
 father addressed to one in whom he feels the deepest 
 interest. It may, or may not, be what I would say could 
 I speak from the tomb, but it is written according to my 
 present light. 
 
 The existence of God ought to be a moral certainty to 
 every reflecting mind. The belief in one God a God as 
 distinct from the material universe as the builder of a 
 temple is from the temple itself is as firmly fixed in my 
 mind as the consciousness of my own existence. Yes, it 
 is a belief in one supreme, personal, 1 self -existent, omnis- 
 cient, omnipotent, omnipresent God, existing from eter- 
 nity to eternity, without body parts or passions. Do not 
 confound a personal God with an anthropomorphic God 
 the God of the ancient Israelite and those moderns, the 
 Adventist and the Mormon, a God with hands and feet, 
 a God with the faculties of memory and reason. No, all 
 these imply limitation of presence, power and knowledge. 
 It is freely confessed that God is incomprehensible. Were 
 he otherwise, I could not believe in Him, as God. But a 
 belief in any other God than the one defined call it by 
 what fine name you may is, to my mind, practical athe- 
 ism. David Hume 2 who, I am sorry to say, is now chiefly 
 
 J A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. 
 Boethus. 
 
 'See note at the end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 IO HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 remembered for his attacks upon supernatural religion, 
 says in his Natural History of Religion: 
 
 "To any one, who considers justly of the matter, it will appear 
 that the gods of all polytheists are no better than the elves and 
 fairies of our ancestors, and merit as little any pious worship or 
 veneration. These pretended religionists are really a kind of super- 
 stitious atheists, and acknowledge no being that corresponds to 
 our idea of a deity." 
 
 Yes, from the very nature of God, it is impossible there 
 could be another like him. 
 
 A savage of the stone age, looking at a metallic clock, 
 seeing the movement, hearing the tick of the second and 
 the stroke of the hour, would believe the clock a living 
 thing, if he reasoned as the pantheist 1 reasons. But, if 
 he adopted the logic of the materialist, he might philoso- 
 phise as follows : 
 
 "This thing is governed by certain immutable laws; these laws 
 are inherent; ergo, it is impossible to conceive of the material of 
 the thing as distinct from the force that moves it, and vice versa, 
 the impossibility recurs. Hence it is obvious that they the ma- 
 etrial and the force are inseparable. I can not destroy the material 
 of which this thing is made. The force can not exist apart from 
 the material, or the material apart from the force. The material 
 and the force, together, constitute the thing which I see. No one 
 could have made this thing, for it might have been possible to have 
 made a better thing than this thing is. The thing never having 
 been made, the material being indestructible and the material and 
 the force being inseparable, this thing has existed from and will 
 exist to eternity. It never had a maker, and it runs itself by certain 
 immutable and inherent laws, which no one made." 
 
 Wild as this reasoning may appear, it is a fair epitome 
 of Biichner's Kraft mid Stoff, if we but substitute "ma- 
 terial universe" for "clock." 
 
 My son, you have amused yourself with soap-bubbles. 
 You know what they are. The Methodist Bishop War- 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 1 1 
 
 ren, has compared our earth to an enormous soap-bubble 
 suspended in space, as the ordinary bubble is suspended 
 in the air. If the great Humboldt was right, that is to 
 say, .if the world is a ball of fire covered by a shell, thin- 
 ner accordingly than an eggshell, then Dr. Warren's com- 
 parison is not a bad one. Professor Loomis thought 
 sufficient steam might be generated in the earth to blow 
 it to atoms. I remember an allegory of Victor Hugo's 
 in Napollon /<? Petit. He imagines himself and his 
 reader in Russia ; the Neva is frozen over ; men go upon 
 the ice, improvise and build a city; they stamp upon the 
 ice, it is solid as rock, and they shout, "Long live ice." 
 But the sun returns and with it spring, and the break-up 
 of the river follows, bringing horror and destruction. 
 Standing upon the earth, we know not what is beneath 
 our feet. 
 
 But this is not all. You have seen a railroad train 
 moving at the rate of sixty miles an hour a mile a min- 
 ute. If you ever rode at that rate, you felt safe only be- 
 cause you trusted the engineer. Think of this earth 
 soap-bubble, steam calliope or whatever it is traveling 
 about the sun at the rate of not one mile 1,110 miles 
 a minute, eighteen and one-half miles at every tick of the 
 clock, and, in this space of time, it deviates from a 
 straight line only 1 / 9 of an inch, so immense is the earth's 
 orbit. At the same time it is moving with the sun about 
 some unknown centre, at the rate of eight miles a second. 
 And this is not all. Traveling, like a spinning top, not 
 upright, but with an inclination of 23^2 degrees, it whirls 
 on its own axis at the speed of 1,000 miles an hour. In 
 its journey about the sun, it never takes the same path 
 twice. At times it slacks its speed. Then, like a living 
 thing that has recovered its breath, it speeds on, swifter 
 and swifter; again, as if wearied, it lags. With its htm-
 
 12 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 dreds of active volcanoes and thousands of spouting gey- 
 sers, an onlooker might be pardoned for mistaking it for 
 a great steam-engine. But, regardless of distance and 
 variant speed, it completes each circuit, always to a sec- 
 ond, in the same space of time. The young Jew in King- 
 sley's Hypatia asks himself if the earth is not a huge 
 animal and man a parasite. Had he known all that Co- 
 pernicus, Galileo, 1 Kepler, 1 Newton, 1 Bradley 1 and Struve 
 have taught us, his semi-pantheistic reflection might have 
 made him a theosophist. But the tale is not yet told. 
 Concurrently with these divers revolutions, systemic, so- 
 lar and axial, the earth performs that St. Vitus dance 
 which men call nutation, that is to say, the pole of the 
 earth nods to the pole of the ecliptic 1,400 times in one 
 revolution. Add to all these the unexplained phenomenon 
 of the variation of latitude. This we know results from 
 the change of the location of the terrestrial pole. If this 
 proves the earth an elastic ball, it brings to mind Dr. 
 Warren's soap-bubble theory ; but it is claimed as an ar- 
 gument for the earth's solidity. 2 All these antics of our 
 earth have such regularity that their recurrence can be 
 predicted. Yet this soap-bubble, hanging upon nothing 
 and flying about with more diverse motions than a umiak 
 in a maelstrom, is our home. Are we, in railroad par- 
 lance, taking a free ride on a wild engine? Is there no 
 God? Atheism is the gospel of despair. No, Kepler's 
 laws must have an enacting clause the fiat of the Eter- 
 nal. There is a God who holds this chemical engine filled 
 with explosives in the hollow of his almighty hand. I 
 care not whether he governs by fixed laws, or by a con- 
 tinuous and universal providence. The discussion is 
 
 J See note at end of this letter. IV. F. B. 
 
 'Read the citation of Bishop Watson's remark on the geologist 
 in the main text. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 13 
 
 profitless. Whether he be the clock-maker or the helms- 
 man is immaterial. The earth passes equal areas in the 
 same space of time without reference to lineal distance. 
 Hence the difference in the rate of speed. We call this 
 fact Kepler's second law. The philosophic savage before 
 mentioned, noting that the hands of the clock moved over 
 equal lineal distances in equal spaces of time, might call 
 this phenomenon law, and himself an agnostic, and not 
 cut as sorry a figure as the skeptic gazing upon the eter- 
 nal clockwork of the skies. The argument for a maker 
 of the universe is stronger than the argument for the 
 maker of the clock. The latter is a clumsy imitation of 
 the former. This argument from design is as old as 
 Sokrates, and, since his day, has been repeated by num- 
 berless philosophers,, from Paul to Paley. 1 
 
 And now come an army of philosophers to tell us that 
 Sokrates, Paul and Paley are in the slang of the day 
 back numbers. I have been expecting the antithesis of 
 Milton would appear to sing the ascent of man, instead 
 of his fall. I can imagine the invocation of his muse. 
 Instead of "Man's first disobedience," we would have: 
 
 "Man is a biped of celestial shape, 
 A cross betwixt the angel and the ape. 
 That man was fashioned from a clod of earth 
 Bak'd in the heat of an Assyrian dearth, 
 No son of science in this age believes, 
 And none but bigot in his mind conceives. 
 How man from monad did primeval spring, 
 Through all gradations, help, O muse, to sing." 
 
 Peace to the ashes and glory to the names of our illus- 
 trious ancestors, the pismire and the tadpole! 
 
 The scientific skeptic will tell you that his sole quest is 
 truth. If he would only stop with the truth! But you 
 
 1 See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 14 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 will find, on closer acquaintance, that no class of men 
 not even the poets have such fructifying imaginations 
 as scientists. The scientist's zeal for his science stimu- 
 lates his imagination into morbid activity. The astron- 
 omers point to the waxing and waning polar caps of 
 Mars, to Schiaparelli's canals and to the changing color 
 of the alleged oases, and jump ta the conclusion that the 
 planet is inhabited by a race of Brobdingnags who have 
 constructed a system of public works, beside which the 
 seven wonders of the world, the Chinese wall, the trans- 
 continental railroads, the sub- Alpine tunnels, the pyramid 
 of Cholula and the puny attempts at irrigation by the 
 Incas and Lombards, all combined, pale into lilliputian 
 nothingness. I freely admit that those geometric figures 
 traced on a continental blackboard, though no more won- 
 derful than what the microscope reveals in every crystal, 
 are not readily explained as natural phenomena. It is 
 settled that they are not optical illusions. But the mean 
 temperature of Mars is 2 degrees below that of Uper- 
 nivik. Is not the burden of proof upon the man who 
 asserts the probability or utility of irrigation in a climate 
 whose mean temperature is 36 degrees Fahrenheit? 1 
 Grizzly bears are poor civil engineers, and the culture of 
 Iceland moss would hardly demand or justify the em- 
 ployment of an army of Herculeans in a task whose cost 
 would bankrupt a planet. I have not spoken of the objec- 
 tion of Stoney, the Irish physicist, to this canal theory, 
 based on the kinetic theory of gases. He claims that 
 water can not exist on Mars. 
 
 Geologists have read the pre-Adamic man into the 
 strata of the earth. Now, allow me to suggest how much 
 some of this may be worth. Perhaps you have read in 
 
 *But Professor Percival Lowell says 48 degrees. See his article 
 in McClure's Magazine for December, 1907. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 1 5 
 
 the account of the San Francisco earthquake of last year 
 how a herd of cattle sank in a fissure which opened in 
 the earth and which closed over them. How deep did 
 they sink? Echo answers: "How deep?" Suppose they 
 had been men, would such a happening account for the 
 finding of a Calaveras 1 or a Neanderthal skull 2 a thou- 
 sand years hence? 
 
 The ablest plea for the pre-Adamite which I have ever 
 read is Man in the Past, Present and Future, by the 
 German materialist Biichner. The industry of this au- 
 thor in the collection of facts is certainly praiseworthy, 
 but his deductions are as gross a non-sequitur as the dis- 
 course of the grave-digger in Hamlet. Perhaps I am a 
 bigot, but I can not avoid the conclusion that these men 
 are trying to escape the stain of original sin by extending 
 their pedigree. And I am disgusted with the Christian 
 writers who will try to manufacture a theological mer- 
 maid in their vain endeavor to attach that monkey-theory 
 to revelation. It is something which is not sustained, 
 even by prima-facie evidence. You will find the unbe- 
 lievers more credulous than the believers. Some time 
 you will read about the Cardiff giant. 3 Remember the 
 
 'See picture and account of this skull, which is preserved in 
 the Peabody Museum in Harvard College, in Winsor's Critical 
 History of America, volume 1, page 385. But read Holmes's ac- 
 count in Smithsonian report for 1901. Holmes and McGee, it 
 would seem, have left little to console the pre-Adamite theorists. 
 W. F. B. 
 
 2 Discovered in 1856, near Hochdal, Germany. I have seen so 
 many contradictory accounts of the locality and circumstances of 
 the discovery that I know not what to credit. This skull has been 
 credited by different scientists to everything, from an idiot to an 
 ape. You can find an account of this skull in almost any work on 
 palaeontology. W. F. B. 
 
 8 Dug up in October, 1869. Tt imposed on many scientists, but 
 turned out to be the work of a rude stonecutter, and a greater 
 fraud than the wild men from Borneo. See article by Andrew D. 
 White, Century, volume LXIV. New series XLII, pages 948-955. 
 W. F. B.
 
 l6 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 name, and remember your father when you read the ac- 
 count. The cave of Aurignac 1 is inconsistent with what ? 
 Usher's chronology that is all. 
 
 Boucher de Perthes 2 and those who came after him 
 have produced some evidence of a very early man. Bel- 
 larmine said, three hundred years ago, that if the Coper- 
 nican theory of the universe was scientifically established, 
 revelation would have to be copernically interpreted. So 
 I think about the claim of Boucher de Perthes. I have 
 no doubt of the truth of revelation. Let us cross the 
 other bridge when we arrive at it. 
 
 It is not my purpose to wander from the subject in 
 ridiculing science, as such. But the tendency of modern 
 scientists is towards agnosticism. I have written of the 
 Martian canals, the Calaveras skull, etc., as illustrating 
 the untrustworthy quality of some scientific deductions. 
 They tell us that Paley's Natural Theology is not up-to- 
 date, because it assumes that some ultra-mundane being 
 made man exactly as he is and placed him in the world 
 exactly as it is, ergo, it does not meet the modern theory 
 of evolution. Now, I am not going to attack evolution, 
 for I believe in it, myself, to a limited extent. Let us 
 meet these people with a reductio ad absurdum. 
 
 The existence of our sun is an impossibility, and I will 
 prove it by a stronger argument than any agnostic ever 
 advanced against the hypothesis of a God. If we allow 
 a cube of ice of given dimensions to be melted in the 
 sun at a place of mean terrestrial temperature, we can 
 determine the number of heat units, the length of time 
 
 l The cave of Aurignac, in the department of Haute Garonne, 
 France, was discovered in 1852. The time at which seventeen 
 skeletons found therein were living human beings has been vari- 
 ously estimated. W. F. B. 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 17 
 
 and the amount of coal combustion requisite. Then let 
 us imagine a circular shell of ice of the thickness of the 
 cube about our sun at the distance of this planet. The 
 amount of heat thrown from the sun into space in any 
 given time is thus easily determined; and we learn that, 
 had that sun been made of anthracite coal, it would have 
 burned out in less time than popular chronology assigns 
 to human history. There is no rational theory for sup- 
 plying its heat. 1 The existence of such a thing as a sun 
 is absurd there it is in mid-heaven. 
 
 The existence of a God proved, the way is easy. He 
 must have made man for a purpose. There is no more 
 practical question than the relation of man to God. I 
 concede the power of natural religion. Man with his own 
 unaided power can discover much the existence of God 
 and the knowledge of his attributes, the probability of an 
 existence after death and a general judgment. Orthodox 
 believers have made too much of the supernatural and 
 not enough of natural religion. The reason is that the 
 deistical school of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
 turies from Lord Herbert to Thomas- Paine have as- 
 sailed revealed religion, till Christians have laid aside 
 their works with the denying inquiry of Nathaniel : "Can 
 any good come out of Nazareth?" Like Philip, I will 
 answer: "Come and see." 
 
 Remember, God never did for man what man could do 
 for himself. God did not make the mariner's compass. 
 He never made a printing press, a submarine cable, an 
 electric telegraph, a balloon or a cotton-gin. He never 
 furnished man with a life-expectancy table or a table of 
 
 *The Sun, Young. Lord Kelvin has proved that, had the sun 
 been made of anthracite coal, it would have burned out in less than 
 5,000 years. Its density is about 25 per cent, greater than water. 
 Helmholtz's theory of solar contraction can not be proved, either 
 true or false, for many centuries to come. W. F. B. 
 2
 
 l8 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 logarithms. God never taught man hygiene or chemistry, 
 never solved for him the pons asinorum; never discov- 
 ered, for man, the binomial theory or the continent of 
 America. He has given man his physical and mental 
 powers and the hidden forces of nature. Religion is any 
 system of theology or philosophy dealing with the prob- 
 lem of life and death. The question is: How far could 
 man's unaided intellect reach in the solution of this great 
 science? The following discourse was delivered by a 
 learned Chinaman to a missionary: 
 
 "What are you here for? To teach me about God? My an- 
 cestors, who were contemporary with your spiritual father Abra- 
 ham, believed in the same God in which he believed; and I 
 believe in the same God in which they believed. But I have never 
 seen anything which convinced me that He ever revealed Himself 
 to man in anything but reason and nature. If he has ever made 
 any other revelation, I should be most happy to receive it. Now, 
 if He has made any other, it must be a better and more certain 
 revelation, or God did a vain and foolish thing, which I don't 
 believe He would do. If He ever revealed Himself through this 
 Jesus of Nazareth, as you say He did, that revelation should have 
 been better and more certain than reason and nature. If so, why 
 don't you fellows agree about it? One of you tells me one thing, 
 another tells me something different. Go home, agree among 
 yourselves, come back, and I will talk with you." 
 
 I do not know what, if anything, the missionary said 
 in reply. - What he could have said puzzles me. It is the 
 sad spectacle of a divided Christendom. United Chris- 
 tianity might have redeemed the world. We can find 
 much in the writers of the deistical schools to prove the 
 necessity of a supernatural revelation. Voltaire and Lord 
 Herbert confess the necessity. The strongest argument 
 in favor of the necessity of a positive revelation is found 
 in the perusal of the works of any writer on natural re- 
 ligion, from the Memorabilia to such philosophers as 
 Voltaire and Hume and such theologians as Dick and
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY IQ 
 
 Paley. The authors of the Bridgewater Treatises 1 are 
 not an inch in advance of Sokrates. This idea is brought 
 out in Macaulay's review of Ranke's History of the Popes. 
 Let us take the testimony of a few witnesses : Sokrates 
 and Confucius, both of them, predicted a teacher who 
 would teach the ultimate truth. And now comes Edward 
 Lord Herbert of Cherbury. I quote from his autobiog- 
 raphy, at pages 176 and 177: 
 
 "I did consider whether it was not better for a while to sup- 
 press it. Being thus doubtful, in my chamber, one fair day in the 
 summer, my casement being opened towards the south, the sun 
 shining clear, and no wind stirring, I took my book, De Veritate, 
 in my hand, and kneeling on my knees, devoutly said these words : 
 
 " 'O Thou eternal God, Author of the light which now shines 
 upon me, and Giver of all inward illuminations, I do beseech 
 Thee, of Thy great goodness, to pardon a greater request than a 
 sinner ought to make; I am not satisfied enough, whether I shall 
 publish this book, De Veritate; if it be for Thy glory, I beseech 
 Thee give me some sign from heaven; if not, I shall suppress it.' 
 
 "I had no sooner spoken these words, but a loud though yet 
 gentle voice came from the heavens (for it was like nothing on 
 earth), which did scr comfort and cheer me, that I took my 
 petition as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded, where- 
 upon also I resolved to print my book. This, how strange soever 
 it may seem, I protest before the eternal God is true ; neither am 
 I in any way superstitiously deceived herein, since I did not only 
 clearly hear the noise, but in the serenest sky that I ever saw, 
 being without any cloud, did to my thinking see the place whence 
 it came." 
 
 Here we have the father of modern deism testifying 
 to a direct, immediate and supernatural revelation from 
 Heaven. 
 
 David Hume, the Scotch philosopher of the eighteenth 
 century, has given theologians much trouble, because, in 
 his Essay on Miracles, he argues upon principles now 
 
 1 See note at the end of this letter. W. F. D.
 
 2O HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 reduced to a science the science of probabilities. It is 
 what every man acts upon in the ordinary affairs of life, 
 the banker with his average of monthly deposits, the 
 underwriter with his mortuary table, et cetera. In his 
 Natural History of Religion, Mr. Hume argues that poly- 
 theism was the primary religion of men, and that mono- 
 theism or theism, as he styles it was the result of en- 
 lightened reason; that it sprang from, or grew out of, 
 polytheism by what Mr. Hume would probably have 
 called evolution had he lived a century later. In my 
 opinion, the eminent Scotchman furnishes us with an 
 excellent argument for a primitive supernatural revela- 
 tion. When he argues that man's unaided intellect grasps 
 at polytheism, he shows the necessity for a revelation. 
 Would a just God have withheld it? 
 
 I shall ask you to consider together three works of 
 Voltaire, 1 for, in my notion, they are an entirety. These 
 are Zadig, The Earthquake at Lisbon and Candide ou 
 I'Optimiste. To those content with the opinion of re- 
 viewers, Zadig teaches blind fatalism, the poem on the 
 earthquake teaches pessimism, and Candide ou I'Optimiste 
 philosophical indifference to suffering. I read for myself 
 and not for reviewers. In my judgment, Zadig, which 
 was written eight or nine years before the others, ought 
 to be read last, for it is, in a sense, an explanation of the 
 others. These works will be considered in the following 
 order : 
 
 1. Le Tremblement de terre dc Lisbonne. 
 
 2. Candide ou I'Optimiste. 
 
 3. Zadig. 
 
 To understand any book we must thoroughly know the 
 circumstances under which it was written. On All Saints' 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 21 
 
 Day, 1755, while the people of Lisbon were attending 
 mass in their churches, the sound of thunder, which ap- 
 peared to come from the bowels of the earth, drowned 
 the peal of organs and the voices of choirs. The panic- 
 stricken multitudes were frozen with terror. Immedi- 
 ately the ground began to heave and swell. The tall piles 
 swayed to and fro, like supple willows before the breeze. 
 Those within the churches attempted to rush out, but 
 were met by others rushing in, as to a place of safety. 
 Stayed in their flight, all were buried beneath falling arches 
 and crumbling walls. A multitude rushed to the harbor 
 and were met by a huge tidal wave bearing ships upon its 
 crest. An enormous crowd took refuge upon a vast marble 
 quay, which resisted the sea wave only to sink into the 
 ocean with the whole of its living burthen. In two hours 
 a destructive fire, stimulated by a raging wind, completed 
 the destruction, and the city was a total wreck. The 
 cathedral, eighteen churches, the convent, the hall of the 
 inquisition, the royal palace, the palaces of the nobility 
 and the mansions of the wealthy, the custom house, public 
 granaries and warehouses filled with merchandise, yards 
 filled with timber, were overthrown by the shock or de- 
 voured by the flame; and 60,000 people perished. The 
 shock was felt as far east as Toplitz, as far south as Sa- 
 hara, as far west as Barbadoes and Lake Ontario and as 
 far north as Sweden and Loch Lomond and Loch Ness in 
 Scotland. Humboldt estimated that the extent of the 
 earth's surface disturbed was four times that of all 
 Europe. 
 
 From time out of memory men have tried to solve the 
 problem of the origin of evil. Zoroaster and Manichaeus 
 confessing one God, the author of all good, at the same 
 time acknowledge an evil principle, the origin of all evil. 
 This theory, the latter and his follower, Faustus, tried to
 
 22 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 reconcile with the Christian idea of God and Satan. 
 Pessimists, like Schopenhauer, have maintained that evil 
 was universal, while optimists, as Bolingbroke and Pope, 
 have contended for the dictum, "whatever is is right." 
 This would do away with the origin of evil, since that 
 can have no origin which has no existence. Voltaire was 
 deeply moved by the account of the destruction of Lis- 
 bon, and ; wrote this poem, which contains more philosophy 
 than any poem which I have read, except Milton's Para- 
 dise Lost, and closes with a prayer, the most beautiful in 
 any language excepting the Lord's prayer and the 
 prayer of Agur. The poet pursues his argument thus : 
 
 "Can we concieve a God beneficent, 
 Upon His children's happiness intent, 
 Yet on them sorrows sparing not to heap? 
 What eye can penetrate designs so deep? 
 Through the All-Perfect how can ill befall? 
 Yet how have other source, since he rules all? 
 Still evil's everywhere, confusion dense; 
 Sad puzzle, far too hard for human sense. 
 A God came down to shed some balm around, 
 Surveyed the earth, and left it as He found. 
 His power to mend the sophist loud denies ; 
 He wanted but the will, another cries ; 
 And while the disputants their views proclaim, 
 Lisbon is perishing in gulfs of flame, 
 And thirty towns with ashes strew the lea 
 From Tagus' ravaged borders to the sea. 
 Does God in anger scourge a guilty race? 
 Or does the Lord of Being and of Space, 
 Unswayed by pity's touch or anger's force, 
 Of His fixed will just watch the changeless course? 
 Does formless matter rebel to its Lord, 
 Bear in itself the seeds of disaccord? 
 
 Nature is mute, we question her in vain, 
 And feel that God alone can make all plain.
 
 KPISTLE DEDICATORY 23 
 
 Humble in plaint, and patient to endure, 
 I doubt not Providence, because obscure." 
 
 Here, in the last four lines, is a confession of the neces- 
 sity of a positive revelation. The poem abounds with ex- 
 pressions of the most profound reverence for the Deity. 
 It simply presents the enigma of the existence of non- 
 punitive suffering as a problem past man's solution. The 
 Anglican bishop of Landaff says as much in his Apology 
 for the Bible. 
 
 John James Rousseau, 1 the Genevese philosopher, thus 
 writes in his Confessions: 
 
 "I received a copy of the Destruction of Lisbon, which I sup- 
 posed was sent me by the author. This made it necessary for me 
 to write to him and speak of the poem. This I did in a letter that 
 was printed long afterwards without my consent, as will appear 
 hereafter. Struck at seeing this poor man, overwhelmed, so to 
 speak, with prosperity and glory, eternally declaiming most bit- 
 terly against the miseries of life, and constantly looking at every- 
 thing with a jaundiced eye, I got into my head the insane idea 
 of inducing him to enter within himself, and proving to him that 
 everything was good. Voltaire, while constantly pretending to 
 believe in God, never really believed in anything but the Devil ; 
 for his pretended God is nothing but a malevolent being who, 
 according to him, delights in nothing but evil-doing. The glaring 
 absurdity of his doctrine is especially revolting in a man loaded 
 with every sort of blessing, who, while reveling in happiness, 
 endeavored to strike his fellows with despair by the frightful 
 image of universal calamity, calamity from which he is himself 
 wholly exempt. I, that had a better right than he to calculate and 
 weigh the evils of human life, made an impartial examination 
 thereof, and proved to him that there was not one of them all 
 from which Providence was not cleared, not a single one that had 
 not its origin in the abuse man had made of his faculties, rather 
 than in nature. I treated him, in a letter, with the utmost regard, 
 consideration and delicacy, with all possible respect, I can truly 
 say. However, knowing the extreme irritability of his self-love, 
 
 l See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 24 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 I did not send this letter to himself, but to Dr. Tronchin, his 
 friend and physician, with full power either to give or suppress 
 it, according as he might think proper. Tronchin gave the letter. 
 Voltaire sent me a few words in reply, stating that, being sick 
 himself, and having charge of a sick person, he would put off his 
 answer until some future day, and said not a word upon the 
 subject . . . Subsequently Voltaire published the reply he 
 promised, but never sent me. This was none other than the novel 
 of Candide, of which I can not speak, as I never read it" 1 
 
 I have allowed Rousseau to tell his own story. He was 
 an eloquent writer, but a poor critic. How the abuse that 
 man had made of his faculties could account for the de- 
 struction of Lisbon is past my weak comprehension. 
 
 Voltaire's Candide on I'Optimiste has been described as 
 a book written to ridicule divine. Providence. No state- 
 ment could be further from verity. It is sometimes placed 
 in contrast with Johnson's Rasselas published afterward 
 to the disparagement of the former. The terrible earth- 
 quake at Lisbon had shaken, not only the earth, but the 
 faith of its inhabitants in the theory of the optimists. Vol- 
 taire's poem was opportune. Had Rousseau read Candide 
 ou I'Optimiste, he must have been slow of comprehension 
 had he not seen himself portrayed in Pangloss, the pe- 
 dantic and loquacious pedagogue. Candide on I'Optimiste, 
 like Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reiriewers, was 
 called out by adverse criticism. It is a sprightly philo- 
 sophical banter written to ridicule Rousseau's optimism. 
 In my judgment, it is the greatest of Voltaire's writings. 
 This pastmaster of ridicule shot Parthian arrows, taken 
 from the armory of his inexhaustible wit. Rousseau says 
 that he did not read the book. The ostrich hides her head 
 in the sand, but does not escape the hunter. Candide is 
 a low German who travels over the earth from West- 
 
 1 Rousseau, Confessions, book IX.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 2$ 
 
 phalia, his native land, to Bulgaria, back to Holland, 
 thence to Portugal, then through Spain to Buenos Ayres, 
 from Paraguay through the Amazonian forests and the 
 imaginary Eldorado to Surinam, where he takes ship to 
 France. In a voyage from France to Venice, he touches 
 England at Portsmouth, and witnesses the execution of 
 Admiral John Byng. He does not land. If we fit ro- 
 mance to dates, Candide would have spent about a year 
 in South America ; for he witnessed the earthquake at 
 Lisbon, November i, 1755, and Admiral Byng was shot 
 March 14, 1757. At Venice, Candide meets by accident 
 with several dethroned monarchs, who had come to spend 
 the carnival there. The anacronisms of introducing The- 
 odore of Corsica 1 several months after his death and of 
 making the carnival occur during or after Lent are un- 
 important, except to captious critics. Vergil did worse 
 with Aeneas and Dido. Voltaire makes his hero, by turns, 
 a vagabond, a soldier; a nabob, a slave, a lacky and a 
 friar, and in one of these guises exhibits him in Constan- 
 tinople, Ispahan, Lapland, Norway and Denmark. Can- 
 dide is the victim of a baron insane with family pride, of 
 military subalterns, religious bigots, inquisitors, a tyran- 
 nical colonial governor, sharpers, thieves, robbers, harlots 
 and a moral monster. He witnesses, meets with and 
 hears related all kinds of misfortunes, battles, bloodsheds, 
 shipwrecks, earthquakes, auto da fes, et cetera. The 
 most dreadful disasters are heaped upon his devoted head. 
 This book, like Humphrey Clinker and Gulliver, is writ- 
 ten in the taste of the age. It ridicules optimism, but 
 does not teach pessimism. Don Quixote, Candide ou 
 I'Optimiste and the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver are, in my 
 opinion, the three great satires since Lucian wrote his 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 26 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Olympian Dialogues. Candide ou I'Optimiste is a kind of 
 cross betwixt Don Quixote and Kingley's Westward Ho, 
 as inferior to the one as it is superior to the other. Pan- 
 gloss, a companion of Candide, is in turn hanged, burned 
 and drowned, but possesses as many lives as a cat. He 
 is a kind of philosophical Don Quixote, but fails to elicit 
 the admiration due to La Mancha's doughty Knight of 
 the Sorrowful Countenance. Candide might almost be 
 considered his Sancho Panza, but they are totally different 
 characters. Cunegonde, the sweetheart and afterwards 
 the wife of Candide, Cacambo, his valet, Zenoida, Can- 
 dide's second wife, Pococurante, a cynical Venetian, 
 James the Anabaptist, Martin, a Manichean, and the Old 
 Woman who passed through every phase of existence 
 from a pampered beauty to a kitchen scullion are other 
 characters. When I first read Candide ou I'Optimiste, I 
 was nineteen years old. When I next read it, I was past 
 forty. It did not seem like the same book. With the ex- 
 ception of two things which will be noted hereafter, there 
 is nothing worse in it than will be found in Shakspere, 
 Smollett and Swift. The difference between Candide ou 
 I'Optimiste and the poem on the destruction of Lisbon, is 
 the difference between a didactic poem and a prose satire. 
 The same general sentiment appears in each pure ag- 
 nosticism as to the ways of God to man. If agnosticism 
 went no further, I would have little criticism to pass. I 
 am neither Manichaean, optimist nor pessimist. It oc- 
 curred to me several years ago that the Almighty could 
 run the universe without my aid or assistance, and I have 
 not been offering Him help or proffering Him suggestions. 
 Zadig. like Candide ou I'Optimiste, is a philosophica' 
 romance. Zadig was a young Babylonian, a kind of a 
 Solomon in his wisdom. The story of his life, as written 
 bv Voltaire, reads like an eastern tale. At times one al-
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 2/ 
 
 most thinks he is reading in the Arabian Nights Enter- 
 tainment. It is a genius who can adopt the style of an- 
 other to the baffling of detection, like the writer who a 
 few years ago produced the Letters of a Chinese Official. 
 Voltaire evidently had himself in mind when he wrote 
 this tale. A significant anagram corresponds to the name 
 of one of his enemies. There are characters and circum- 
 stances all through the story corresponding closely to per- 
 sons and things which had affected him or come under 
 his observation. Zadig was engaged to be married to a 
 young lady by the name of Semira. One day, as they 
 walked upon the banks of the Euphrates, they were as- 
 sailed by the minions of a dissolute rival of Zadig, named 
 Orcan. Zadig rescued his mistress, but, in so doing, re- 
 ceived a wound near the left eye. An imported Egyptian 
 physician said that he must lose the eye. Semira heard 
 of it, and having an unconquerable aversion to one-eyed 
 men, married Orcan, her would-be ravisher. Semira was 
 an educated lady of the court. Zadig now wooed and 
 won Azora, a woman of the common people, but she 
 proved false. In the third chapter of this tale, Zadig 
 meets with an adventure very similar to the story of the 
 Stray Camel which John G. Saxe has reduced to verse. 
 You will find it in a copy of his poems in my library on 
 page 1 60. Zadig is beset by an envious man, the very 
 facsimile of the Abbe Desfontaines who is remembered 
 only because he maligned Voltaire. Like Daniel, Zadig 
 is exalted to be prime minister of Babylon. But the king's 
 jealousy nearly cost Zadig his life. He fled into Egypt. 
 The first person he meets in that country is a woman 
 who is being assaulted by a man. Zadig draws his sword 
 in her defense, and in the encounter the man is slain. 
 Then the woman upbraids Zadig for slaying her lover, 
 and the people of Egypt sell him into slavery. Zadig
 
 28 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 becomes the property of an Arabian, named Setoc, who 
 takes him to his own country. Zadig won the good-will 
 of his master, who, by a philosophical object lesson, he 
 converts from Sabianism to deism; 1 and by his influence 
 sutteeism is abolished. For this (but nominally for de- 
 nying that the stars set in the sea) he is condemned to be 
 burned by a slow fire. A rescued widow by the name of 
 Almona procured his pardon. He is sent by his master 
 to the court of a foreign prince, where, by an ingenious 
 stratagem worthy of Solomon or Sancho Panza, he dis- 
 covers an honest man to fill the office of royal treasurer. 
 Returning to Babylon, he falls in with the leader of ban- 
 ditti and finds the royal consort of Babylon, Astarte, 
 reduced to slavery. He turns to Babylon. The govern- 
 ment is overthrown, and the king is dead. The succes- 
 sion is to be determined by a combat between knights. 
 The victor is to marry the queen and take the crown. 
 Their faces are covered, so that the knights are only 
 known by the color of their armor. Zadig is victorious, 
 but a vanquished knight steals his armor while he sleeps, 
 and the thief is adjudged the victor. Zadig leaves Baby- 
 lon in despair. And now comes what a certain critic 
 thinks adds nothing to the story, but I think is the best 
 part of it. Fortunate is the writer who escapes the charge 
 of plagiarism. Did I say fortunate? Perhaps another 
 word would better express it. For plagiarism is a quasi- 
 confession of merit. This is the only instance, within my 
 knowledge, where Voltaire has been accused of literary 
 larceny. What is plagiarism? Read in English Bards 
 and Scotch Reviewers the simile which Byron applies to 
 Kirke White, "So the struck eagle" et quod sequiter. 
 Byron took this from Aeschylus who lived twenty-four 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 2O, 
 
 centuries before him. Aeschylus took it from Aesop 
 who lived a century earlier. Where did Aesop get it? 
 From some ballad-singer ? orator ? hunter ? or shepherd ? 
 who lived where ? and when ? It is another argument for 
 the economic basis of society that the charge of plagiar- 
 ism was unknown before the invention of literary prop- 
 erty. Thomas Parnell, an Irish contemporary of Vol- 
 taire, tells a story similar to the one I am about to relate, 
 in his poem The Hermit. Where did Parnell get it? 
 Pope says from Spain; Goldsmith thinks from Arabia; 
 others say Persia or Hindustan. 1 But let us go back to 
 Zadig. He meets a hermit with a book in his hand, which 
 he calls the book of destinies. He takes Zadig into his 
 company and binds him by an oath not to leave him for 
 several days. The hermit robs a hospitable entertainer 
 of a golden basin, with which he rewards a miser for a 
 niggardly entertainment. They are at the house of a 
 philosopher, where the hermit rewards hospitality by set- 
 ting fire to the house. Arrived at the house of a widow, 
 they are treated as well as her means will allow. She 
 sends her little nephew to guide them on their way. The 
 hermit seizes the boy by the hair, throws him into a river 
 and drowns him. Zadig upbraids the slayer, when an 
 angel is revealed in the person of the hermit. The basin 
 was stolen to teach the vain and ostentatious owner wis- 
 dom. The miser was rewarded to teach him hospitality. 
 The philosopher's house was burned that he might dis- 
 cover an immense treasure beneath the ruins. The boy 
 was slain to prevent his killing his aunt in one year and 
 Zadig in two. He was not reformed, because in that 
 event he would have killed himself. The moral of the 
 tale is : Men judge of all without knowing anything. 
 
 Poe's William Wilson, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde and 
 Ignatius Donnelly's Doctor Huget for ''unconscious absorption." 
 W. F. B.
 
 30 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 One might appropriately close this triology of Voltaire 
 with the Moslem's submission: "God is great." 
 
 I am about to compare this triology with the most sub- 
 lime poem ever produced in any language and shall show 
 the superiority of supernatural to natural religion. Much 
 scholarship and much ink has been wasted to determine 
 whether this poem was didactic, dramatic or epic. Leave 
 this to the folk who would classify genius, as a botanist 
 classifies plants and an ornithologist classifies quails and 
 partridges. The book of Job is either didactic, dramatic 
 or epic, in an objective sense, according to the mind of 
 the person who reads it. Job is an Arabian sheik who 
 served God according to the natural law. The age in 
 which the hero lived, or whether he ever lived, is foreign 
 to my purpose. The moral is the same, man or myth. 1 
 Job had been prospered beyond all men of the East. 
 There came a time when the sons of God came to pre- 
 sent themselves before the Lord, and Satan came to pre- 
 sent himself before the Lord. It has been a mooted 
 question with exegetists whether this Satan was the 
 Prince of Darkness who came, like Menelaus, without 
 an invitation, or a sort of celestial detective sent out from 
 the heavenly court, as the postmaster-general sends out 
 an inspector. This question, too, is foreign to my pur- 
 pose. Another question which has bothered exegetical 
 scholars is whether the assemblage to which Satan came, 
 invited or uninvited, was a meeting of the saints on earth 
 or the saints in heaven. The size of the crowd is the only 
 
 I I believe Job to have been historic for a similar reason given 
 for Jonah, in the main body of this work. I refer, of course, to 
 the texts, Ezekiel, xiv., 14, and James, v., 11. Whether the book 
 is historic in the sense that BoswelFs Johnson is historic, or in 
 the sense that Shakspere's Henry VIII. or Richard III. is historic, 
 is for the litterati to determine. The question of verbal inspiration 
 is left with the theologians. W ', F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 31 
 
 question involved in this controversy. The Lord in- 
 quires of the Adversary if he has considered his servant, 
 Job, a fervent and upright man who serves God and es- 
 chews evil. Satan was, evidently, a firm believer in the 
 economic basis of society, and thought that Job was 
 swayed by his material interests and that there was a 
 consideration for his service. He suggests the extinction 
 of all Job's worldly possessions. The Most High permits 
 this, putting an interdict upon any injury to his person. 
 Then follows a severe test of the steadfast patriarch. 
 Not only is his property stolen or destroyed, but his chil- 
 dren perish in a hurricane. The only thing left him is a 
 shrewish wife. But Job reverently bows his head and 
 says: "The Lord gave, the Lord taketh away, blessed 
 be the name of the Lord." His evil genius makes his 
 return to the heavenly court. When reminded that Job 
 holds fast to his integrity, the Adversary suggests that 
 self-preservation is the strongest instinct of man's nature, 
 and that, if Job is smitten in his body, his integrity will 
 yield. License is given the Adversary to proceed to this 
 extremity, with an interdict against destroying the life 
 of the patriarch. Satan smites Job with some loathsome 
 disease whose nature has been a fruitful source of specu- 
 lation. Cast out as unclean, Job sits down upon the gar- 
 bage pile, which stood outside of every village, before 
 the existence of modern sanitary regulation. His wife 
 appeared as a tempter, advising him to bless (curse 1 ) 
 God and die. But Job rebukes her and holds fast to his 
 integrity. Three of his friends appear upon the scene 
 and are stricken dumb at beholding his calamity. For 
 seven days and seven nights not a word is spoken, when 
 Job breaks the silence by cursing the day in which he 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B,
 
 32 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 was born. As a wail of sublime despair, nothing, in any 
 language save Satan's address to the sun in Milton's 
 Paradise Lost approaches this discourse of Job. Then 
 follows a series of discourses, in three cycles of six 
 speeches each, a discourse by each of Job's friends 
 doubtless in the order of age and a reply to each of 
 these by Job himself. These discourses are without par- 
 allel in the history of didactics. 1 One who has been pres- 
 ent at an Indian council would be at home in reading this 
 book. Each speaker proceeds without interruption and 
 is listened to with respectful silence. The burden of the 
 discourse of Job's friends is that suffering is punitive, 
 and they exhort Job to repentance. Job argues that suf- 
 fering is not necessarily punitive, and in the twenty-first 
 chapter refers to the prosperity of the wicked in proof 
 of his thesis. The chief value of this book is the over- 
 whelming argument it furnishes for a final judgment, 
 which must be a verity if God is just. In the thirty-first 
 chapter, Job lifts his voice to heaven in an awful oath of 
 clearing, acquitting himself of a long list of enumerated 
 offenses covering almost every conceivable sin. Job's 
 friends have already confessed defeat by their silence, 
 and now comes the interposition of Elihu, a bystander, 
 who reproves Job's friends for their silence and criticises 
 Job in a strain which does not differ materially from the 
 position taken by his friends. Elihu 2 appears as a de- 
 fender of divine justice, and is angry with Job's friends 
 for their inability to answer him. The true moral of this 
 wonderful book is the reply of the Almighty who an- 
 swered Job out of the whirlwind. It reminds one of a 
 scene at the death-bed of Montesquieu : 
 
 1 When you are older read the Book of Job with Plato's Dia- 
 logue on Justice. W. F. B. 
 
 2 It is claimed that this discourse of Elihu is an interpolation. 
 The discussion of this question is foreign to my purpose.- W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 33 
 
 "Sir," said the clerk, "you know how great God is." 
 "Yes," replied the philosopher, "and how little men are." 
 
 The divine interposition denies the possibility of Job's 
 reading the meaning of God's visitation. How shall those 
 who can not divine the constitution or course of nature, 
 or understand and explain the instincts of animals, inter- 
 pret the ways of God to man ? The interposition begins : 
 
 "Who is this that darkeneth counsel 
 By words without knowledge?" 
 
 God does not condescend to notice Job's individual 
 case. "Who am I?" and "Who art thou?" is the sub- 
 stance. This reply is divided into two discourses ; and, 
 at the end of each, Job bows his head with the Moslem's 
 submission the very words of which appear in the dis- 
 course of Elihu God is great. 
 
 Now a superficial reader might insist that the only 
 difference between what I have inaccurately called Vol- 
 taire's triology and the Book of Job is literary merit. 
 This would be a grave error. The Wise Man tells us 
 that dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to 
 send forth a stinking savor. I once read with your 
 mother the Confessions of Rousseau and the Confessions 
 of St. Augustine. When they were finished I asked: 
 
 "Where is the difference?" 
 
 I shall never forget the answer : 
 
 "All the difference in the world; the difference between the 
 confession of a braggart and the confession of a penitent." 
 
 That you may see how unsatisfactory natural religion 
 is, both in ethics and in hope, let us compare two pas- 
 sages from Voltaire, each with a parallel passage from 
 Job:
 
 34 
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 In his oath of clearing, 
 Job says: 
 
 "I made a covenant with 
 mine eyes ; 
 
 Why, then, should I think 
 upon a maid? 
 
 If mine heart has been de- 
 ceived by a woman, 
 
 Or if I have laid wait at 
 my neighbor's door; 
 
 Then let my wife grind 
 unto another, 
 
 And let others bow down 
 upon her." 1 
 
 So much for morality consistent with Voltaire's life 
 at Cirey from 1734 to 1749. But let us read again: 
 
 Speaking of Candide's 
 pre-nuptial relations with 
 Zenoida, Voltaire says: 
 
 "The greater part blamed 
 her, and her conduct was only 
 approved by some few who 
 knew how to reflect. Zenoida, 
 who set a proper value on the 
 good opinion, even of fools, 
 was, nevertheless, too happy 
 to repent the loss." 
 
 DESTRUCTION OF LISBON 
 
 "Yet, when we issue from this 
 dreadful gate, 
 
 Who may presume to claim a 
 happier fate? 
 
 Tremble we must, howe'er 
 the riddle's read, 
 knowing nothing, we 
 have all to dread." 
 
 And, 
 
 JOB XIX 
 
 "For I know that my re- 
 deemer liveth, 
 
 And that he shall stand at 
 the latter day upon the earth : 
 
 And though after my skin 
 worms destroy this body, 
 
 Yet in my flesh shall I see 
 God: 2 
 
 Whom I shall see for my- 
 self, 
 
 And mine eyes shall be- 
 hold, and not another; 
 
 Though my reins be con- 
 sumed within me." 
 
 The foregoing passages need no comment. But the 
 greatest lesson to be learned from Job is the necessity of 
 
 1 Every boy ought to commit the seventh chapter of Proverbs to 
 memory. W. F. B. 
 
 "The higher critics have tried a revision of this text. But the 
 learned Jew, Rabbi Shelomoh Yitzhaki, renders it, "In my flesh 
 shall I see the judging God." A Hebrew for Hebrew. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 35 
 
 a positive revelation, yet man's inability to understand it 
 all. The trusting faith that a little child puts in his 
 parent that is what we must have, and it is worth all 
 the philosophy in the world. Voltaire wrote in his La 
 Loi Naturelle: 
 
 "O God, whom men ignore, whom everything reveals, 
 Hear now the latest words of him who now appeals ; 
 'Tis searching out Thy law that hath bewildered me ; 
 My heart may go astray, but it is full of Thee." 
 
 God's answer to Job would have been a sufficient an- 
 swer to Voltaire. 
 
 But Voltaire furnishes the strongest argument in favor 
 of Christianity by what he is unable to do against it. 
 Lord Lyttelton, in his Dialogues of the Dead, makes Lu- 
 cian say to Rabelais : "Ridicule is the terror of all false 
 religions." Lucian himself laughed the gods out of 
 Olympus. No person who has read Voltaire, and espe- 
 cially his romance, The White Bull, can doubt that he 
 took his cue from Lucian ; else it was a strange case of 
 mental parallelism. 
 
 I could not recommend Voltaire to you, even as a 
 teacher of natural religion, for a youthful mind, without 
 philosophical training, is too apt at mistaking ridicule 
 for argument, and in the impulse of adolescence jumps 
 to a conclusion. A sneer will go further than an argu- 
 ment, and. Voltaire outranks every sneerer that ever lived, 
 except Lucian. Even in Candide ou I'Optimiste, like a 
 Malay running amuck, he strikes with the deadly kris 
 of his masterful wit at every believer, except James the 
 Anabaptist, and the pure theists of his imaginary Eldo- 
 rado. In his Seer and Atheist, he writes like a Quaker, 
 and this is what he, probably, would have been had he 
 been born in England instead of France. O my son, I
 
 36 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 can not resist referring again to the fact that Christian- 
 ity has been invulnerable to his raillery. 
 
 "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." 
 
 The Gospel was more than the adventures of Amadis 
 de Gaul. 
 
 I think we have seen the necessity for a positive reve- 
 lation. Now, I do not know whether Moses wrote the 
 Pentateuch or not. Richard Simon, the father of mod- 
 ern higher criticism, said he did not. Later critics say 
 he did. Colenso, an Anglican bishop of the last century, 
 wrote a very learned and elaborate treatise more perni- 
 cious than anything ever penned by Voltaire to prove 
 not only that Moses did not write it, but that it was not 
 inspired. Now, my boy, there is a distinction between 
 higher criticism, the handmaid of faith, and destructive 
 criticism, the assassin of faith. Always keep this dis- 
 tinction in mind. It is not important who the particular 
 author of any book in the Bible was. You will find in 
 the reply to Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, by the An- 
 glican bishop of Landaff Apology for the Bible a 
 splendid explanation of the distinction between the gen- 
 uineness and the authenticity of a book. I know this: 
 It is easier for me to believe that the author of the Pen- 
 tateuch or rather that Moses was inspired than that he 
 was not. Donovan, if he was not inspired, every codifier 
 from Drako to Blackstone pales in the blaze of his genius 
 lijce a firefly in the path of a marine search-light. Read 
 the twentieth chapter of Exodus. Where did Moses get 
 that law? You will read in the body of this work what 
 I have to say about Ezra. There is a thing to which I 
 wish to call particular attention. The Jews never made 
 use of judicial torture, and they were, apparently, the 
 only ancient people to whom this abomination was un-
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 37 
 
 known. Their punishments were severe, it is true; but, 
 in a capital trial at least, a man had to be convicted upon 
 the testimony of two witnesses. Read Deuteronomy, 
 chapter xix., verse 15, and then read article III., section 
 3, clause i, of the Constitution of the United States. 
 Remember the latter was written in A.D. 1787, the for- 
 mer nearly fifteen centuries before Christ; the latter by 
 lawyers with centuries of civilisation behind them, the 
 former by an ancient Toussaint 1'Ouverture, for a nation 
 of runaway slaves. Under our constitution, a man can 
 confess in open court, or plead guilty, but with the Jews 
 he could not plead guilty, or, in other words, testify 
 against himself. This is something that is familiar to 
 every lawyer who has studied Hebrew jurisprudence. 
 The superiority of any nation is measured by their judi- 
 cial procedure. Where did Moses get that procedure? 
 In the wilderness of stony Arabia thirty-four centuries 
 ago, he stood several centuries in advance of Lord Bacon 
 and Sir Edward Coke, both of whom used torture. For 
 these men borrowed their procedure from pagan Rome. 
 Where where did Moses get his? Moses or Ezra? 
 I care not who it was. 
 
 Do not waste your time in bootless speculation upon 
 matters incidental to the subject of revelation. There 
 are a score or more of Bible questions which had best be 
 left alone. For example, the redemption of man does 
 not depend upon the flatness or rotundity of the earth, 
 or whether God made the universe in six days or in six 
 indefinite periods of time, or whether Eve ate an apple, 
 an apricot or horse-chestnut, or whether or not her sin 
 was concupiscence, or whether Noah's flood was uni- 
 versal or local, or whether or not the difference between 
 Hebrew and Sanskrit dated from the Tower of Babel, or 
 whether Abraham was 75 or 135 years old when he mi-
 
 38 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 grated from Charan. The so-called opposition of science 
 will close with the last act in the drama of human his- 
 tory; for scientists change their theories as a chameleon 
 changes his color, or a snake his skin. Theology can not 
 chase an ignis fatuus. 
 
 1. To my own vision, it is plain that the Bible pas- 
 sively recognizes the Homeric theory of a flat earth and 
 a firmament above, which might be represented by a 
 saucer covered with a glass bowl. If you try to torture 
 any other meaning out of certain texts in Genesis, Joshua, 
 Job and Ezekiel, you will ignominously fail and make 
 yourself a fit subject for merited ridicule. 1 But the Bible 
 tacitly recognizes the anthropomorphic idea of God. It 
 was the only idea that primitive people could grasp. You 
 will understand this by a careful study of the language 
 of any primitive people. It is impossible to express an 
 abstract idea in the language of the Santee Sioux In- 
 dians, certainly before it was modified by white scholars. 
 You talk to a child in a way to make him understand, 
 and you must employ very different language from that 
 used with an adult. 
 
 2. It is enough to know that the sin of our first parents 
 was the sin of disobedience, whatever the form may have 
 been. The fall of man sowed the germ of original sin. 
 Redemption is the only remedy. The transmission of 
 spiritual defilement from parent to child is as scientific 
 as Darwin's law of heredity and as just as the physical 
 transmission of disease, of which we see daily examples. 
 In fact, heredity is the carrying of the doctrine of original 
 sin over into science, as the modern injunction is the 
 carrying of the Roman interdict over into equity. 
 
 *The true explanation is that the language of these texts was 
 literal to the writers and figurative to the Holy Ghost. Nothing 
 far-fetched in this. IV. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 39 
 
 3. Your brother Eugene once asked me to explain 
 Noah's flood. I told of thirteen different explanations, 
 from the theory of a celestial ocean, like the Saturnine 
 rings, to a depression of the earth's crust, as explained 
 by Hugh Miller. Then I gave him the objections to each 
 of these. He looked up in my face and asked, "Papa, 
 what do you believe?" I replied, "I have no opinion and 
 would not advise you to waste your time trying to form 
 one." 
 
 4. I used to ridicule the story of Babel as a stupid at- 
 tempt to account for something which bore internal evi- 
 dence of growth, by the fable of a gang of brickmasons 
 going to sleep and waking up tongue-tied. But it is suf- 
 ficient to know that, after the flood, men sought to guard 
 against a second cataclysm by their own power, and that 
 God defeated the attempt. 
 
 5. The Bible says, Genesis xi., 26, that Terah lived 
 seventy years and .begat Abram. At verse 32, of the 
 same chapter, it says that Terah died in Charan and all 
 his days were 205 years. In the first verse of the next 
 chapter we are told that God commanded Abram to get 
 out of the country. In the fourth verse of the same chap- 
 ter we are told that Abram was seventy-five years old 
 when he departed. By the first verse of chapter xvii., we 
 learn that, after his departure from Charan, his visit to 
 Egypt, his war with the kings, his visit to Melchisidek 
 and the birth of Ishmael, he is ninety-nine years old. 
 Now, if Abram's father was seventy at Abram's birth 
 and 205 at his own death, Abram must have been 135 
 at his departure from Charan. Voltaire calls attention 
 to this in his Philosophical Dictionary and cites Augus- 
 tine of Hippo as saying that the discrepancy is inex- 
 plicable. So Thomas Paine tries to make much out of 
 the claim that Ezra did not know enough to add a column
 
 40 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 of figures. My son, time spent on such trifles is time 
 wasted. The Anglican bishop of Landaff gives us a 
 possible answer to Paine. The important fact in regard 
 to Abraham is that he was the restorer of monotheism 
 and the spiritual father of three great religions. There 
 has been much dispute about the age of Columbus, the 
 discoverer of America, and it has been placed as high 
 as seventy and as low as fifty. But I never heard of any 
 one disputing- the discovery on that ground. Where did 
 Hannibal cross the Alps? I do not know. Some one 
 has claimed that he did not cross them at all. But we 
 feel certain that he carried the second Punic war into 
 Italy, and turned that war from a struggle of the Ro- 
 mans for territory to a struggle for existence; that he 
 fought and won the battles of Tribia, Thrasymene and 
 Cannae, besieged Capua and blockaded Rome; that for 
 fifteen years he made farming in Italy unprofitable and 
 well-nigh impossible ; that he drove the rustics into the 
 towns and kept them there, thus changing the whole 
 character of the Roman people, 1 who afterwards carried 
 on their farms by slaves. These essential facts can not 
 be affected by an argument for or against the Little St. 
 Bernard, Mont Genevre, 2 Mont Cenis, Mont Viso or a sea 
 voyage from Spain to Italy. 
 
 For my own part, I care not whether the story of the 
 creation, of the fall of man, of the Noachian deluge or 
 
 denies this. See Seven Roman Statesmen, Tiberius 
 Gracchus W. F. B. 
 
 a li we accept the account of Polybius, it would seem certain 
 that Hannibal crossed at the Little St. Bernard. But Polybius, in 
 his third book, says that, when Hannibal had arrived at the sum- 
 mit, he pointed out the valley of Po to his soldiers to encourage 
 and stimulate them. Now, the valley of the Po can't be seen from 
 the Little St. Bernard or any other pass of the Alps. Who wishes 
 to throw away Polybius on that account? Yet this is about on a 
 par with any criticism of Paine or Voltaire upon the Bible. 
 W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 41 
 
 of the tower of Babel are literal, allegorical or anthro- 
 pomorphical. Let speculative theologians dispute about 
 it. It is not my field. The ethical sense is the same, in 
 any event, of the three. As a matter of practical ethics, 
 the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Moham- 
 medanism (and Parsiism is nearly allied) 1 are superior 
 to any system of ethics ever devised, from the most en- 
 lightened paganism to modern ethical culture. Ethics is 
 founded either in dogma or sociology. There can be no 
 half-way about it. Roman virtue was simply conven- 
 tional ; 2 Jewish virtue was founded upon the law of God. 
 Let us cite instances. 
 
 LUCRETIA 
 
 Two thousand four hundred seventeen years ago, when 
 Tarquin the Proud, the seventh king of Rome, reigned, a 
 noble Roman lady, named Lucretia, lived with her hus- 
 band at Collatia, a few miles from Rome. Her husband 
 was Collatinus, whose father was the king's first cousin. 
 Once while the army of Tarquin was engaged in besieging 
 the city of Ardea, Collatinus was feasting with the king's 
 sons. They were, doubtless, filled with wine, or they 
 would not have been guilty of the foolishness which I am 
 about to relate. They engaged in a dispute about the 
 beauty and virtue of their respective wives. This was 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B. 
 
 2 See note at end of this letter. 
 
 Mores, with the Romans, signified both manners and morals. 
 So far as I know, the celebrated Count Volney was the first 
 philosopher of modern times to argue that morals were simply 
 custom which was regulated by the age and the environment. One 
 can listen to this with measured patience from the lips of an 
 avowed infidel. But when an alleged Christian minister steals 
 Count Volney's thunder and delivers it from the pulpit shade of 
 Jonathan Edwards ! What would you say to some of your de- 
 generates? W. F. B.
 
 42 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 finally settled by a night journey and two surprise parties, 
 one at Rome and the other at Collatia. They found the 
 wives of the King's sons entertaining their friends, but 
 Lucretia was spinning in the midst of her maids. This 
 settled the dispute. But at this visit Sextus, the King's 
 son, conceived an unholy desire for Lucretia. After a 
 few days he returned to Collatia and was hospitably enter- 
 tained by Lucretia, as the kinsman of her husband. That 
 night Sextus left his couch, and, approaching that of 
 Lucretia, laid his hand upon her breast and said : 
 
 "Be silent, Lucretia ; I am Sextus Tarquinius ; my sword 
 is in my hand. You shall perish, if you utter a word." 
 
 The wicked man gave the wretched woman the terrible 
 choice to submit to him or die by his hand. He further 
 told her that, if she chose death, he would kill one of her 
 male slaves and place him on the couch with her, and 
 would swear to her husband that he slew them in the act 
 of adultery. The woman yielded to his wishes. Having 
 accomplished his fiendish purpose, Sextus returned to the 
 camp. The woman sent for her husband and her father. 
 With them came Brutus and Valerius, two friends. The 
 woman told her story and stabbed herself. 1 This story 
 has been branded as a myth, but, be it fact or be it fiction, 
 the "Chaste Lucretia" was the Roman's ideal of female 
 virtue. 
 
 Gains Julius Caesar engaged in an intrigue which 
 caused Pompey to divorce his wife, Mucia. Pompey took, 
 in place of Mucia, Caesar's only daughter Julia. Even 
 the virtuous Cato divorced his wife for the accommodation 
 of a friend, and remarried, her after the friend's death. 
 The offense of Clodius, which shocked Rome, was the 
 sacrilege, not the adultery. Cicero divorced his wife, 
 
 "See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 43 
 
 and no satisfactory reason has been assigned by any of 
 his biographers, from Plutarch to Forsyth. It may not 
 be right to do what Daniel Sickles or Daniel McFarland 
 did. But the fact that for more than two hundred years, 
 neither in England nor in America, has any man been 
 executed for slaying the seducer of his wife, when that, 
 and that alone, prompted the fatal blow, shows a horror of 
 the crime, thus summarily punished, which did not exist in 
 pagan Rome. Much is said of the modern divorce court 
 much of the one couple who are divorced nothing of 
 the seven who remain true to death. The remedy does 
 not lie in legislation. Marriage in its use has been de- 
 graded to something beneath the beasts that perish. But, 
 for all of that, Christianity, in its war with man's de- 
 pravity, is gaining a slow but certain victory. Christian 
 Europe and America are immeasurably better than pagan 
 Rome. Then it was the Ciceros and Catos who sought 
 the divorce. Now it is the Carters and Castellanes. 
 
 JOSEPH 
 
 Let us contrast the history just related with another. 
 You remember how Joseph was hated by his brethren, 
 and how they sold him to a band of Arabians, who in turn 
 sold him to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard, and 
 how Joseph became his master's steward and overseer. 
 The young man was apt in business, and his master's 
 affairs prospered in Joseph's hands. Both on this ac- 
 count, and because of the beauty of his person, his mis- 
 tress made love to him. Joseph gently, but firmly, rejected 
 her advances, with the words, "How can I do this great 
 wickedness and sin against God? ; ' But the faithless 
 spouse of Potiphar was persistent. Pretending to be sick 
 at the time of a great religious festival, she remained at 
 home. Joseph came into the house on some business
 
 44 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 of his master, when the woman again approached him, 
 threatening that, if he refused her, she would accuse him 
 to her husband of attempting the crime he had refused 
 to commit. Upon his final refusal, she seized him in the 
 wildness of her erotic fury, and he fled, leaving his gar- 
 ments in her grasp. The would-be adulteress was as good 
 as her threat, and Joseph was placed in prison with 
 malefactors. 
 
 Mark the contrast : 
 
 Lucretia refused to sin till threatened with death and 
 disgrace. Death she did not fear, for she killed herself. 
 Lucretia wished to live only long enough to explain her 
 fall and to invoke vengeance upon the vanquisher of her 
 virtue. When Brutus snatched the dagger from her 
 wound and swore by the blood that stained it to avenge 
 Lucretia, he swore by the blood of an adulteress. 
 
 Voltaire's hero, Candide, with the more than tacit ap- 
 proval of his author, yielded to a demand from Ismael 
 Raab which would make a devil blush at its mere relation. 
 
 Neither the conventional ethics of pagan Rome, the 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century nor modern ethical 
 culture ever did, ever will or ever can produce a single 
 martyr. 
 
 But Joseph refused to do wrong because it would dis- 
 please God. In face of a like threat, he refused to do 
 what Lucretia did. In the natural course of events, there 
 was no more hope of vindication in his case than hers. 
 Dogma against sociology. Which? 
 
 Let us now compare the death of a great pagan with 
 the death of a great Christian. Zeno, the founder of the 
 sect called stoics, taught the attainment of virtue should 
 be the object of man's existence. He was, possibly, the 
 most enlightened and virtuous pagan that ever lived. The 
 religions of Greece and Rome were almost identical, but
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 45 
 
 neither was ethical. All the ethics of both races was 
 either conventional or philosophical. Now let us see how 
 this most virtuous pagan died. At the age of ninety-eight, 
 Zeno was still teaching in Athens. As he was walking 
 out of his school, he fell and broke one of his fingers. 
 At this he was so affected by the consciousness of his own 
 infirmity that, striking the earth, he cried out,"Erchomai 
 ti m'aueis" "I am coming. Why callest thou me?" and 
 immediately went home and committed suicide. 
 
 Paul, chained to a Roman soldier, in the same dungeon 
 which had held Jugertha and Cethegus, wrote these 
 words : 
 
 "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have 
 kept the faith. For the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of 
 justice, which the Lord, the just judge, shall render unto me at 
 that day." 1 
 
 I say with Balaam : 
 
 "Let my soul die the death of the just, and let my last end be 
 like to them." 
 
 Every Jew is not a Joseph, every Christian is not a 
 Paul. The church is. not a cabinet of choice specimens, 
 but an ark for the salvation of sinners. If you see a 
 Christian who is a glutton, a drunkard or a profane 
 swearer, do not be impatient because he does not add 
 unbelief to all his other sins. For with what judgment 
 ye judge ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye 
 mete, it shall be measured to you again. 
 
 x The Douai Version gives the correct version of this pass- 
 age. The Greek word apodosei is translated reddet in Jerome's 
 Vulgate, but give in James's version, and I am surprised to see 
 it retained in the Revised Version. The infinitive of the Greek 
 verb as every Greek scholar ought to know never could mean 
 aught but to give back, restore, return what is due, either debts, 
 penalties or honors. The idea of a gratuity could never be in- 
 volved in any mode or tense of that verb. W '. F. B.
 
 46 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Two priests walked on the bank of a little stream in 
 Italy. One of those fearful and sudden floods so com- 
 mon to that stream rushed down. A horseman was 
 crossing a bridge which spanned the stream. The sup- 
 port of the bridge was swept away and the structure fell. 
 The horseman went down to his yeasty grave uttering 
 loud curses and was seen no more. "That man is in 
 Hell," said the elder priest. The younger man rebuked 
 him, saying it might be possible that, like the penitent 
 thief, he had repented at the last. They agreed that the 
 one of the two that died first should return if allowed 
 to do so with information as to the horseman's final 
 destiny. Years passed by. The old priest had gone to a 
 distant part of Italy. The young man had forgotten the 
 matter, till one day he was sitting in his study, when the 
 old man suddenly entered the room. The young man 
 was startled : 
 
 "Whence come you?" 
 
 "From Hell." 
 
 "How comes it?" 
 
 "Do you remember the morning we walked by the bank of the 
 river and witnessed the drowning of the solitary horseman?" 
 
 "I do now recall it." 
 
 "That man repented at the last moment of life and was saved. 
 I am in Hell for condemning him." 
 
 This legend carries its own moral. I do not believe in 
 living a life of sin, and repenting in articnlo mortis. That 
 is drinking the wine from the cup of life and throwing 
 the dregs in the face of Christ. But it is never too late 
 to mend. In Prescott's Conquest of Peru you will read 
 of the death of Pizarro by the assassins headed by Juan 
 de Harrada; how the ruthless plunderer of Peru made 
 the sign of the cross in his own blood, uttered the word 
 Jesn, and, before he could kiss the cross, died by a coup
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 47 
 
 de grace. Say what you will, despite his cruelty and 
 rapacity, faith remained. 
 
 Christianity since its foundation has had to war with 
 the depraved nature of man. Juvenal in his Satires, and 
 Paul in his Epistle to the Romans have pictured what 
 pagan society was at the foundation of Christianity. The 
 Jewish historian, Josephus, relates an incident which 
 shows in what depths of corruption, depravity, sensuality 
 and superstition the pagan contemporaries of Christ were 
 plunged :* 
 
 Decius Mundus, a Roman equestrian, coveted Paulina, 
 the wife of Saturninus, a patrician, but his unholy love 
 was not reciprocated. Mundus had resolved upon suicide, 
 when Ide, a free woman of his father, diverted him arid 
 undertook to satisfy his desire. With money furnished 
 by Mundus, she bribed some of the priests of Isis to tell 
 Paulina that she was the favorite of the dog-headed god, 
 Anubis, recently imported from Egypt, and that he loved 
 her. She told her husband, and they were both proud of 
 the honor. The silly woman supped and passed a night 
 in the temple with what she supposed was a god, but 
 learned too late was her rejected lover. She conjured 
 her husband to avenge her injury, but she did not, like 
 Lucretia, commit suicide. Saturninus was no Virginius 
 or Daniel Sickles, but complained to the emperor. Ti- 
 berius, whatever faults he may have had, was stern in 
 the administration of justice. After due investigation, 
 the emperor banished Mundus, but inflicted the same pun- 
 
 'Gaius Julius Caesar, if living today and guilty of what he was 
 charged with, according to Suetonius, would be ostracised from 
 the society of even bad men. I do not believe him guilty, but it 
 shows the state of Roman society when such a crime was credited 
 to the first statesman and general of his age, without injury to 
 his standing. The story of the virtuous Cato's divorce is familiar 
 to all. W. F. B.
 
 48 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 ishment upon Ide and the corrupted priests which his 
 procurator unjustly inflicted upon the divine subject of 
 this book, and he ordered the image of Isis to be thrown 
 into the Tiber and her temple to be destroyed. We may 
 sneer at the folly of this Roman woman, but it hardly ex- 
 ceeds the credulity of the dupes of modern spiritualism. 
 
 Human history represents a fierce struggle between 
 man's material interests and pure idealism. The man of 
 Nazareth was crucified to save the graft of the Saddu- 
 cean priesthood. The Ephesian silversmiths raised an 
 uproar, because the preaching of Paul interfered with 
 their trade. The Philippian accusers of Paul and Silas 
 were moved by a similar impulse, as we read in the six- 
 teenth chapter of Acts. Voltaire's Zadig was in danger 
 of slow fire because of the abolition of sutteeism the 
 jewels and ornaments of the women were the perquisites 
 of the priests who condemned Zadig to be burned. Pure 
 idealists like St. Paul, Jeanne d'Arc, 1 John Howard, 
 and Osawatomie Brown are generally beheaded, burned, 
 hanged, or die in the wilderness unless like Frau Krii- 
 dener, 1 they stand with the powers that be. The next gen- 
 eration mentally reverses the judgment and consigns them 
 to the mad-house. When "in the long revenge of time," a 
 costly mausoleum arises, immortal fame has made such a 
 tribute ridiculous. 
 
 This humble effort of mine, to which this letter forms 
 a rambling preface, was written to establish the historical 
 character of the Gospel narrations. It does not treat the 
 life of Christ in detail. It does not discuss the time of his 
 birth, the length of his ministry, or his age at his 
 death. These minor questions might draw attention from 
 weightier matters. 
 
 'See note at end of this letter. W. F. B.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY 49 
 
 There are many things in the Gospel which have both- 
 ered me. I confess that I never quite understood the 
 parable of the unjust steward in the sixteenth chapter of 
 Luke, and no explanation has proved quite satisfactory 
 to me. But is it wise to throw away the Gospel, because 
 I can not explain a parable? As well might we reject 
 geometry, because the squaring of the circle is an un- 
 solved problem. As St. Peter said, there are many things 
 in the Scriptures hard to be understood, which they that 
 are unstable and unlearned wrest to their own destruction. 
 A quarter of a century ago, I came to the conclusion that 
 I was not a theologian, and remained steadfast in that 
 opinion. One of the most worthless books that I ever 
 saw was entitled Every Man His Own Lawyer. I regard 
 the amateur theologian with the same distrust as I do the 
 amateur lawyer. 
 
 In regard to the differences which distract the Chris- 
 tian world, you have often heard my opinion. But that 
 is not the subject of this book. 
 
 When you are dealing with the subject of religion, re- 
 member it is the most important problem of life. Upon 
 its proper solution, your most sacred interests depend. 
 
 Sincerely, 
 
 WILBUR F. BRYANT. 
 
 Hartington, Christmas, 1907.
 
 5O HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 NOTES TO EPISTLE DEDICATORY 
 
 Agnostic. One of a school of philosophers who simply recog- 
 nise natural phenomena, disclaiming all knowledge of the origin 
 of the universe, and neither denying nor admitting the existence 
 of the Deity or human existence after death. It is from the Greek 
 agnosko I do not know. It would be unjust to identify those 
 philosophers with the ancient skeptics. For they maintained that 
 no certain inference could be drawn from the senses, and dis- 
 trusted even natural phenomena. W . F. B. 
 
 Atheist. From alpha, privative, and theos, Greek for God; 
 one who denies the existence of God. W. F. B. 
 
 Boucher dc Perthes. Eminent French archaeologist (1788- 
 1868), author of Celtic and Antedelnvian Antiquities, in which he 
 attempted to prove, with apparent success, the great antiquity 
 of man upon this planet. He might almost be classed as a 
 Columbus in his field. It would be presumption in an amateur 
 to publish a dogmatic opinion ; and I will only say that, granted 
 the utmost limit of age claimed for these relics, they do not prove 
 the pre-Adamic man. For no one can construct a system of chro- 
 nology from Christ back to Adam out of Scripture without 
 pinning his fabric to several extrinsic semi-mythical dates. The 
 pre-Adamic man may furnish Jack London with a good subject 
 for a novel, but as a historic character he is a total failure. But 
 a man even skilled in the science, but unskilled in the particular 
 branch of the science under investigation, is not always in a posi- 
 tion to criticise the scientific investigator. To illustrate, only the 
 trained eye of an astronomer could make a practical survey of 
 the Martian canals of Schiaparelli. Only a person of scientific 
 training could appreciate Charles Darwin's Monograph of the 
 Cirrhipedia. The same is true in the domain of archaeology. My 
 sympathies are with the scientist assailed as Professor Taylor as- 
 sailed Silliman, with the absurd hypothesis that the Almighty had 
 stirred trilobites into the earth as the cook would stir plums into 
 a pudding. Romanes afterward sarcastically suggested that the 
 Almighty did this to fool people. Nothing makes a man more 
 truthful than a fearless investigation into any branch of physical
 
 NOTES TO EPISTLE DEDICATORY 5 1 
 
 science. Others have followed Boucher de Perthes. The finding 
 of certain skeletons in Gilder's mound near Florence, Nebraska, 
 is too recent to demand elaboration. My friend, Professor Bar- 
 bour of the State University of Nebraska, whose character as a 
 man, and ability, attainments and industry as a geologist are too 
 well known to require eulogy, is of the opinion that these skele- 
 tons had been buried for 10,000 or 12,000 years. The conclusions 
 of Ales Hrdlicka, the distinguished anthropologist, who seems 
 predisposed to skepticism in this matter, differs from Professor 
 Barbour as to the age of the relics. See Skeletal Remains Sug- 
 gesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America, Smith- 
 sonian Institution, Bulletin 33, Washington, 1907. But see Doctor 
 Ward in Putnam's, January, 1907, 410-413. W. F. B. 
 
 Bridgewatcr Treatises. Francis Henry Bridgewater, Earl of 
 Bridgewater, died in 1829, at the advanced age of ninety-three 
 years. By his will he bequeathed eight thousand pounds to be 
 paid to the person or persons who should be appointed by the 
 president of the Royal Society to prepare a work on natural re- 
 ligion. The will was as specific in its details as the will of Ste- 
 phen Girard. Eight treatises were written, one each by Thomas 
 Chalmers, John Kidd, William Whewell, Peter Mark Roget, 
 William Buckland, William Prout, Charles Bell and William 
 Kirby. The advocate of the chimpanzee genealogical tree, of 
 course, considers these treatises back numbers. W. F. B. 
 
 Brown, Osawatomie. John Brown of Kansas and Harpers 
 Ferry fame. 1800-1859. 
 
 Christianity. It is not the intention in this letter to place 
 Christianity on a plane with any other religion. Judaism, Mo- 
 hammedanism and Parsiism are good so far only as they re- 
 semble Christianity. Christianity was the fruition of Judaism. 
 Mohammedanism is modified Judaism. Parsiism is a modifica- 
 tion of the primitive religion of the human race. W. F. B. 
 
 "Curse God and Die" is the rendering of the words of Job's 
 wife in King James's version. Benedic Deo et morere, is the read- 
 ing of the Vulgate. The former is what she meant: the latter is 
 what she said. The employment of a soft word for a harsh is 
 known to all polite nations. The Roman disliked the verb morere, 
 and said of the departed vixit he has lived. Who has not heard 
 a scrivener or notary before asking an illiterate person to make 
 his mark, "I believe, Mr. Blank, you do not write," instead of
 
 52 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 "you can not write"? The expression of bless for curse is heard 
 occasionally among rustics, where archaic expressions linger long- 
 est W. F. B. 
 
 Darwin, Charles Robert, the most famous scientist since New- 
 ton, founder of the sect of chimpanzeeites, born February 12, 
 1809, an Englishman, son of an eminent physician, Charles War- 
 ring Darwin, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, the poet, whose fan- 
 tastic ideas communicated to Mrs. Shelley, through the medium 
 of her husband and Lord Byron, gave birth to her remarkable 
 romance Frankenstein. The fame of the grandfather is eclipsed 
 by that of the grandson, who was born on the same day as Abra- 
 ram Lincoln, and it is a matter worthy of debate which will have 
 the most enduring fame. Thomas Paine, famous as a political 
 agitator in England, America and France, died the same year. 
 Darwin was a great chemist, a great botanist, a great zoologist, 
 a great geologist, a great comparative anatomist, but a poor logi- 
 cian, a faulty philosopher. The Origin of Species contains its 
 own refutation. Some of Darwin's admirers, particularly Ben- 
 jamin F. Underwood, have claimed that he never taught that 
 man was descended from any existing species of ape, but simply 
 that he had been evolved from ape-like species. To prove that 
 he taught the baboon and monkey descent of man, it is only nec- 
 essary to read the two or three closing pages of his Descent of 
 Man. Darwin did enough and wrote enough to make him great, 
 without this fallacious addendum to his fame. Died April 19, 
 1882. W. F. B. 
 
 Deist. A person who believes in a personal God distinct from 
 nature itself, but who rejects the supernatural revelation. W. 
 F.B. 
 
 Galileo Galilei. An eminent Italian mathematician and nat- 
 ural philosopher; born at Pisa, 1564, died at Florence, 1642. He 
 discovered the isochronism of the vibrations of the pendulum ; 
 the law governing velocity of falling bodies ; invented the ther- 
 mometer; and, though not the first inventor of the telescope, he 
 was the first to make it of practical use in astronomy. With this 
 instrument he discovered the satellites of Jupiter, the rings of 
 Saturn, the phases of Venus, the longitudinal and diurnal libra- 
 tions of the moon, and the solar spots. Galileo was an epoch- 
 maker in astronomical science. He accepted the heliocentric theory 
 of our planetary system, known before his time to the. ancient
 
 NOTES TO EPISTLE DEDICATORY 53 
 
 Assyrians and maintained by Pythagoras, Aristarchus of Samos, 
 Cusa, Copernicus, Diego di Zunica, Foscarini and Giordano Bruno, 
 but which had been superseded by the clumsy hypothesis of Ptol- 
 emy of Alexandrea. The Ptolemaic theory had come to Europe 
 from the Mohammedans through the Moorish empire of Spain, the 
 Crusades, and the conquest of Constantinople. Galileo's discov- 
 eries would have made him immortal, but he dwells in popular 
 memory chiefly because of his trial before the Holy Office, a 
 proceeding which has been grossly misunderstood. It is safe to 
 say that every popular account of it is more or less false. This 
 proceeding was for a contempt of court in disobeying an order 
 of the Congregation of the Index forbidding him to teach the 
 heliocentric theory. The res of the contempt was his Dialogues, 
 which he claimed taught the geocentric or Ptolemaic theory. But 
 a commission of experts, to which the work was submitted, re- 
 ported that the author of the book certainly believed in the helio- 
 centric theory. Under the law, when there was a disagreement 
 between the statement of a suspected author and the apparent 
 purport of the book, torture could be applied to the prisoner for 
 the purpose of eliciting the truth. Galileo was menaced with 
 torture, but not tortured. In fact, he could not be tortured under 
 the law, both on account of his age and from the fact that he 
 was suffering from a hernia. His judges knew this, but he, prob- 
 ably, did not. Galileo showed anything but want of fortitude; 
 he was like a schoolboy under the old regime telling a lie and 
 sticking to it, in the face of a threatened flogging. The abjuration 
 required of him was a purging of contempt placing in legal 
 formula, with some amplification, the denial which he had al- 
 ready voluntarily made. He was sentenced as a suspected heretic 
 to imprisonment during the pleasure of the -Holy Office; he was 
 confined, first at Sienna, afterward in his own villa at Arcetri, 
 near Florence, during the term of his natural life for nine years 
 after his trial. It was at the latter place where Milton saw him. 
 Galileo, probably, had the freedom of his own grounds, but he 
 could not go into town without leave. The contempt proceeding 
 against Galileo Galilei did not differ materially from the proceed- 
 ing against Eugene V. Debs. Of course it is hard to understand 
 how the first order, which Galileo disobeyed, could ever have 
 been made, as the voyage of Juan Sebastian del Cano had ex- 
 ploded the Homeric theory, and the Ptolemaic theory conflicted
 
 54 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 as much with the apparent meaning of certain texts of Scripture 
 as did the heliocentric theory. But as held in the Debs Case, 
 where the court has jurisdiction, it must be obeyed, right or 
 wrong. The court that tried Galileo was the Roman Inquisition, 
 established by a papal bull of date July 21, 3542, ninety-one years 
 before his trial. It had universal, original and appellate juris- 
 diction throughout the world. It inflicted only the minor pena! 
 repressions, turning the obstinate and incorrigible over to the 
 secular ruler or magistrate, who was compelled to favor the 
 proceedings of the Inquisition, under pain of excommunication. 
 At Galileo's death the heliocentric theory was no more than a 
 very probable hypothesis. He, himself, in his private correspond- 
 ence, sometimes denied and sometimes affirmed the opinion, ac- 
 cording to his correspondent. His duplicity in this and at his 
 trial can be easily understood by any one who will read the fine 
 analysis of the Italian character of the century before Galileo 
 it had probably not materially changed in Macaulay's Essay of 
 Machiavelli. Galileo, undoubtedly, thought that posterity would 
 understand his Dialogues; and he did not care what his contem- 
 poraries thought about it, as he felt confident the heliocentric 
 theory would finally prevail. Kepler's three physical laws of 
 planetary motion had been discovered fifteen years before Galileo's 
 trial. In 1685, Sir Isaac Newton simplified the three in one, 
 known as the Newtonian law of gravitation. In 1727, James 
 Bradley discovered the aberration of light, which demonstrated 
 that the earth was moving in space. These three discoveries 
 closed the question in favor of the heliocentric theory. Thirty 
 years after the last discovery, Benedict XIV. suspended the decree 
 of the Congregation of the Index of date March 5, 1616 the 
 same for which Galileo had incurred condemnation in disobeying. 
 As the purpose of this work is not the discussion of controverted 
 points between Catholics and Protestants, the bearing of this 
 affair on papal infallibility will not be touched. Any one desirous 
 of examining this question is referred to two articles in the 
 Dublin Review, one in the April number for 1871, entitled, 
 Copernicanism and Paul V.', the other in the July number for 
 the same year, entitled, Galileo and the Pontifical Congregations 
 The statement of Draper in his Conflict between Religion and 
 Science that Galileo was denied burial in consecrated ground is 
 a mistake. He sleeps in Santa Croce, the Westminster of Flor- 
 ence. W. F. B. 
 
 I
 
 NOTES TO EPISTLE DEDICATORY 55 
 
 Gibbon, Edward. English historian (1737-1794), author of 
 the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, probably the greatest 
 work that was ever the product of a single mind. W '. F. B. 
 
 Herbert, Edward (1581-1648). Deist. Wrote De Veritate, 1524. 
 W. F. B. 
 
 Hettinger, From (1819-1890.) German Roman Catholic cler- 
 gyman and scholar. His work on Natural Religion is the best 
 treatise which I have ever seen upon that subject. No clergyman, 
 of any denomination, can afford to be without it. W. F. B. 
 
 Hume, David. Scottish historian and philosopher (1711- 
 1776), author of History of England; apologist for the house of 
 Stuart. H'. F. B. 
 
 Jeanne d'Arc. Maid of Orleans. W. F. B. 
 Kepler, John. German astronomer, born seven years after 
 Galileo. Like Galileo, he was an advocate of the heliocentric 
 theory. For this he was condemned by the Lutheran Theological 
 Faculty of Tubingen, in 1596. Quitting his native Wiirtemberg, 
 he sought refuge with the Jesuits of Gratz and Ingoldstadt, who 
 received him with open arms and afterward obtained for him a 
 lucrative and honorable position. Some Catholic writers plead 
 this as a kind of set-off to the story of Galileo, but it really 
 proves nothing, except that the Faculty of Tubingen, as well as 
 the Congregation of the Index, were mistaken in a matter of 
 biblical exegesis. The Society of Jesus, probably, loved Kepler 
 for the enemies he had made. W. F. B. 
 
 Krudener, Juliane de Vietinghoff. Russian novelist and 
 mystic (1774-1824), prophesied Napoleon's return from Elba and 
 the second overthrow of the Bourbons. The articles of the holy 
 alliance were said to have been submitted to her for revision. 
 She was a sort of female Tolstoi. Frau Krudener was the con- 
 fidante of Alexander I., but was finally expelled from St. Peters- 
 burg for revealing state secrets. She sought to found a colony 
 of her disciples in the Crimea, but died there before the settle- 
 ment was perfected. W . F. B. 
 
 Lucian. Greek writer of uncertain date, born at Samosata, on 
 the Euphrates, Syrian by race; apprenticed to a stonecutter, a 
 maker of pagan images of Mercury; ran away from his master 
 and returned to his home; studied rhetoric; began practice at 
 the bar, but left it in disgust to make a fortune as a declaimer
 
 56 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 and teacher of what moderns would call elocution; was ten years 
 in Gaul; finally settled in Athens; lived to a great age, whether 
 eighty or one hundred at his death depends upon the uncertain 
 date of his birth. Though an Asiatic, he acquired a pure Greek 
 style and was almost as much the master of Attic as Xenophon 
 himself. Lucian, like Swift, sometimes makes slips in syntax, 
 but unlike Shakspere and Gaius Julius Caesar, he has had no 
 obliging commentator to fit his false syntax onto some imaginary 
 theory of correct diction. But none but a pedant, incapable of 
 appreciating Lucian's merit, would dwell upon these trifles, which 
 are hardly more of blemishes than spots on the solar disc. Lucian 
 devoted his last years to literature and wrote inter alia, Dialogues 
 of the Dead, and Dialogues of the Gods. Philopatris, formerly 
 attributed to him, is now generally believed to have been the 
 work of a later writer. If this is correct, he was a close imitator. 
 Few writers have been more the subject of contention than Lucian. 
 He was such a master of refined satire that it is sometimes im- 
 possible to tell whether he is satirical or serious. Some critics 
 who have disputed his authorship of Philopatris have even claimed 
 that he was secretly a Christian. This, however, though possible, 
 is not very probable. But the story that he was torn by dogs 
 for ridiculing Christianity is a fable. Outside of Philopatris, there 
 is nothing which can be set down as an attack upon Christianity. 
 Lucian calls Christ "the crucified sophist," but, however this ex- 
 pression may sound to our ears, it is not irreverent coming from 
 him. Little is known of Lucian's private life, except that he was 
 a dutiful and grateful son who provided for his parents in their 
 old age In his old age, his own means appear to have been 
 limited, for he accepted a sinecure at the hands of the Roman 
 Imperator. Lucian's fondest admirer among great modern writers 
 is M. Ernest Renan. See Voltaire, infra. W. F. B. 
 
 Pantheist is from the Greek, pas, passa, pan, all, and theos. God. 
 It designates a person who believes that the material universe is 
 God, or answers to God, as our bodies answer to ourselves; that 
 is, God has the same relation to the universe as man's soul has 
 to his body. This doctrine involves the eternity of matter. 
 W. F. B. 
 
 Lucretia. Destructive critics of profane history are disposed 
 to doubt everything from the Colossus of Rhodes to George 
 Washington's hatchet Now, they deny the story of Lucretia,
 
 NOTES TO ETISTLF. DEDICATORY 57 
 
 Collatinus and Sextus Tarquinius. Two thousand years from 
 now they will deny the stories of Florinda, Count Julian and 
 Roderick, the Goth. Gibbon has called attention to the resem- 
 blance between the two accounts. In two thousand years, they 
 will claim that one was taken from the other. They could have 
 no possible connection. It is like the claim that William Tell 
 was a myth because' Saxo Grammaticus tells the same story 
 about somebody else. I would respectfully call attention to the 
 story of Idomeneus sacrificing his son, as told by the later classical 
 writers, and the story of Jephtha sacrificing his daughter, as re- 
 lated in the book of Judges. Will some destructive critic point 
 out how one of these accounts could have been taken from the 
 other? If we can trust the best chronology at hand, they could 
 not have occurred more than twenty-five years apart. What con- 
 nection did the Greeks have with the Hebrews? W. F. B. 
 
 Paley, William (1743-1805). Author, inter alia, of A View of 
 the Evidences of Christianity, Natural Theology and Horae 
 Paulinae. He enjoyed an immense popularity for nearly a cen- 
 tury, but this was due largely to his style of writing, which was 
 a transition from the Johnsonian style which prevailed in England 
 before his time. His Horae Paulinae is a wonderful book. His 
 Evidences is little more than an abridgment of Lardner, but it 
 pays to read it. W. F. B. 
 
 Rousseau, John James (1712-1778). Deistical philosopher, is 
 now chiefly known as the author of Emile, a work on pedagogy 
 very popular among educators. He was also the author of Le 
 Control Social the gospel of the French Revolution and many 
 other works. He lived for many years with a coarse and ignorant 
 woman whom he married before his death. Rousseau had by 
 her five children. These he sent to the foundling hospital as 
 soon as they were born. In his celebrated Confessions, to which 
 he owes half his fame, Rousseau says : 
 
 "Let the last trumpet sound when it will. I will come with this 
 book in my hand and will present myself before the sovereign 
 judge. I will boldly proclaim: 'Thus have I acted, thus have I 
 thought, such was I.' ... Assemble around me the number- 
 less throng of my fellow mortals; let them listen to my confes- 
 sions, let them blush at my depravity; let them shrink appalled at 
 my miseries. Let each of them, in his turn, with equal sincerity, 
 lay bare his heart at the foot of the throne, and then let a single 
 one tell thee, if he dare : '/ was better than that man.' "
 
 58 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Rousseau must have had supreme confidence in the depravity 
 of the human heart. His expression comparing the death of 
 Sokrates with the death of Christ is generally quoted as para- 
 phrased by William Wirt in his Letters of a British Spy, and the 
 paraphrase is an improvement upon the original. W . F. B. 
 
 Theodore of Corsica. Few men have been surrounded with 
 such a halo of romance and mawkish sentiment as this man. Yet 
 he was as great a vagabond as the notorious Count Johannes, but 
 he still occupies a place in history. As is the case with every shift- 
 ing adventurer, possessed of a fertile imagination, there is a great 
 uncertainty as to the facts of his life. Theodore von Neuhof, the 
 son of a Westphalian baron settled in France, was born at Metz 
 about 1686. In his youth, Neuhof was a page of the Duchess of 
 Orleans. Afterward, while a student at Cologne, he killed an- 
 other nobleman in a duel and fled to Sweden. Here he ingra- 
 tiated himself into the good graces of Gortz, the prime minister 
 of Charles XII. Neuhof was employed in the secret foreign ser- 
 vice. After the fall of Gortz, Othello's occupation was gone. 
 The scoundrel duped Lady Sarsfield into marrying him. He 
 robbed his wife of her jewels and fled from France to Italy, 
 whence he sailed to Africa and acted for more than fifteen years 
 as interpreter to the dey of Algiers. Neuhof succeeded in in- 
 ducing the dey of Algiers and the bey of Tunis to furnish him 
 with 4,000 muskets, two regiments, a little ammunition and money, 
 under the pretense that he could conquer Corsica for those pirates. 
 It is probable that he had turned Moslem during his sojourn in 
 Africa. Neuhof sailed to Leghorn, where he met some Corsicans 
 whom he told that, if they would recognise him as their king, he 
 would deliver them from the tyranny of Genoa, and enlist the 
 sympathies of Europe in their favor. In the month of March, 
 1735, Neuhof landed at Aleri. April 15, 1736, he was elected 
 king, as Theodore I., a new constitution was formed, which he 
 swore to support ; he formed a court ; conferred titles of nobility. 
 The father of the historic Paoli was one of the recipients. The 
 physical advantages which the rocky and mountainous island 
 afforded and the enthusiasm of his followers, gave him ?. tem- 
 porary advantage over the Genoese, and he played king for eight 
 months, keeping up the courage of his new subjects by promises 
 of foreign aid. A price was placed upon his* head. Neuhof left 
 the island under the pretense of hurrying up matters, and actually
 
 NOTES TO EPISTLE DEDICATORY 59 
 
 obtained recognition by the Netherlands, and a loan from Jews in 
 Amsterdam upon a promise of the monopoly of Corsica's trade. 
 But Genoa, with the aid of France, conquered his kingdom. 
 Theodore I. sought refuge in England. An attempt to regain his 
 throne in 1745 proved a failure. Finally confined to a debtor's 
 cell, he found a friend in Horace Walpole, who raised a sub- 
 scription and obtained his release. Theodore Neuhof died in 
 London, December 11, 1756. He was buried at Westminster. 
 
 The details of his career in Corsica remind one of Mark Twain's 
 humorous account of the revolution in Pitcairn's island, or Daniel 
 Pratt as candidate for President in 1876. Neuhof could speak 
 many languages which had been picked up easily in his wander- 
 ings, but, aside from these, his attainments were not unusual ; 
 and his ability was ordinary. Neuhof had a knowledge of men 
 and of the weaknesses of human nature ; and his career is worthy 
 of study as an example of what can be done With a glib tongue, 
 a vivid imagination and a brazen effrontery. There is little doubt 
 that George Washington or Frederick the Great, or even Shamyl, 
 placed in the same situation as Neuhof, would have achieved 
 the independence of Corsica. Owing to the facts that he belongs 
 to the history of the island that gave birth to Napoleon; that 
 the couplet on his tombstone has passed into a proverb; that he 
 is mentioned in Voltaire's greatest work, will lend to the name 
 of Theodore of Corsica a romantic immortality. W . F. B. 
 
 Voltaire (1694-1778). Poet, philosopher, novelist, and mis- 
 cellaneous writer, the most distinguished Frenchman of the 
 eighteenth century, and the greatest name in French literature, 
 friend of Bolingbroke and Pope, was twice confined in the Bas- 
 tile; released on condition of quitting France; chose England as 
 his place of exile; afterwards spent several years at the court of 
 Frederick the Great; protege of Catherine II. of Russia, who 
 possessed the knack of finding apologists among the literary men 
 of her day; lived for twenty years (1758-1778) at Ferney, de- 
 partment of Ain, on the Swiss border, only four or five miles 
 from Geneva ; like William Shakspere, was a successful business 
 man. Voltaire was a deist, skeptical on almost everything but 
 belief in God. In a sickness supposed to be mortal, he prepared 
 and subscribed the following statement : 
 
 "I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, 
 and detesting superstition. Voltaire."
 
 60 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Voltaire attacked Christianity in the same manner as Lucian 
 assailed paganism. Writing as though he were an orthodox be- 
 liever, he ridiculed the supernatural in a manner similar to Gib- 
 bon's celebrated fifteenth chapter. Gibbon took his cue from 
 Pascal's Provincial Letters, and the resemblance between Lucian 
 and Voltaire is too great to be accidental. The coarse simile of 
 John Randolph would apply as a metaphor to Voltaire he 
 "shines and stinks." Voltaire lived for fifteen years with another 
 man's wife during the life of her husband. This woman was 
 Madame du Chatelet, the translator of Newton's Principia; and, 
 as is evident from a letter written to her by him, just before their 
 conventional separation, their relations were not altogether platonic 
 His biographers have passed lightly over this affair, because, for- 
 sooth, such things were fashionable in France, and the husband 
 was satisfied. As though fashion could repeal, or consent to sus- 
 pend the moral law. Others, apparently, think that people like 
 Byron, Voltaire, George Eliot and Jim Bludsoe are absolved 
 from obedience to the Decalogue. In this age of clean names for 
 filthy things, their relation would be styled an affinity. It is such 
 moral obliquity which makes literature dangerous to those whose 
 characters are unformed. There is no doubt that Voltaire, when 
 he thought he was about to die, sent for a clergyman, received 
 the sacraments and signed a paper asking pardon if he had of- 
 fended the church. But it is equally certain that he did this to 
 escape the potter's field. Voltaire had been educated by the 
 Jesuits, and, at the time of his most bitter attacks upon ecclesi- 
 asticism, he wrote to one of the encyclopaedists defending the 
 Society of Jesus. He was dubbed Antichrist by contemporary 
 Capuchins, denounced by Dr. Johnson as a felon worthy of Old 
 Bailey and barked at by myriads of bipedal phyces whose names, 
 even, are forgotten. On the other hand, Victor Hugo shaved the 
 edge of blasphemy with, "Jesus wept and Voltaire smiled." 
 
 Voltaire's place in history is greater than his place in literature. 
 And his influence, for good or for evil, will continue to the end 
 of time. Was that influence good, evil or mixed? This ques- 
 tion will be differently answered, according to the varying esti- 
 mates which men may place upon a stable religious conviction, 
 and their idea of reaching and obtaining the same. Voltaire's 
 masked attacks upon the Bible are puerile, and- his open attacks 
 upon organised Christianity are misconceived. As the unjust
 
 NOTES TO EPISTLE DEDICATORY 6l 
 
 steward in the Gospel parable had naught to commend him but 
 his cunning, so we find little to admire in Voltaire's strictures on 
 Scripture but his wit. The popular knowledge of this man is 
 limited to what is expressed in Cowper's lines r 
 
 "Who, for the bane of thousands born, 
 Built God a church, and laughed his word to scorn." 
 
 "The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew 
 Bon mots to gall the Christian and the Jew." 
 
 His Henriade was unduly praised by his contemporaries, who 
 placed it beside the Iliad and the Aeneid. This is absurd, but it 
 was, nevertheless, an epoch-making book. Henriade is an epic 
 poem with Henry IV., popularly known as Henry of Navarre, 
 for its hero. The teaching of the sentiment of religious tolera- 
 tion is the purpose of this poem. It was translated, into nearly 
 every modern language and diffused the idea of universal tolera- 
 tion over Europe. By those who agree with Abbe Fleury and 
 Marsilius of Padua that the dominion of the Church is spiritual 
 only and that it can employ no coercive punishment, and by those 
 who believe that secular governments are not paternal to the 
 extent of controlling the religious opinions of subjects or citizens 
 by these, I say, Voltaire might be revered as the Apostle of 
 Liberty. Such people might argue that the foolishness of intol- 
 erance has been demonstrated by the logic of events ; that we 
 behold in Italy and Spain the fruit of the Inquisition and in 
 France the fruition of the policy of Charles IX. and Louis XIV. ; 
 that all three of these countries are honeycombed with unbelief, 
 but that in Germany, the birthplace of Protestantism and the 
 home of Rationalism, where Catholic laymen have been called 
 upon to defend their faith, the Bishop of Rome finds his most 
 efficient champions; that if a man's religion will not stand the 
 test of investigation, there is something the matter with him or 
 his religion; that supporting Christianity with the secular arm 
 weakens it. To those who believe that the church de facto is the 
 church de jure, whether represented by a St. Thomas of Canter- 
 bury, John Calvin or Cotton Mather; that all governments are 
 of divine ordination ; that the two Church and State each in 
 its sphere, are the joint guardians of the human conscience to 
 these, I say, Voltaire would appear as the evil genius of modern 
 civilisation. These people might argue that the condition of 
 France came about through the influence of Voltaire, Rousseau,
 
 62 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Diderot, d'Alembert, and their ilk; that it came because re- 
 pressive measures were not adopted; that the Spanish inquisition 
 was abolished in 1813, and that the condition of that country and 
 of Italy is due to the free circulation of such books as Kenan's 
 Vie dc Jesus; that heresy is a spiritual smallpox which the Church 
 and State have the right to exclude by quarantine and suppress 
 by enforced vaccination ; that anarchy is political heresy, and that 
 the government even of free America is proceeding against that 
 by excluding anarchists and refusing to naturalise them; that, if 
 that is just, why can we complain of a government where ninety- 
 five per centum of its people belong to one church which is 
 established by law for keeping out and suppressing heresy ? That 
 the laws against blasphemy, profanity and Sunday desecration, 
 disguised under the specious plea of police regulation, are really 
 anti-heretical in their nature and operation. These people might 
 cite as a precedent, Paul's destruction of the books of magic and 
 his striking a sorcerer with blindness. Voltaire was the product of 
 his time. He was in the reaction against the repressive policy of 
 Catharine de'Medici and Madame de Maintenon. The former has 
 found two able apologists in Lingard and Balzac, but neither has 
 convinced the humble writer that Catharine de' Medici was not what 
 I have always believed her the worst woman that any country 
 or any age ever produced. The massacre of St. Bartholomew ad- 
 mits of no justification, excuse, apology or explanation. Madame 
 de Maintenon, who persuaded her royal consort to murder and 
 dragoon into exile 500,000' of his most loyal subjects, has been 
 credited with sincere religious zeal ; but her private correspond- 
 ence shows that, like the howling silversmiths of Ephesus, she 
 was moved by material interest. This persecution which involved 
 the war of the Cevennes and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
 was a State and not a Church persecution. Innocent XL dis- 
 approved of it, but, not being on good terms with the French 
 King, he solicited the good offices of James II. of England. But 
 Louis Quatorze killed and exiled the Huguenots and thus got rid 
 of a conservative class who, a century later, might have saved the 
 head and possibly the crown of the Baker and the Baker's wife. If 
 atheism is preferable to Protestantism, then Louis was justified 
 by the result. Voltaire was a man of intense personal vanity, and 
 could never remain silent when assailed. His ecrases rinfdme, 
 
 *The number is uncertain. W , F. B,
 
 NOTES TO EPISTLE DEDICATORY 63 
 
 which he uttered in his wrath and which became his motto and 
 the motto of the encyclopaedists, had its birth in the fact that he 
 was piqued at having some of his writings put under ecclesiastical 
 ban. He had, before this, dedicated his Mahomet to the Bishop 
 of Rome, and the Pontiff had graciously accepted the compliment. 
 Voltaire was not by nature irreligious. In his The Sage and the 
 Atheist he shows a great admiration for the Quakers, and only 
 his advanced age kept him from settling in Pennsylvania. In his 
 historical works, written in the middle age, he betrays little of 
 his later declared opinions; and his account of the Protestant rev- 
 olution is the most truthful and impartial which I have ever read. 
 Macaulay says in his Essay on Frederick the Great: 
 
 "Of all the intellectual weapons which have ever been wielded 
 by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. . . . 
 We can not pause to recount how often that rare talent was 
 exercised against rivals worthy of esteem ; how often it was used 
 to crush and torture enemies worthy only of silent disdain ; how 
 often it was perverted to the more noxious purpose of destroying 
 the last solace of earthly misery, and the last restraint on earthly 
 power. Neither can we pause to tell how often it was used to 
 vindicate humanity and toleration, 'the principles of sound phil- 
 osophy, the principles of free government." 
 
 The reader who wishes to understand some of Macaulay's al- 
 lusions, is referred to the articles Calas, Crebillon and Desfon- 
 taines in any good encyclopaedia. His statement that Satan is 
 Christianity is true, and true in the sense in which he meant it. 
 If there is no Devil, Christ's death on the Cross was unnecessary, 
 and even the existence of God himself becomes a matter of boot- 
 less academic speculation. See Lucian, supra. W. F. B.
 
 INTRODUCTION 65 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The main text of this book was written in the form of 
 a lecture and has been delivered many times. It was 
 first delivered on the recommendation of George E. (now 
 Professor) Condra of the State University, at University 
 Place, January 18, 1903. Only slight and unimportant 
 changes have been made to adapt it to this publication. 
 Some notes have been added for elucidation of the text. 
 
 The theistic theory of the universe is more than an 
 hypothesis; it is the only rational theory. The simple 
 fact that ice is practically the only crystal which does not 
 sink in water is sufficient evidence of design in creation. 
 Every tyro in physics knows the terrible consequences 
 which would follow if the contrary were true. Nature 
 is governed by law ; and that law implies a lawgiver is a 
 truism. 
 
 The theistic theory once established, it is impossible 
 to conceive of a supreme god who is not like even Cap- 
 itolinian Jupiter (Jus- Pater), the father of justice; and 
 there is so much of injustice in this world that it seems 
 certain that some time, somewhere, somehow I know 
 not when or where or how there will be a balance struck 
 between right and wrong. The anthropomorphical ac- 
 count of the judgment, given in the twenty-fifth chapter 
 of St. Matthew's Gospel, is no more literally true than 
 the parable of the ten virgms, contained in the same 
 chapter. But judgment will come a general judgment 
 and the ways of God to man will be justified. 
 
 Agnosticism itself is the strongest argument for super- 
 natural religion. No question can equal in importance
 
 66 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 man's relation to his creator. A century and a half ago 
 Voltaire wrote: 
 
 "What am I ? \Vhence have come ? and whither go? 
 This men still ask, and this can never know." 
 
 This briefly expresses the credo of every modern agnostic, 
 and it is doubtful if in the search for truth of such earnest 
 souls among the ancients as Sokrates and Cicero a more 
 satisfactory result was reached. What stronger proof 
 need we of the necessity of a supernatural revelation? 
 Would a just and merciful God leave his children in the 
 dark without a guide? Whether this guide be an in- 
 fallible book or an infallible church, is a dispute between 
 Augsburg and Rome and will not be here discussed. 
 Both Augsburg and Rome accept the Bible as the word 
 of God. 
 
 "We are living in an age of transition,"' say the apolo- 
 gists for destructive criticism, but the truth is there is 
 nothing new under the sun. Even.' poison heresy of this 
 age has its prototype in the ages that are passed. Lucian 
 was but the Voltaire of paganism ; Heraklitus of Ephesus 
 was the Buchner of his age; Protagoras differed but 
 little from Herbert Spencer; Celsus wrote like a modern 
 agnostic ; M inot J. Savage stole his thunder from Bishop 
 Colenso, who, in turn, took his cue from Richard Simon 1 ; 
 and Washington Gladden is but the parrot repeating the 
 stale and exploded criticisms of Porphyry and Theodore 
 of Mopsuestia. 
 
 That Alexander read the prophecies concerning him- 
 self in the temple at Jerusalem, is as well-established as 
 any fact in the life of the Macedonian. It is related by 
 the nearest extant historian to Alexander's time and is 
 
 'Richard Simon does not belong with the destructive critics. 
 W. F. B.
 
 INTRODUCTION 6? 
 
 confirmed by the fact that some strong influence operated 
 to prevent Alexander from accepting the advice of Par- 
 menion to divide the empire with Darius. 1 But a few of 
 the savants of cyclopaedias and magazines jumped at a 
 few Greek words appearing in the text of the Book of 
 Daniel like a black bass at a minnow. Alas, for the in- 
 tellectual indolence of the age! Men and women who 
 will read the superficial outpourings of flippant miscalled 
 critics have never looked within the pages of Origen and 
 Pusey. There is absolutely no reason for assigning the 
 Book of Daniel to the age of Antiochus Epiphanes. The 
 few Greek words which appear in the text are the names 
 of certain musical instruments and prove nothing, except 
 the strong probability that the instruments were received 
 from the Greeks and brought their names with them, as 
 we of the West have received "maverick," "corral," and 
 "ranch" from our Texan and Spanish-American neigh- 
 bors. In both cases commerce transmitted nomenclature. 
 Our friend Doctor Draper tells us, in substance, that 
 the pyramids stood as long before the time of Jacob as 
 Christ lived before Draper wrote his Intellectual Devel- 
 opment of Europe, and that the hieroglyphics inscribed 
 thereon bespeak a long development of the art of writing. 
 But his syllogism rests upon a false premise the as- 
 sumption of the correctness of the chronology of the Arch- 
 bishop of Armagh. Because Usher was the political pet 
 of that royal pedant, James Stuart, his chronology was 
 placed in the margin of the English Bible, but it is no 
 more a part of the Bible than is the table of contents 
 placed at the head of a chapter. John Denison Baldwin 
 says: 
 
 'This message from Darius came before the visit to Jerusalem 
 W. F. B.
 
 68 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Any system of chronology that places the creation of man only 
 about four thousand or five thousand years previous to the birth 
 of Christ is a mere scholastic fancy, an elaborate absurdity. There 
 is nothing to warrant it and not much to excuse it Those who 
 profess to find it in the Bible misuse and falsify that book." 1 
 
 And now come the critics of the New Testament to 
 inform us that the Gospels were written two or three 
 centuries after Christ, that most of the epistles were not 
 written by the persons to whom they were ascribed and 
 that the Apocalypse or Revelation of John has no place 
 in the canon. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote an elab- 
 orate work against heresy about A.D. 180. In this book, 
 he speaks of the four Gospels as a modern geographer 
 might speak of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa 
 and America. Irenaeus was born in Asia Minor and 
 remembered and had associated with Polycarp, a disciple 
 of the Apostle John. This bishop tells us that Matthew 
 published "a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their 
 own language/' that Mark, Peter's disciple and inter- 
 preter, "did himself also publish unto us in writing the 
 things which were preached by Peter"; that Luke, too, 
 the attendant of Paul, "set down in a book the gospel 
 preached by him" ; that John put forth his Gospel "while 
 he abode in Ephesus in Asia," and Irenaeus informs us 
 that John did not die until after the accession of Trajan, 
 A.D. 98. Polycarp was burned A.D. 169 and Irenaetis 
 was at least nineteen years old at the death of Polycarp. 
 Of the integrity of his statements there can be no ques- 
 tion. But the Gospels contain internal evidence of their 
 own authenticity. Matthew's Gospel was certainly writ- 
 ten before the destruction of Jerusalem, September, A.D. 
 70. Read the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of 
 
 1 Prehistoric Natifms, pp. 26, 27.
 
 INTRODUCTION 69 
 
 Matthew, remembering the Jew looked upon Jerusalem 
 as the Roman regarded Rome, as an eternal city ; and our 
 Saviour speaks to his disciples apparently with this as- 
 sumption. The event showed that the assumption was 
 not verified in the sense in which the Jews understood it. 
 Now, a counterfeiter, writing at a later date, would not 
 have failed to offer some explanation such as is offered 
 in John, second chapter, twenty-first verse. The writers 
 of the Gospels were familiar with the geography of Pal- 
 estine, the customs of the Jews and the language of 
 Judea; such knowledge as they possessed could hardly 
 have been acquired by men who were not to the manner 
 born. 1 
 
 2. The genuineness of the epistles of Paul and the Acts 
 are proved to a moral certainty (hardly less than the 
 demonstration of a proposition of Euclid) in Paley's 
 Horae Paulinae. This book, read by few and almost 
 forgotten, puts this question beyond all doubt. Indeed, 
 the authenticity and genuiness of the Acts of the Apostles 
 is better established than the genuineness and authenticity 
 of Caesar's Commentaries, and this by evidence internal 
 and external. 
 
 3. The Apocalypse or Revelation of John was certainly 
 written by some person upon the Isle of Patmos. The 
 writer's figures are taken from surrounding geographical 
 objects, and the hail mentioned in xvi, 21, "every stone 
 about the weight of a talent," was, probably, suggested 
 by the volcanic stones hurled from a neighboring island 
 upon Patmos at the time of a great earthquake which 
 took place here in the reign of Domitian and at the prob- 
 able time of John's banishment. In the writer's humble 
 judgment, controversialists have been at fault in regard 
 
 reader is referred to Lardner. Credibility of the Gospels, 
 a book which never was and never can be answered. W . F. B.
 
 7O HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 to this book. Like some critics who have sought for 
 everything in Shakspere, these speculative exegetists have 
 interpreted the number of the beast into everything from 
 the Bishop of Rome to Martin Luther. It seems plain 
 to the present writer that Caesar Nero was meant and 
 none other. The Scarlet Woman was clearly Pagan Rome. 
 Most of the figures relate to things past and present, and 
 very little of it is prophecy. 1 
 
 There is room for a very interesting work on the "Acci- 
 dents of History." One of the most important personages 
 in the last century of American history was a jury 
 lawyer unknown to fame until he delivered a nominating 
 speech at a national convention. The choice for this task 
 was because of his living distant from the candidate whom 
 he nominated. This candidate failed of nomination, but 
 the nominator was placed in the field as a campaign orator 
 in the interest of the successful candidate. Prior to all 
 this, this lawyer had published certain atheistical tracts 
 entitled "Ghosts," "Gods," etc. And the political opposi- 
 tion reprinted these tracts and circulated them wherever 
 the aforesaid orator was assigned to speak. His fame 
 spread abroad throughout the land, and for the next 
 twenty-three years of his life, 1876-1899, he spoke to 
 crowded houses and gathered in shekels galore. In a 
 material sense, his life was success. But its influence 
 has been pernicious. It is a sad commentary upon the 
 superficiality of our countrymen that such a man, with- 
 out learning or philosophical training, by force of his 
 coarse and flippant wit, could have produced such a 
 change as has been produced in this country in the last 
 
 1 From chapter I., verse 1, it would seem that the book is 
 prophetic, as doubtless portions of it are. The writer is not so 
 presumptuous as to attempt the interpretation of this book. W. 
 F. B.
 
 INTRODUCTION 71 
 
 generation. But all this is easily explained. This man 
 succeeded not by his own strength, but by the weakness 
 of his adversaries. The vicious practice of exempting 
 church property from taxation has filled the land with 
 churches; and the almost equally vicious practice of the 
 gratuitous education of clergymen has supplied these 
 churches with men of inferior ability and attainments. 
 Cheap comedians and sensational actors 1 have taken to 
 the pulpit instead of the stage. The man from Peoria 
 might be fitly compared to the doughty Don of La Mancha 
 charging a flock of sheep. The shepherds attacked him 
 with their slings ; he came out slightly disfigured, but still 
 in the ring. Some of his assailants were able men, but 
 the result was little more than a free advertisement. 
 
 The opposition of science, falsely so-called, has been 
 sufficiently treated in the discourse which follows this 
 introduction. 
 
 We are told that Christianity is a failure because it has 
 not made a conquest of the world. It somtimes seems a 
 matter of regret that the Abrahamic Aera used by 
 Eusebius was not adopted and retained by the Arabians, 
 Jews, and all Christians. It might have served as a 
 common bond of union. Three thousand eight hundred 
 twenty-seven years ago this great man left the polytheistic 
 civilisation of Chaldea that, withdrawing from pagan con- 
 tact, he might preserve uncorrupted in his own family 
 and descendants the primitive belief in one God. The 
 Abrahamic religions Christian, Jew and Mohammedan 
 now embrace a substantial majority of the human race. 
 God never revealed the whole truth to Abraham. His 
 idea of the Almighty was anthropomorphic, and it is 
 
 ^or example, T. DeWitt Talmage and his protege, Samuel 
 Porter Jones. IV. F. B.
 
 72 
 
 doubtful if he had any conception of a future state. All 
 of his followers are monotheists, but, like their great 
 father, all of them do not possess the whole truth. In 
 this respect, a comparison may be drawn from the light 
 of the sun falling upon the earth. In the central zone 
 the vertical rays fall; in the temperate zones there is a 
 deflection, till we reach the frigid zones, where dwells 
 the darkness of unbelief. A short arctic summer reveals 
 the light of truth, but invincible ignorance conquers, and 
 fetichism and atheism settle down upon those unhappy 
 men for whom repentance was not appointed. As one 
 reflects how the spiritual children of Abraham have mis- 
 understood and slaughtered one another, he is reminded 
 of the Big-endian war in Gulliver's Travels. 
 
 In the latter half of the sixteenth century, there lived 
 in a forest near Paris a witch, weird as the woman of 
 Endor or one of the hags who met Macbeth upon the 
 heath. One night a fierce storm arose. The huge trees 
 about the hovel moaned like the prophetic oaks of 
 Dodona; the prone-descending rain beat against the side 
 of the hut and trickled from the thatched roof. The 
 feeble rush light flickered and flickered the plaything of 
 the tempest. Anon, a loud knock was heard at the door, 
 and the hag opened it for a youth whose dress showed 
 him to be of noble blood; his name was Henry. The 
 woman sat before him a simple meal of black bread, 
 cheese and spring water. Another knock and another 
 Henry entered, also of noble blood. Another knock and 
 a third Henry entered, he, also, of noble blood. Hunting 
 in the forest, they had all been overtaken by the storm 
 and had sought refuge here. "To whom does this repast 
 belong?" cried one. "To me/' said the first, "because I 
 came first." "To me," said the second, "because I am the
 
 INTRODUCTION 73 
 
 oldest." "To the one who can best defend it," said the 
 third. All assented, and drawing their swords fought like 
 gladiators till the water was spilled, the bread and cheese 
 trampled in under foot, and the floor of the hut bathed 
 in the blood of the combatants. Each of the young men 
 burst into a loud laugh. But the woman fixed her evil 
 eye upon them : 
 
 "As you have met in this place, so shall you be united in one 
 common fate; as you have deluged this hut with blood, so shall 
 you deluge France ; and as you have trampled under foot this 
 repast which hospitality prepared, so shall you abuse and lose that 
 power which you might have shared." 
 
 These young men were Henry de Guise, assassinated 
 by the order of the king December 23, 1588; Henry de 
 Valois, assassinated by James Clement, August 5, 1589; 
 Henry de Bourbon, assassinated by Ravaillac, May 14, 
 1610. This tale carries its own moral. Believers in 
 supernatural religion can be a unit against the common 
 enemy, without the surrender of any essential principle. 
 
 This little book does not purport to be a life of Jesus 
 Christ. Go to Farrar and Fouard for that. But I can not 
 close this introduction without calling attention to a book 
 published three years ago by Dodd, Mead and Company, 
 New York, The Trial of Jesus by Giovanni Rosadi. (This 
 is the book from which most of the popular lectures on 
 "the trial of Jesus" have been cribbed.) Every man, 
 woman, and child, but certainly every lawyer, should read 
 this book. The prefatory introduction is particularly grat- 
 ifying for its onslaught upon criticism which is not high 
 and upon height which is not criticism. . 
 
 In the discourse which follows, search not for plagiar- 
 ism of thought or word. "There is nothing new under 
 the sun." Forget the writer. If this little work has
 
 74 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 caused you to turn your eyes upon the subject of this 
 discourse, he is content. 
 
 W. F. B. 
 Hartington, Nebraska, November 25, 1907.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 75 
 
 THE HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 'If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither wi 1 ! they 
 believe if one rise again from the dead." 
 
 Luke, xvi., 31 Douai Version. 
 
 The story of the rich man and Lazarus is familiar to 
 every school boy. I shall waste no time in the bootless 
 speculation as to whether this story is a parable or some- 
 thing else. In either event, to my mind, it conveys the 
 same truth. 
 
 The Master tells us there was a certain rich man who 
 fared sumptuously every day; that a certain beggar lay 
 at his gate covered with sores. His food was the crumbs 
 that fell from the rich man's table ; his only nurses, the 
 dogs that licked his sores. The beggar died and was 
 carried by angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man 
 died and was buried, and in Hell lifted his eyes, being in 
 torment; and seeing Abraham afar off and Lazarus in 
 his bosom, he asks the Father of the Faithful to send 
 Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water 
 and touch it to his parched tongue. But this poor boon 
 is denied the wretch. Lost though he is to all hope, nat- 
 ural affection still remained. The sequel shows that the 
 retention of this instinct only made his torment the more 
 terrible. He entreats Abraham to send Lazarus to his 
 father's house that this messenger from the dead may 
 warn his five brethren that they come not to this place of 
 torment. Abraham replies that his brethren have Moses 
 and the prophets. The lost one cries out with the energy 
 and agony of despair: 
 
 "Nay, but if one went unto them from the dead, they will 
 repent."
 
 76 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 How must Abraham's answer have sounded to the 
 condemned man? 
 
 "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they 
 believe if one rise again from the dead." 
 
 The mental experience of all men is nearly the same. 
 In words of the poet : 
 
 "The thoughts we are thinking our fathers did think." 
 
 Probably each person has said within himself : ''Could 
 I have seen the miraculous drought of fishes ; could I have 
 seen water changed to wine ; could I have seen Jesus walk 
 on the sea of Tiberias, heal the leper, feed the multitude, 
 or raise the widow's dead son to life, I would then be 
 troubled with no doubts." 
 
 It will be my purpose to show that we of this age have 
 more evidence of the divinity of Christ than did his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 In the outset, let me honestly state the alternative : you 
 must believe all that was ever claimed for Jesus Christ 
 by the most sanguine believer and all that Jesus Christ 
 taught, or you must believe him a worse impostor than 
 Joe Smith, the Mormon prophet. Now, what is claimed 
 for Jesus? The most intimate friend he had on earth 
 wrote concerning him: 
 
 "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, 
 and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with 
 God. All things were made by him; and without him was not 
 anything made that was made." 
 
 Jerome's rendering of the first four words of John's 
 Gospel should be contrasted with this rendering of the 
 first seven words of Genesis, in order to get their true 
 significance. 
 
 "In principle erat verbum" "In the beginning was the Word."
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 77 
 
 "In principio Deus creavit coelum et terrain" "In the begin- 
 ning God created the heavens and the earth." 
 
 There is a maxim of lawyers: 
 
 "Contemporanea expositio est optima et fortissimo in lege" 
 "A contemporary exposition is the best and strongest in law." 
 
 In construing any writing the circumstances under 
 which it was written are the strongest evidence. It is a 
 matter of history that John wrote his Gospel to refute the 
 Cerinthians, who claimed that Christ was a created being 
 simply a virtuous man. 
 
 "In the beginning zvas the Word ; and the Word was with God ; 
 and the Word was God; the same was in the beginning with God. 
 By him were all things made; and without him was not anything 
 made that was made." 
 
 A lawyer in drawing a bond could not use stronger 
 language than John uses: 
 
 This is what is claimed for Jesus. His most intimate 
 friend could hardly have been mistaken in what Jesus 
 claimed for himself; and he testified his sincere belief in 
 that claim by facing death in the boiling cauldron. 
 
 Now, what did Jesus teach? The New Testament is 
 the best commentary upon the Old; and Jesus Christ is 
 the best commentator. He puts the seal of his approval 
 on the Old Testament when he says, "I come not to de- 
 stroy, but to fulfil." He verifies his resurrection by the 
 miracle of Jonah 1 and the whale. He verifies his coming 
 to judge the world by the Noachin Deluge. It is the 
 rankest nonsense to say that he referred to those events 
 as anything but historical facts. Imagine the greatest 
 
 Unbelievers and destructive critics have made themselves 
 merry at the expense of this prophet. The story, though remark- 
 able, is hardly a miracle, if we accept Pascal's definition of the 
 word. I would refer any inquiring mind to dissertation on Jonah 
 and Paul at end of volume. W. F. B.
 
 78 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Teacher the world ever saw stultifying Himself with ex- 
 pressions like these: "As it was in the days of Sinbad 
 the Sailor so shall it be in my day." That is to say, "Sin- 
 bad lied and I am lying, too." "A wicked and adulterous 
 generation seeketh for a sign; but there shall no sign be 
 given them, but the sign of Baron Munchausen. I will 
 prove by the Prince of all Liars that I am telling the 
 truth." 
 
 Further, Jesus taught that a certain portion of the 
 human race would be eternally damned. "These shall go 
 away into aionion punishment, but the just into life 
 aionion." Oh ! how many of these half-breed Christians 
 neither fish nor fowl I have heard get up and display 
 their little smattering of Greek by expatiating on that 
 word aionion. "Why," they say, "it does not necessarily 
 mean eternal." Bless their lilliputian intellects ! Of course 
 it does not; and no Greek scholar ever claimed it did. 
 I can find things in the Bible described as aionion that 
 did not last as long as I have lived. But, can you believe, 
 without doing violence to every rational rule of construc- 
 tion, that Jesus Christ used that word twice in one sen- 
 tence, and meant one thing in one use and another thing 
 in the other use? If so, your credulity is greater than 
 mine. If the punishment of the reprobate is not eternal, 
 the reward of the just is not. 
 
 To sum up : you must either believe that Jesus was God, 
 the Creator of all things; you must accept as true the 
 doctrines and miracles of the Old Testament and the doc- 
 trine of eternal reprobation ; or you must condemn Him 
 as an impostor. 
 
 If Jesus Christ was an impostor, he was a most peculiar 
 one. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Alexander Dowie. 
 and every other fake, have followed imposture for what 
 there is in it ; and have found it profitable. Jesus lived a
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 7Q 
 
 life of toil, suffering and self-denial. At the time of his 
 death he probably did not have to exceed 120 followers. 
 He predicted his own fate and suffered death by the 
 ignominious method of execution reserved for Roman 
 deserters and runaway slaves. Is not the hypothesis that 
 he was an impostor contrary to all human experience? 
 I might stop right here with a case made out ; but I have 
 set out to prove this matter to a demonstration ; and shall 
 be as good as my word. There will be no begging of the 
 question ; nothing will be assumed in my premises as to 
 the divine or even supernatural nature of Jesus. That 
 he had an historical existence may be assumed as an ad- 
 mitted fact. A quarter of a century ago there were those 
 who even denied this ; but they have gone into the limbo 
 of oblivion, along with those who claimed that the monks 
 of the middle ages wrote the Aeneid of Vergil 1 , where 
 they will soon be followed by the ingenious people who 
 claim that Bacon wrote the Shaksperean dramas. 2 These 
 facts can be gathered from profane writers and will be 
 generally accepted : 
 
 About 1900 years ago (the exact date can not be fixed 
 nearer than six years 3 ) there was born somewhere in 
 Palestine a Jewish peasant, who had reached mature age 
 when he began to preach a new and singularly pure doc- 
 trine. He was reported by enemies, as well as by his 
 friends, to have performed prodigies all of these in the 
 line of doing good none of them descending to the 
 vulgar level of the juggler or magician. At the end of a 
 short ministry, he was, on the indictment of the Jewish 
 
 'See note 1, p. 104. 
 2 See note 2, p. 104. 
 
 'Perhaps not nearer than eight between B.C. 6 and A.D. 2. 
 His age at his death was between thirty-one and forty-one years.
 
 8O HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Synedrium, 1 crucified by the order of the Roman pro- 
 curator, Pontius Pilate. The career of this man, thus 
 briefly summarised, has been ignored or passed over 
 lightly by contemporary historians. 
 
 Josephus was born at Jerusalem, probably eight years 
 after the death of Christ. It is almost certain that his 
 immediate ancestors were engaged in compassing that 
 death. In Josephus' history of the Jewish wars, there 
 is a passage which expresses a half-belief in the divinity 
 of Christ. This passage is found, exactly as it reads in 
 our copies, in the oldest extant copy of Josephus the 
 one in the monastery on Mount Sinai. Yet, I am in- 
 clined to the belief that, if it is not altogether spurious, 
 it does not appear in the exact form in which it was 
 written by the Jewish historian. It is very improbable 
 that the man who, as we believe, went to Rome and in- 
 stigated Nero, through his Jewish wife, Poppaea, to per- 
 secute the Christians, ever wrote these words concerning 
 the founder of Christianity : "Now, there was about this 
 time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a 
 man." 2 Tacitus, who was eight years old and lived in 
 Rome at the death of St. Paul, passes over the career of 
 Jesus with a single dash of the pen. Speaking of the 
 Christians, he says : "Auctor nominis ejus Christtis, qui, 
 Tiberio impcrante, per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum 
 supplicio affectns erat." "The originator of this name 
 was one Christ, who, Tiberius being emperor, by the pro- 
 
 *It is claimed by certain Jewish writers that there was no 
 Synedrium or Gerusia at the time Jesus was condemned, it having 
 been abolished by Herod B.C. 37, and not restored (by Agrippa) 
 till A.D. 41. There appears to be Talmudic authority for this 
 statement, bui Josephus, who shows no desire to spare Herod, is 
 silent as to the abolition of the Synedrium. Pontius Pilate was 
 deposed by Vitellius, proconsul of Syria, A.D. 36. Jesus must 
 have been crucified before that date. W. F. B. 
 
 * See note 3, p. 104.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 8l 
 
 curator Pontius Pilate, suffered death." There can be no 
 doubt of this passage; even Gibbon concedes it. Sixty- 
 five years after the death of Jesus Christ, Pliny, proconsul 
 of Bythinia, is writing to the emperor Trajan, trying to 
 explain who these Christians are. Yet this earthly life of 
 Jesus Christ, almost ignored by the wise man of his day, 
 taken as an entirety, is the greatest event that ever hap- 
 pened or ever can happen in the history of the human 
 race. The history of civilisation before Christ was a prep- 
 aration for his coming. The history since that time has 
 been its sequence. 
 
 More than fourteen centuries before Jesus was born 
 at Bethlehem of Judea, Balaam, the son of Beor, uttered 
 his prophecy which, in my humble judgment, is the 
 sublimest poetry in the Bible outside the Book of Job. 
 
 "And there shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall 
 rise out of Israel." 
 
 The tradition of this prophecy, says Origen, was pre- 
 served among the Gentiles. We even read in Confucius 
 of a wise man who would arise in the West. In Xeno- 
 phon's Memorabilia, we learn that such a teacher was 
 predicted by Sokrates, one who would teach the ultimate 
 truth. And when we read in St. Matthew's Gospel of the 
 wise men coming from the East and inquiring: "Where 
 is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen 
 his star in the East and are come to worship him," it 
 seems like a green shoot sprouting from a grain of corn 
 taken from the sarcophagus of a mummy three thousand 
 years old, 1 
 
 But I had forgotten to mention, what you already know, 
 that there are men who deny the supernatural character 
 
 t This figure was used by Bishop Hare, of the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church, in a sermon preached at Niobrara, Nebraska, 
 Eve of Epiphany, 1879. W. F. B.
 
 82 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 of the Old Testament. They say that the Pentateuch and 
 the greater part of the Old Testament were written during 
 the seventy-years captivity. They forget that proving that 
 Ezra wrote the five books attributed to Moses could not, 
 in the least, affect the question of divine inspiration. The 
 Holy Ghost could inspire Ezra as well as Moses. The 
 question is not who wrote the book, but did the Holy 
 Ghost inspire the writer? I presume it is quite unneces- 
 sary for me to say that I believe Moses wrote the Penta- 
 teuch, except the account of his own death. 
 
 If Ezra wrote the Pentateuch, he wrote the Decalogue. 
 Where did he get that law ? A Jewish captive in a land 
 where the national religion required every woman, at 
 least once in her lifetime, to offer her chastity in the 
 temple of the Goddess of Love. 1 A land that did not have 
 a chaste woman in it if in such a land Ezra wrote the 
 command, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," where, I 
 repeat, did Ezra get that law ? But we can not devote too 
 much time to these people ; life is too short. 
 
 The name of Alexander of Macedon should never be 
 spoken in terms of praise. He deserves to be classed with 
 Atilla and Jenghis Khan 2 rather than Hannibal and Gus- 
 taf Adolf. He was an ancestor worthy of the freebooters 
 who captured Miss Stone. Yet Alexander was the path- 
 finder of Christianity. His conquest spread the Greek 
 language as a medium for the transmission of the Gospel. 
 The Roman with his good roads and religious indiffer- 
 entism was another preparation for the coming Messiah. 
 
 The Resurrection of Christ is the miracle of miracles. 
 Prove this, and you have established the truth of Chris- 
 tianity. There is better proof of the Resurrection of Jesus 
 
 1 See note 4, p. 105. 
 
 'This is perhaps too severe. Voltaire says that Alexander built 
 more cities than he destroyed. W. F. B,
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 83 
 
 Christ than there is of the battle of Thermopylae. Three 
 hundred Spartans withstood five million Persians at the 
 pass between Mount Aeta and the Malian Gulf. When 
 299 of the 300 had perished, the bodies of 20,000 Persians 
 lay slain about them. 1 The story is improbable. The 
 only original authority for this story is the Greek his- 
 torian, Herodotos, who was four years old when the event 
 took place, and was not an eye-witness. Yet nobody ever 
 doubts Thermopylae as an historical fact. 
 
 A man is crucified. His heart, or at least the pericar- 
 dium, is pierced with a lance; he is buried; in thirty-six 
 hours he rises from the dead. We have two witnesses, 
 Matthew and John, who testify to this from personal 
 knowledge. But you say that this thing is more improb- 
 able than Herodotos' account of Thermopylae : the ac- 
 count of the Resurrection is unaccountable, contrary to 
 all human experience, and so forth. There are many 
 things that are unaccountable. Place ice at 32 degrees 
 Fahrenheit over a fire, and this water will absorb 142.65 
 degrees of heat without raising its temperature before it 
 melts ; is not this unaccountable ? We have hypotheses 
 galore, from Black's theory of quasi-chemical combina- 
 tion to the modern theory of conferred potential energy ; 
 but they are all mere theories nothing more. Again, is 
 it not unaccountable that ice is the only crystal that will 
 not sink in water; and equally unaccountable that water 
 expands at the boiling point as well as at the freezing 
 point? In fact, the resurrection of the dead is no more 
 remarkable than the mystery of life itself. 
 
 It is contrary to human experience. This is Hume's 
 argument. Richard Whately, adopting Hume's premises 
 and pursuing his logic courageously, made it appear very 
 
 1 See note 5, p. 106.
 
 84 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 improbable that Napoleon Bonaparte ever had an his- 
 torical existence. 1 But I must net digress too far. 
 
 There is one argument which will establish the fact 
 of Christ's Resurrection beyond a reasonable doubt. Let 
 me illustrate. Suppose when the supreme court and both 
 branches of the legislature are in session, and your gov- 
 ernor is attending to the duties of his office, some anarchist 
 blows up the capitol with dynamite and leaves the State 
 without a constitutional government: and after we have 
 been delivered from this undesirable state, the new State 
 government sets apart January 2Oth as a day of fasting 
 and prayer that Almighty God will forever deliver us 
 from the terrible scourge of the anarchist ; that two thou- 
 sand years hence, some critical historian would dispute 
 the fact that the state capitol was ever blown up. His 
 contemporaries could refute him by pointing to the ob- 
 servance of the 2Oth day of January as a fast day. Would 
 it have been possible for the fast to have been established 
 at the time, if the event had not taken place? Why, the 
 man who proposed it would have been sent to the mad- 
 house. 
 
 Within two months of Christ's Resurrection, his fol- 
 lowers began to observe the first day of the week in mem- 
 ory of that event. They have continued the observance 
 ever since. Sunday is a witness to the Resurrection not 
 to be impeached. 2 
 
 If we accept the miracle of the Resurrection, it is an 
 easy matter to believe in his miraculous birth. In fact, 
 such belief folloiws as a logical sequence from the Resur- 
 rection and ascension. Some wise men remind us that 
 of the Gospel writers two Mark and John make no 
 mention of the miraculous conception. I have absolutely 
 
 'See note 6, p. 106. 
 
 *See note 11, latter article.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 85 
 
 heard the statement made and have seen it in print 
 that Matthew is the only one who mentions it. Those 
 people must have read Luke in a hurry. There was little 
 need for John to enter into the details of the miraculous 
 conception after he had declared Christ to be God the 
 Creator. It is true that Mark makes no mention of this 
 miraculous birth. Horace Greeley, in his American Con- 
 flict, the history of the Slave-Holders' Rebellion, does not 
 mention the raid made by Confederate refugees in Canada 
 on St. Albans, Vermont. I remember something of the 
 St. Albans raid, and should like to be alive 2,000 years 
 hence to hear people say that it never took place, because 
 Greeley says nothing about it. 
 
 But we have a stronger proof yet of the supernatural 
 and divine character of Jesus Christ. Now, my friends, 
 this is the situation. Jesus Christ was a Galilean peasant ; 
 by human means, he never learned to read and write 1 
 "How knoweth this man letters having never learned." 
 He had no political power or prestige. He uttered these 
 prophecies : 
 
 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and 
 stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have 
 gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her 
 chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! Behold your house 
 is left unto you desolate." Matthew, xxiii., 37-38. 
 
 "Thine enemies shall cast a trench about three, and compass 
 thee round, and keep thee in on every side." Luke, xix., 43. 
 
 "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for your- 
 selves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming in 
 which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that 
 never bare, and the paps that never gave suck." Luke, xxiii., 
 28-29. 
 
 1 Since this was written the author's opinion has been consider- 
 ably modified, but a full discussion would require a treatise. But 
 see Luke, iv., 16-18 ; John, viii., 8. W. F. B.
 
 86 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 "And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then 
 know that the desolation thereof is nigh." Luke, xxi., 20. 
 
 "And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led 
 away captive into all nations; and Jerusalem be trodden down of 
 the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." Luke, 
 xxi., 24. 
 
 "When ye, therefore, shall be the abomination of desolation, 
 spoken of by Daniel the prophet . . . Then let them which be 
 in Judea flee into the mountains." Matthew, xxiv., 15, 16. 
 
 At the time these prophecies were uttered, their ful- 
 filment was highly improbable. Judea was a province of 
 the Roman Empire and had been such for about a hun- 
 dred years. The Romans never interfered with the re- 
 ligion of any nation. The Jews were exempted by Julius 
 Caesar from the payment of taxes during the Sabbatical 
 year. Their relations with the Empire were, on the whole, 
 pleasant. No human prescience could have foretold what 
 Jesus prophesied. 
 
 Let us see how well these prophecies were fulfilled. A 
 little over thirty years after they were uttered the Jews 
 broke out in open rebellion against Rome. History hardly 
 records a more foolhardy attempt. The combat between 
 the Briton and the Boer was not so unequal. Ce'stius, a 
 Roman general, invested Jerusalem. The Jews were in 
 his power. He suddenly raised .the siege and retreated. 
 History contains nothing more remarkable than this con- 
 duct of Cestius. The Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, 
 says these are his exact words: "He retired from the 
 city without any reason in the world." The retreat was 
 without doubt providential. As soon as Cestius was gone, 
 the Christians, remembering the words of Jesus, "And 
 when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, 
 know ye that the desolation thereof is nigh." "Then let 
 them that are in Judea flee into the mountains," fled from
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 87 
 
 the city to Pella in the mountains beyond Jordan, Here 
 they founded a church, the ruins of which remain to this 
 day. The Jews, to whom this particular warning had not 
 been delivered and who would have rejected it had it been, 
 remained and perished. This flight of the Christians after 
 the retreat of Cestius is the best evidence that Christ ut- 
 tered that prophecy. When the Roman general Vespa- 
 sian reinvested the city, there was not a Christian in it. 
 How obdurate must be the unbelief of any man who will 
 deny Christianity in the face of such evidence. Verily, 
 if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they 
 believe if one rise again from the dead. 
 
 But the fulfilment of these wonderful prophecies does 
 not end here. Jesus said, "Your enemies shall cast up a 
 trench about you and keep you in on every side." We 
 learn from Josephus that Titus, who succeeded Vespasian 
 in command of the Roman army before Jerusalem, sur- 
 rounded the city with a wall, and reduced the poor Jews 
 to the utmost extremity of famine. Of the Jews 1,100,000 
 were slaughtered during the siege. 
 
 I will not dwell longer on this phase of the fulfilment, 
 but will simply ask you to read the twenty-fourth chapter 
 of Matthew, and then read the twelfth chapter of the 
 fifth book and the sixth book of Josephus' Wars of the 
 Jews. 
 
 After the destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of 
 the Jews, the city remained a ruin for sixty years till it 
 was rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian. The name of the 
 city was changed to Aelia Capitolina. A heathen temple 
 was erected. 
 
 About the year 363, Julian, commonly called the Apos- 
 tate, determined to rebuild the temple of the Jews on 
 Mount Moriah, and to invite the Jews to return to the
 
 00 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Holy City. Julian committed this work to his minister 
 and close friend, Alypius. What Julian's motive was I 
 do not attempt to define. He may have acted from mo- 
 tives of state policy ; he may have been actuated by senti- 
 mental regard for Jews, coupled with a dislike for Chris- 
 tians; or, as is generally charged, his purpose may have 
 been to falsify the prediction of Jesus Christ. But v>e 
 know, and that by pagan as well as by Christian authority, 
 that Alypius, under the direction of Julian, tried to re- 
 build the temple at Jerusalem and did not succeed. The 
 Jews themselves were invited to take part in the work. 
 Every one knows how enthusiastic the pious Jew has 
 been to restore the Holy City and the worship of the 
 temple. This is proved by the Zion movement of our 
 own day. The Jews had then a better opportunity to re- 
 build the temple than they had in the days of Nehemiah. 
 There were plenty of wealthy Jews there and they had 
 substantial backing, the head of the Roman Empire. 
 No ordinary occurrence would have put a stop to the 
 work. Now, w r hat was in the way of restoring the Holy 
 City? Simply the word of a Nazarene carpenter, cruci- 
 fied more than three hundred years before. He had said, 
 "Behold your house is left unto you desolate"; and all 
 the power of the Roman emperor could not break that 
 prophecy. But I am getting ahead of my story. What 
 happened down there at Jerusalem? I will quote my 
 author ; and he is not a Christian. We pass by Chrysos- 
 tom, Ambrose and Gregory Nazianzen, who told this same 
 story and defied contradiction. Ammianus Marcellinus, 
 Julian's private secretary and biographer, wrote: 
 
 "Cum itaque rei fortiter instaret Alypius. juvaretque provinciof 
 rector, metuendi globi flammarum prope fundamenta crebris ad- 
 sultibus erumpentes fecere locum exustis aliquoties operantibus
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 89 
 
 inaccessum; hocque tnodo elemento destinatius repellente, cessavit 
 inceptum. Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiii, 1. 
 
 Translation. "When accordingly Alypius vigorously pressed 
 the work, and the governor of the province assisted, fearful balls 
 of fire, breaking out near the foundations by frequent and re- 
 peated attacks, made the place inaccessible to the blasted work- 
 men; and this having been so determined by the repelling element, 
 the undertaking was abandoned." 
 
 Edward Gibbon, who, by the way, never wrote or spoke 
 a word for Christianity, closed his account of this trans- 
 action with these words, "Such authority should satisfy 
 a believing, and must astonish an incredulous mind. 1 
 
 About six months after this event Julian was killed. 
 It is related that he caught the fresh blood flowing from 
 his wound in the palm of his hand ; and, hurling it toward 
 heaven, he cried, "Take thy fill, Galilean ; thou hast con- 
 quered; but still I do renounce thee." 2 Whether he said 
 this or not, he might have said it very appropriately. 
 
 I was once talking with a young woman tinctured with 
 agnosticism. She asked what proof I had of the truth 
 of Christianity ; I told her this story of the prophecy of 
 Christ and Julian's attempt to rebuild the temple. She 
 looked into my face with her honest brown eyes, and 
 asked, "If that is true, sir, why does any one doubt the 
 truth of Christianity?" I said to her as I say to you, / 
 do not know. 
 
 Two hundred and fifty-one years after this remarkable 
 event Jerusalem was taken by the Persians; fourteen 
 years thereafter it was retaken by the Roman emperor, 
 Heraclius ; nine years thereafter it was taken by the Mo- 
 hammedans under Caliph Omar. The followers of the 
 Arabian prophet held it in undisputed possession till near 
 
 1 See note 7, p. 107. 
 3 See note 8, p. 107.
 
 go HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the close of the eleventh century. It was literally trodden 
 down of the Gentiles. In the year 1095, Peter the Hermit 
 preached the First Crusade. A more successful orator 
 never lived. All of Christian Europe was on fire with 
 holy zeal. Remember at this time Russia was barbarian 
 and Spain was Mohammedan, as Turkey is to day. The 
 bishop who presided over Rome's comprehensive see of- 
 fered a plenary indulgence to every soldier who would 
 enlist. An army of 300,000 men under the first soldier 1 
 of Europe followed the standard of the Cross and invaded 
 Asia to fight for an empty sepulchre. It is true that, after 
 four years of war, they took Jerusalem, and went through 
 the form of setting up a kingdom. But they never took 
 root there, and after 196 years of almost continuous war- 
 fare seven crusades the attempt to deliver Jerusalem 
 was abandoned. Why was this attempt unsuccessful? 
 All Europe was never as firmly united since the breaking 
 up of the Roman Empire. Italian, German, French, 
 Scotch, Englishmen, fought under one standard, "Deus 
 vult" "God wills it." They had the stimulus of religious 
 zeal, the moral prestige of the see of Rome. Northern 
 nations have almost always conquered southern. Witness 
 Rome and Carthage ; Rome and the Northern Barbarians ; 
 the North and the South in the late war. What stood in 
 the way ? Surely it was not the Saracen, no, indeed the 
 simple word of the Man of Nazareth, "Jerusalem shall be 
 trodden down of the Gentiles till the time of the Gentiles 
 be fulfilled." 
 
 Let me pause to say a word of Mohammed. Under- 
 stand that I do not stand here as the advocate of Islam. 
 But it is my firm belief that the Arabian was as much an 
 
 learned Jew Rashi is said to have told Godfrey of 
 Bouillon that he would fail. W. F. B.
 
 91 
 
 instrument in the hands of God as was any man that ever 
 lived. The Arabian prophet and the succeeding caliphs 
 conquered Arabia, subjugated Egypt, and drove the fire- 
 worshipers 1 from Persia. In this vast area, equal to the 
 ancient dominion of Darius, the Mohammedan caliphs 
 tolerated no man who did not believe in one personal God ; 
 and that Moslem Empire stood as an impregnable wall 
 against the encroachments from the East of Brahminism 
 and Buddhism. We have had a taste of it since the re- 
 ligious congress of 1893, in theosophy so-called. 
 
 To sum up : Jesus Christ claimed to be God the Creator. 
 This claim being a matter in which he could not have 
 been self-deceived, it follows that he was either what he 
 claimed to be or an arrant impostor. He could not have 
 been an impostor because ( I ) the admitted history of his 
 life was inconsistent with the career of an impostor; (2) 
 his coming was authentically predicted fourteen hundred 
 years before the event took place, and such a prediction 
 was beyond the power of man; (3) the cardinal miracle, 
 the Resurrection, which is no more wonderful than ad- 
 mitted natural phenomena, is proved by two witnesses and 
 by the institution of the Lord's day; (4) the divinity of 
 Christ is proved by prophecies which he uttered, which 
 were beyond the power of human prescience, and their 
 fulfilment is a part of the world's history ; they have been 
 continuous miracles with all the world for witnesses; (5) 
 the proof of Christ's divinity takes the whole Bible with it. 
 
 Now, methinks, the truth of Christianity is established. 
 For what do they ask you to throw your Bible over the 
 transom? A few years ago the old-fashioned infidelity 
 of Thomas Paine was in vogue. It is about a third of a 
 century since a number of passengers were riding in an 
 
 J This is a slander. The Parsi does not worship fire. W . F. B.
 
 92 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 old-fashioned stage coach. Among them was a young 
 man, one of those tremendous fellows, in his own esti- 
 mation, who was trying to ridicule the Bible as a mass of 
 fairy tales and priestcraft. He was holding up the story 
 of David and Goliah, and trying to make it appear ab- 
 surd. No one replied. An old Quaker was in the coach. 
 Turning to the broad-brim, the stripling inquired : "Old 
 man, what do you think of a boy throwing a stone and 
 breaking through a giant's skull?" The disciple of 
 George Fox replied: "Indeed, friend, I should think it 
 nothing strange were the Philistine's head as soft as 
 thine." But that kind of infidelity has nearly died out. 
 The man from Peoria fanned the dying embers for a time. 
 But now he is gone. 
 
 We now have to face the opposition of science, falsely 
 socalled. Ah! how many times have I heard some fel- 
 low who could not tell black tourmaline from old red 
 stone, who could not name the satellites of Jupiter to save 
 his life, who could not separate botanically a dandelion 
 from a sweet potato, who did not know whether Christ 
 was crucified on Calvary or shot at Marathon, 1 laying 
 down the astounding proposition that science demon- 
 strated that the world could not have been made in six 
 days. There is no such statement in the Bible. "In the 
 beginning God created the heavens and the earth." When 
 was the beginning? This is no invention of modern the- 
 ologians. I have often wondered why the early fathers 
 of the church have been so neglected. In the writings of 
 the fathers, there is a complete answer to the six days 
 theory, written by Origen fifteen centuries before the 
 science of geology was discovered. Now, I have studied 
 all physical sciences as you are studying them now. But 
 
 l This last is a paraphrase on the man from Peoria. W. F. B.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 93 
 
 with geology I have had some practical experience. It 
 was circumstances over which I had no control that kept 
 me from following that science as my life work. Do you 
 wish to know what I think of it? Bishop Watson com- 
 pared a geologist to a gnat mounted on an elephant's back 
 laying down theories in regard to the whole internal 
 anatomy of the vast animal from the phenomena of the 
 hide. 1 This is the cutest and justest comparison I ever 
 saw. 
 
 A third of a century ago geologists accepted the the- 
 ory that the earth was a huge ball of fire covered by a 
 shell thinner accordingly than an egg-shell ; that we lived 
 on this shell and were rushing through space at the rate 
 of 183^ miles a second. They had the authority of the 
 great Humboldt. Better still, they proved their theory 
 by the uniform increase of heat toward the earth's cen- 
 tre. Now, any man who would advocate that theory 
 would be laughed-at. 2 The objector tenders proof by 
 
 lr rhe strata of the earth reveal its history with great fidelity 
 for long periods previous to the present, but earlier than that the 
 record is indistinct, and if we attempt to follow it back to the 
 beginning, the indistinctness merges into extreme obscurity. The 
 rocks at the base of the known sedimentary series are so greatly 
 disrupted, crumpled, crushed, metamorphosed, and traversed by 
 intrusions that their history is deciphered with the greatest diffi- 
 culty and no little uncertainty, while below these lie the inaccess- 
 ible interior of the earth, whose formation constitutes a still earlier 
 chapter in the history. The nature of this inaccessible mass can 
 only be inferred from volcanic intrusions, the transmission of 
 seismic tremors, the phenomena of gravity, the distribution of 
 frigidity and of internal heat, the modes and processes of de- 
 formation, and other phenomena of a more or less dynamic kind. 
 All these phenomena have their bearing on the problem of the 
 earth's origin, but just what they imply can not be interpreted 
 without some measure of reasonable doubt. Chambcrlin and 
 Saulsbury, Geology. 
 
 2 See Humboldt, COSMOS, volume I., pp. 170, 171, for a brief 
 statement of John Cleves Symmes's theory of the hollow sphere 
 of the earth; also Atlantic Monthly, volume XXXI, page 471. It 
 is easy to brush a theory aside as unscientific, but although it is a
 
 94 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 the laws of physics that, were the earth a liquid sphere 
 with a shell of steel 300 miles thick, this shell would be 
 snapped into fragments in a second of time, probably 
 not by force of the earth's own motion, for its spherical 
 form would protect it from that danger, but by the at- 
 traction of the other heavenly bodies. 
 
 I have stood upon three of the highest summits of the 
 White Mountain range in northern New Hampshire. 
 Within fifty feet of the summit Moosilauke the mountain 
 is encircled -with a bed of marine shells, and upon the 
 rocks near the summit are scratches or abrasions, all 
 pointing south 2 degrees east. Upon the prairies of 
 Nebraska I have seen thousands of erratic boulders, pop- 
 ularly called niggerheads, of different composition from 
 the soil. These facts and others convince us that the 
 North American continent, or a greater part of it, was 
 once covered with a glacial mass drifting south with 
 slight inclination toward the east. 1 Here fact ends, and 
 fancy begins. What caused this glacial invasion? "A 
 change in the inclination of the earth's axis to the plane 
 of its orbit," says one ; "an increased eccentricity of the 
 orbit itself at aphelion," says another. About a fourth 
 of a century ago a Belgian professor advanced the theory 
 that, as ice was accumulating about the south pole, and, 
 owing to ocean currents, it was not accumulating about 
 the North Pole, the time would come when the earth 
 would lose its equilibrium, tilt over, and we would enjoy 
 a wholesale ice freshet ; civilisation would be wiped out ; 
 only people who happened to be on highest points of 
 land would escape; and these would repeople the earth. 
 
 bold hypothesis, based upon arbitrary speculation, it has no greater 
 difficulties than anything science has yet offered. W. F. B. 
 
 x This is true only east of the Great Lakes; to the west of them 
 the drift is in another direction. W. F. B,
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 95 
 
 The Belgian claimed that this had occurred already fifteen 
 times in the history of our planet. The last was in the 
 days of Noah. Whether this is a plausible way of ac- 
 counting for the ice age I shall not stop now to inquire. 
 But there is another class of speculators who say that 
 ages ago, our great-great-very great the Lord knows 
 how great grandfather was what Plato or Diogenes 
 would call a wingless biped; that when this great mass 
 of ice came slipping down from the North Pole, its ad- 
 vance guard was an immense cloud of vapor caused by 
 melting ice. This condensed and fell in rain, and our 
 poor great-great- very-great-forefather did not have an 
 umbrella or macintosh, and poor old ma I mean mon- 
 key ran into a cave to get out of the wet. By and by, 
 the ice arrived; and it got so cold he invented clothes 
 to confine the animal heat and keep himself warm. He 
 blundered around and discovered that by rubbing a piece 
 of hard wood against a piece of soft wood he could get 
 up a fire, and then he began to cook his food. 1 Nobody 
 knows how many years he lived in that cave. But by 
 and by our great-great-great- not-quite-so-great-grand- 
 father moved out of the cave. It was warmer weather 
 outside. The ice was all gone. But he had got so used 
 to living under cover that he built himself a hut. So 
 he kept on by repeated evolutions till he turned up a 
 Wilber force, a Wesley or a Vincent de Paul. If you call 
 this stuff science, you might call the Arabian Nights 
 science. We wonder that the Egyptians, with all their 
 civilisation, worshiped a bull, and created a temple to the 
 monkey-god. What will people say of us three thousand 
 years from now? 
 
 'Man is an animal that cooks his victuals. Burke.
 
 96 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Now, it may be that monkey pedigree is reconcilable 
 with the theistic theory. But it can not be reconciled 
 with the divine mission of Jesus Christ. If a man has 
 been redeemed and is being redeemed by sexual selection 
 and the survival of the fittest, let us never again pray : 
 
 "By thy agony and blood ; by thy cross and passion ; by thy 
 precious death and burial ; by thy glorious resurrection and 
 ascension, Good Lord deliver us !" 
 
 Oh ! can it be the words my infant lips were taught to 
 lisp are a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. 
 
 "Oh ! star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there, 
 To waft us home the message of despair?" 
 
 My materialistic friend you that deny that there is a 
 spirit in man chemists tell us that four-fifths of the 
 human brain is water; the other fifth is made up of 
 albumen, fat, phosphorus, osmazome, acid, salt and sul- 
 phur. 1 You believe that from this conglomeration came 
 Newton's Principia, Homer's Iliad, and the Venus Medici. 
 Sit down at your table ; in a vessel of water put fat meat, 
 the brown substance from roast beef, table salt, vinegar, 
 the white of an egg, then whittle in the business end of 
 a few lucifer matches, and you have the chemical com- 
 position of the human brain. Could you, by devoting 
 your life to the task, produce a brain out of that ma- 
 terial? All your boasted science has never localised the 
 principle of life or solved the mystery of thought. You 
 say you believe in force and matter. What is force? 
 Have you ever seen it? Have you ever touched or han- 
 dled it? I will tell you what it is. It is another name 
 for your ignorance. You deny the miracles of the Old 
 Testament, the miraculous conception of Christ, the mir- 
 
 J The Frenchman Vanquelin, 1812. Since then other chemists 
 have extracted ethyl-alcohol and saccharine. W. F. B.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 97 
 
 acles which he wrought, his Resurrection, when you can 
 not explain the phenomena of your own little brain that 
 makes these denials. Read and study the Book of Job, 
 where in the last act of that great drama God speaks out 
 of the whirlwind and says to Job and his friends, in sub- 
 stance, Why do you discuss my government of the world, 
 when you can not explain the ordinary instincts of ani- 
 mals? And, my materialistic friend, when you will tell 
 me what makes the difference between anthracite coal 
 and diamond, which have the same chemical composition, 
 it will be time enough for you to discourse on this law 
 of nature that you are always prating about this law 
 that nobody made. Neither you nor I know as much 
 about the law of nature as a Kickapoo Indian knows 
 about the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 There are some things proper for a man to investigate, 
 others which it is impertinent and blasphemous for him 
 to try to solve. St. Augustine was asked by a skeptic, 
 "What was God doing before he made the world ?" The 
 stern old African replied : "Creating hell, sir, for priers 
 into his mysteries." 1 
 
 Do I reject science? No, it is the handmaid of re- 
 ligion. The great discoveries in science have been made, 
 not by unbelievers, but by Christians. Copernicus, Galileo 
 and Kepler were all sincere and devout Christians. Ge- 
 ology was discovered by a Christian. The first successful 
 observation of the transit of Venus was made by a clergy- 
 man of the English Church. A bishop of the Methodist 
 Episcopal Church has written the best popular handbook 
 of astronomy ever published. The man from Peoria 
 
 *I have not the Latin text before me. As I now remember, the 
 following would be a fair rendering: "I do not know; I will not 
 say that He was creating Hell for priers into his mysteries." W. 
 F. B.
 
 98 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 could not have written the book. He did not know 
 enough. 
 
 I said that science was the handmaid of religion. The 
 Gospel narrative of Christ's passion is proof positive. In 
 those days, among the Jews, with their extreme doctrine 
 of ritualistic uncleanness, the science of anatomy had 
 practically no existence. Were a physician called upon 
 to testify as to the cause of a certain person's death, and 
 he had to depend for his diagnosis upon the personal 
 knowledge of an ignorant nurse, and the nurse in de- 
 scribing the symptoms described blood poisoning, the 
 ignorance of the nurse would be additional evidence of 
 the truth of the ultimate fact. The physician would say, 
 and justly, "She is too ignorant to have made up this 
 story, yet the facts are a perfect description of blood- 
 poisoning." Xow, the more ignorant you prove the evan- 
 gelists the more valuable their testimony. Luke was the 
 only one of them possessing technical knowledge, and he 
 possessed no personal knowledge of the facts. It is cer- 
 tain that the Saviour did not die from crucifixion. Why ? 
 First, we have every reason to believe that he was a 
 strong, vigorous man. He had worked at manual labor 
 till he was of mature age; he passed most of his time 
 in the open air; his assault upon the money changers in 
 the temple shows that, without the use of a miracle, he 
 was the physical match for a host. Being thus vigorous, 
 there was no reason why he should die sooner than others 
 who were crucified in ancient times. The crucified lived 
 for a long time, not infrequently four or five days. There 
 is some misunderstanding, even among the learned, as 
 to this method of punishment. It is true that the victim 
 was nailed by his hands and feet to pieces of wood cross- 
 ing each other at right angles, but the weight of the body 
 rested upon a bar of wood projecting from the upright.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 9Q 
 
 Death resulted from nervous exhaustion from being kept 
 in one position. No doubt tetanus or locked jaw some- 
 times intervened, though the symptoms of that terrible 
 disorder have never been described by any ancient writer. 
 Christ was arrested a little before midnight, and by nine 
 o'clock, by the summary method of dealing with provin- 
 cials who could not appeal to Caesar, he was hanging upon 
 a cross; at three o'clock he was dead. There is another 
 reason which might be advanced to show that death was 
 not the result of crucifixion. It is a well-known fact that 
 a person of fortitude will survive much longer than a 
 weakling. The alleged "Reverend" Mr. Abbott, who the 
 supreme court of New Hampshire decided was not en- 
 titled to be called a Protestant, 1 says the Saviour showed 
 a lack of fortitude. If a man about to have his leg ampu- 
 tated would refuse to take chloroform, would he be 
 accused of want of fortitude? When in ancient times 
 a person was crucified, it was customary to give the con- 
 demned man a cup of medicated wine, either to impart 
 fortitude or produce intoxication and consequent stupor. 
 When this drink was offered to Christ he refused it, and 
 met his death with divine fortitude. Throughout his 
 trial and execution he showed the utmost firmness and 
 self-possession. He died, beyond question, of heart- 
 rupture preceded by diapedesis, or the oozing of the cor- 
 puscles of blood through the blood vessels without rup- 
 ture. Heart-rupture is medically described as follows: 
 
 "The immediate cause is a sudden and violent contraction of 
 one of the ventricles, usually the left, and the column of blood 
 thrown into it by a similar contraction of the corresponding 
 auricle. Prevented from returning backward by the intervening 
 valve, and not finding a sufficient outlet forward in the connected 
 artery, the blood reacts against the ventricle itself, which is con- 
 
 'Hale vs. Everett, 53 N. H., 9.
 
 IOO HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 sequently torn open at the point of greatest distenticn or at least 
 resistance, by the influence of its own reflected force. A quantity 
 of blood is thereby discharged into the pericardium, and having 
 no means of escape from that capsule, stops the circulation by 
 compressing the heart from without, and induces almost instan- 
 taneous death. The blood in the pericardium separates into its 
 constituent parts." Stroud, Physical Cause of the Death of Christ. 
 
 Diapedesis and heart-rupture are things of rare oc- 
 currence. They are caused by the most intense grief. 
 Voltaire 1 tells us that Charles IX. of France died of 
 blood-sweating, from remorse for the wholesale murder 
 of St. Bartholomew. Among other symptoms of heart- 
 rupture is the uttering of a piercing cry at the moment 
 of the rupture. Every Sunday school boy has in mind 
 the cry of our Lord, "Eli Eli, lama sabacthani" "My 
 God, My God, for what hast thou forsaken me." After 
 the soldier had dipped the sponge in poska, the common 
 drink of the Roman soldiers, and pressed it to the lips 
 of the dying Saviour, the Gospel tells us that Jesus cried 
 with a loud voice and yielded up the ghost, and when 
 another soldier pierced his side the separated parts of 
 blood flowed forth in the form of blood and water. If 
 time would permit, I might show a score of Old Testa- 
 ment prophecies that were fulfilled by this manner of 
 Christ's death. 
 
 Young men, you are nowhere safe from the poison of 
 unbelief. But, as you go forth into the world, you will 
 hear men say: "Well, if a man thinks he is right, he 
 will be all right." On the same principle, if I go to the 
 B. & M. station, get on the train with the intention of 
 going to Hastings, and the train happens to be headed 
 for Omaha, I will land in Hastings because 1 think that 
 I am going there. 
 
 1 See note 11, p. 109.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH IOI 
 
 * 
 
 Young man, remember this : God has given to every 
 man sufficient grace for his salvation. The belief that 
 Almighty God ever foreordained the damnation of a 
 human being is not only unworthy of a Christian, but 
 it would scandalise a respectable pagan. God gave Peter 
 efficacious grace, but he gave Judas sufficient grace. The 
 unpardonable sin was not in selling his Lord for $23 > 7o 1 ; 
 it was in the fact that he despaired of God's mercy and 
 went and hanged himself. No, I repeat, God never cre- 
 ated any man for the purpose of damning him. 
 
 "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared 
 for you from the foundation of the world." 
 
 "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared" not for you 
 "for the Devil and his angels." 
 
 Remember, again, in this matter we have been discuss- 
 ing, no man will be deceived, unless he wants to be 
 deceived. 
 
 Young men and young women (I have used men be- 
 fore in the generic sense), you will be poorly equipped 
 for life if you are not prepared to defend your faith 
 against the most improved methods of Satanic warfare. 
 When you meet one of the literary unbelievers who tells 
 you the synoptic gospels are not good Greek, freely admit 
 it. If you do not, he will have the best of you. Tell 
 him that the first three evangelists did not write good 
 Hellenic Greek. They did not write like Xenophon, like 
 Plutarch or even like Josephus. They wrote as Matthew, 
 Mark and Luke would write. Then ask your critical 
 friend to consider the little toddling child upon the side- 
 walk. It walks by its own strength ; but the guiding 
 hand of the mother is behind to take care that it. does 
 not stumble and fall. 2 So these evangelists wrote with 
 
 1 See note 9, p. 108. 
 
 2 A figure used by Thomas Bonacum, R. C. Bishop of Lincoln.
 
 IO2 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 their own individuality, but guided by God's spirit, and 
 they could not fall into error. 
 
 I do not believe in keeping everything away from a 
 boy. Let him read Paine's Age of Reason, but make him 
 read Watson's reply. It would hardly pay him to waste 
 his time with the trash of the man from Peoria, for that 
 hasn't even literary merit. Let him read Colenso On 
 the Pentateuch; but have him read Pusey as well. 
 Give him the Historical Jesus of Nazareth. Then give 
 him Paley's Horae Paulinae. Have him study it, as he 
 would study Euclid; and that boy will go forth to the 
 battle of life with a faith that is invincibJe. 
 
 We live in a materialistic age. America now is as 
 Rome was in the century immediately preceding the 
 Christian era, as France was in the last half of the 
 eighteenth century. That elegant, erudite and genteel 
 trimmer, Marcus Tullius Cicero, in his philosophical 
 works, argues for the immortality of the human soul. 
 But we learn from his private correspondence that his 
 belief was not firm. Gaius Julius Caesar, high priest 
 of Rome, stood up in the Roman senate to declare 
 that to die was dissolvere cuncta mala mortalium to 
 dissolve all the evils of mortals ; neither is there any 
 place beyond it for care or joy that is to say, physical 
 death is the end of man. 
 
 In France Rousseau and Voltaire 1 had taught mankind 
 that the religion of Jesus Christ was but a fable. This 
 avowal had for its logical outcome the worship of Rea- 
 son and the Reign of Terror. 
 
 In this age of ours, when man is wise above what is 
 written ; when Genesis has been revised by the uncertain 
 light of geology; when wise men have put protoplasm 
 
 1 See note 11, p. 109.
 
 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH IO3 
 
 in place of God, and a chimpanzee in place of Adam; 
 when the Gospel of the Nazarene, according to Matthew, 
 Mark, Luke and John, is pushed aside to give place 
 to the Gospel of Dirt, according to Darwin, 1 Tyndall, 
 Haeckel, and Biichner; when a large minority of our 
 educated countrymen are agnostic; when the sophomore 
 and the drayman, alike, can repeat by rote the anarchistic 
 ravings and atheistic rant of Johann Most and the coarse 
 blasphemy of the Peorian ; when that green, slimy, slip- 
 pery frog which men miscall higher criticism has hopped 
 up the church aisle and sits upon the pulpit cushion; 
 when Hell is reduced to a skating-rink; when so-called 
 clergymen are guilty of a grievous contempt of court by 
 presuming to sit judgment on the eternal justice of God 
 we can say to these critics and scoffers what Bishop 
 Watson said to Thomas Paine: 
 
 "The Bible, sir, has withstood the learning of Prophyry, and 
 the power of Julian, to say nothing of the Manichean Faustus ; it 
 has resisted the genius of Bolingbroke, and the wit of Voltaire, 2 
 to say nothing of a numerous herd of inferior assailants ; and it 
 will not fall by your force. You have barbed anew the blunted 
 arrows of former adversaries ; you have feathered them with blas- 
 phemy and ridicule ; dipped them in the deadliest poison ; aimed 
 them with your utmost skill ; shot them against the shield of faith 
 with your utmost vigor; but, like the feeble javelin of aged Priam, 
 they will scarcely reach the mark, will fall to the ground without 
 a stroke." 
 
 l See note 10, p. 108. 
 3 See note 11, p. 109.
 
 IO4 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 NOTES ON THE HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 NOTE 1. John Hardouin, a French Jesuit, born m 1646, died 
 September 3, 1729, published a work in 1693 and 1697 in which 
 he maintained that none of the ancient classics were genuine ex- 
 cept Homer, Herodotos, Cicero, Pliny the Elder, the Georgics of 
 Vergil and the satires and epistles of Horace ; that the others were 
 fabrications and had no existence until less than a century before 
 the Renaissance ; that the Aeneid of Vergil was an allegory of the 
 progress of Christianity. See an article by the present writer in 
 the Atlantic 'for April, 1897. W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 2. The late Ignatius Donnelly, the ablest advocate of 
 the Baconian theory that ever lived, was the intimate personal 
 friend of the present writer. I revere his memory, but reject his 
 theory. A book as interesting as the elder Disraeli's Curiosities 
 of Literature might be written on "Disputed Authorship." The 
 Rev. Joshua Barnes (1654-1712), an Englishman and a Cambridge 
 scholar, wrote an elaborate work, still preserved in the achives 
 of Cambridge, in which he maintained that Solomon wrote the 
 Iliad. In justice to the author, let it be said that it is doubtful 
 if he ever credited his absurd theory. It is probable, rather, that 
 the book was written to persuade his pious and wealthy wife to 
 furnish the means for him to publish an edition of Homer which 
 he had prepared. A book was published by Senator Moody of 
 Kansas to prove that Thomas Paine wrote the Junius Letters, 
 and this theory has been defended by William Henry Burr of 
 Washington. Shades of Lord Sackville and Sir Philip Francis! 
 W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 3. Jacob Bryant, a Cambridge scholar, born at Plymouth, 
 England, November 14, 1715, died 1804, was private secretary to 
 the Duke of Marlborough and was with him in Germany. By 
 the substantial favors of his patron's family, he was raised 
 above pecuniary want and devoted the remainder of his life to 
 the study of abstruse scriptural and classical questions. Byron 
 alludes to him with covert sarcasm in Don Juan, canto IV., stanza 
 76, line 4. But his name is almost forgotten. Bryant wrote, 
 among other things, Vendiciae Flavianae a defense of Josephus'
 
 NOTES 105 
 
 testimony in regard to Christ. To this work of real value, most 
 rare and not easily obtained, the reader is referred for arguments 
 in favor of the genuineness of the passage of Josephus found in 
 the text. I have said in the text that the ancestor of Josephus 
 was almost certainly engaged in compassing Christ's death. His 
 father, Matthias, was a priest at Jerusalem. W . F. B. 
 
 NOTE 4. Herodotos relates the following concerning the 
 Babylonians : 
 
 "The most disgraceful of the Babylonian customs is the follow- 
 ing: Every native woman is obliged, once in her life, to sit in the 
 temple of Venus, and have intercourse with some stranger. And 
 many disdaining to mix with the rest, being proud on account of 
 their wealth, come in covered carriages, and take up their station 
 at the temple with a numerous train of servants attending them. 
 But the far greater part do thus : many sit down in the temple of 
 Venus wearing a crown of cord round their heads ; some are con- 
 tinually coming in and others are going out. Passages marked out 
 in a straight line lead in every direction through the women, along 
 which strangers pass and make their choice. When a woman has 
 once seated herself, she must not return home till some stranger 
 has thrown a piece of silver into her lap and lain with her outside 
 the temple. He who throws the silver must say thus : 'I beseech 
 the goddess Mylitta to favour thee,' for the Assyrians call Venus 
 Mylitta. The silver may be ever so small, for she will not reject 
 it, inasmuch as it is not lawful for her to do so, for such silver is 
 accounted sacred. The woman follows the first man that throws 
 and refuses no one." Book I., 199, translation from Baehr's text. 
 
 This is confirmed by an allusion in the Book of Baruch, who 
 was private secretary to Jeremiah : 
 
 Mulieres autem circumdatae funibus in yiis sedcnt, succendentes 
 ossa olivarutn. Cum autcm aliqua ex ipsis, attracta ab aliquo 
 transeunte, dormierit cum eo, proximae suae exprobrat, quod ea 
 non sit digna habita, sicut ipsa, neque funis ejus disruptus sit." 
 Chapter VI, 42, 43, of Jerome's Vulgate. 
 
 "The women, also, girded about with cords, sit in the ways, 
 burning the stones of olives. But when one from themselves, 
 having been drawn away by some passenger, lieth with him, she 
 upbraideth her neighbour, because she was not held worthy, like 
 herself, nor had her cord been broken." Translation. 
 
 Baruch wrote about a century before Herodotos. 
 
 Here we have two writers, a Greek and a Jew, who could have 
 had no possible connection with each other and nothing in com- 
 mon. There is no reasonable probability that Herodotos had ever 
 heard of Baruch. In his history he nowhere mentions the Jewish 
 nation. It is true that the German Ewald thinks that all the
 
 IO6 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 Book of Baruch after the eighth verse of the third chapter was 
 written by an Alexandrean Greek, between 360 and 350 B.C., 
 nearly a century after Herodotos had read his history at the 
 Olympian festival. But his argument is an example of peiitio 
 principii. If the Alexandrean Greeks wrote all that the destructive 
 critics attribute to them, they must have been a hive of busy bees. 
 If they wrote so much, how did so much escape the burning of 
 the Alexandrean library? There is, in my humble judgment, no 
 doubt of the genuineness and authenticity of the Book of Baruch. 
 Its place in the Canon is a matter of dispute between Canterbury 
 and Rome and will not be discussed here. W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 5. The entire force with Leonidas during the first two 
 days of the fight was, probably, about 7,000. After the betrayal 
 of the mountain path by Ephilates, many of the allies deemed 
 discretion the better part of valor and retired. Between .the 
 divergent accounts of Diodorus, Herodotos and Pausanias, it is 
 not easy to determine the exact number of fighting men that re- 
 mained. Excluding Helots and Thebans, there were 300 Spartans 
 and 700 Thesbians, 1,000 in all. Four thousand Greeks perished 
 during the entire three days' fighting. W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 6. This work of Bishop Whately's was a reductio ad 
 absurdum and was a reply to, or rather prose satire on, David 
 Hume's Essay on Miracles. Hume is a philosopher hard to an- 
 swer, because his premises are the basis upon which every rational 
 man acts in the ordinary affairs of life. His reasoning has the 
 same foundation as the science of probabilities. It is what in- 
 surance companies act upon; experience shows that one house in 
 fifty burns; experience shows that of 100,000 persons ten years 
 old of equal health and environment 749 will die the first year, 
 746 the second, and the number will decrease each year until the 
 twenty-fifth year, when it will remain stationary four years at 
 718, then the annual mortality will increase till at the end of 
 eighty-five years three old men will remain at the age of ninety- 
 five; and on such experience is based the value of the risk. 
 Hume's reasoning appealed to the ordinary mind and has kept 
 busy doctors of divinity for more than a century. But Whately 
 stole silently into his citadel and spiked every gun. While Na- 
 poleon was living prisoner at St. Helena, he wrote Some Historic 
 Doubts Relative to Bounaparte. He follows Hume's reasoning 
 with great exactness. This work is not only of interest, but of
 
 NOTES ID/ 
 
 value; and it is strange that it has not been more widely read. 
 W, F. B. 
 
 NOTE 1. John David Michaelis, a German biblical scholar of 
 the eighteenth century, has given an ingenious explanation of the 
 defeat of Julian's attempt to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. It 
 was suggested by a passage in Tacitus, History, V., 2, 12, which 
 speaks of subterranean excavations under the mountain upon 
 which the temple was built. The theory of Michaelis is that, 
 during the 293 years between the destruction of the temple by 
 Titus and the attempt to rebuild it by Julian, flammable gas had 
 generated in the caverns ; that the workmen employed by Alypius, 
 using torches for exploration, set fire to this gas. Guizot, in a 
 note to the twenty-third chapter of Gibbon, elaborates upon this 
 theory of Michaelis and apparently approves it; he cites, in sup- 
 port of its probability, the experience of Herod at the tomb of 
 David described in Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVI., 71. 
 Milman, apparently, was of the same opinion as Guizot; he fol- 
 lows him with a less elaborate note on the same subject. But 
 Libanius speaks of an earthquake which accompanied these balls 
 of fire, at each attempt to rebuild. Now, Libanius was a pagan 
 attached to Julian. Chrysostom says that the balls of fire came 
 from the new and partially constructed walls. If either state- 
 ment is correct, Michaelis's hypothesis is hardly tenable. I have 
 not repeated the marvels about the sign of the cross appearing in 
 heaven and upon the garments of the workman. No writer who 
 relates these prodigies was an eye-witness, and I give the relation 
 no credit. W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 8. The story of Julian's death, so often told, is too 
 dramatic to be true. This tale and the statement that Count 
 Volney prayed in a storm on Lake Erie are two stories for which 
 I have been unable to find any original authority. Like the 
 romance on the death-bed repentance of Paine, the Scotch verdict 
 is the limit of its merits. At least ninety-nine of a hundred die 
 with absolute indifference. The historical examples of Sokrates, 
 Sir Thomas More, Archbishop Cranmer and Madame Roland 
 pagan, Catholic, Protestant and freethinker ought to convince 
 one that a man's religion, or want of it, has little to do with the 
 manner in which he meets his death. The latter may attest his 
 sincere belief in the former, but it oftener testifies the inherent 
 force of human nature or his own personal fortitude. A religion
 
 IO8 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 resting on no firmer basis than the manner in which any number 
 of men meet death is a structure built on sand. W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 9. The thirty pieces of silver received by Judas were 
 probably either thirty tetradrachmas or thirty Maccabean shekels. 
 If the former, the value was that stated in the text The value 
 of the shekel in the time of our Saviour would place the equivalent 
 of thirty of these at $15.35. The argument in favor of the shekel 
 is that it was the current coin among the Jews, save in the pay- 
 ment of Roman taxes, and that the price of a man servant was 
 thirty shekels. Exodus xxi. 32. This seems like a small price, 
 but the purchasing power of money two thousand years ago and 
 its purchasing power in this age stand approximately in the ratio 
 of 100 to 1. The penny (German pfenning) was the only coin 
 generally current among the ancient Saxons. W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 10. The monkey theory of man's origin obtains credit 
 from its eccentric novelty. The pea-like excresence on the rim 
 of the human ear proves that man's ears were once peaked; and 
 the vermiform appendix is a stomach gone into bankruptcy. Hence 
 it is obvious, not only that man was once a prehensile quadrumana, 
 but that he chewed his cud. How these two theories can be rec- 
 onciled, quere. A monkey has no vermiform appendix or any- 
 thing that answers to it 
 
 The Darwinian theory is as much of a misnomer as was the 
 naming of the western continent after Americus Vespucius. The 
 real originator of the theory was a Frenchman by the name of 
 John Baptist Peter Anthony de Monet de Lamarck, born at 
 Bazentin, Picardy, August 1, 1744, died at Paris, December 18, 
 1829. In 1809, appeared his Philosophic soologique. In this book, 
 Lamarck elaborated his theory of the development of animal func- 
 tions, hinted at in an earlier work. He advanced the opinion that 
 new organs could be produced in animals by the simple exertion 
 of the will, called into action by new wants; and the acquired 
 organs could be transmitted by generation. He believed in spon- 
 taneous generation, a theory toward whose establishment in a 
 century of time, experimental science has made no nearer ap- 
 proach than is expressed in Jacques Loeb's sea-urchins, artificial 
 fertilisation and chicken incubators. Darwin had the advantage 
 over Lamarck of being a practical chemist and a master of detail. 
 The Lamarckian theory was sufficiently answered by Hugh Miller 
 in his Footprints of the Creator. But now comes the intervener,
 
 NOTES lOQ 
 
 a very reverend sir, with an answer which is a plea in confession 
 and avoidance. The idea that man sprang from ape-like species 
 may be reconciled with the Adamic narration. Man's body may 
 have been made before his soul, and the soul may have been 
 added and man thus made immortal. 
 
 Formavit igitur Dominus Dens hominem de limo terras, et 
 inspiravit in faciem ejus spiraculem vitae; et factus est homo in 
 animam viventem. Genesis, caput II., 7, Jerome's Vulgate. 
 
 "Thereupon God formed man from the mud of the earth, and 
 breathed into his face the breath of life; and man was made into 
 a living soul." Translation. 
 
 The theory is interesting, but it is timely enough to ask leave 
 to amend and file this plea when the plaintiff has made out his 
 case. 
 
 Alas ! one hundred men have read Darwin to one that has read 
 Miller. W. F. B. 
 
 NOTE 11. Page 102. Voltaire himself was a theist and not an 
 agnostic. At a banquet had at his house, d'Holbach and other 
 atheists were combatting the existence of a God, when Voltaire 
 arose and, turning all of the servants out of the room, locked the 
 door, with the remark, "I would not have my valet cut my throat 
 before tomorrow morning." In his philosophical romance Candide 
 ou I'Optimiste he makes Pococurante say of Cicero : "I found he 
 doubted of everything, I thought I ... had no need of a 
 guide to learn ignorance." Chapter XXV. 
 
 "Greece, we know, was the country of fables, and almost every 
 fable was the origin of a doctrine, of a temple, and of a public 
 feast. By what excess of madness, by what absurd obstinacy, 
 have so many compilers endeavored to prove, in so many enormous 
 volumes, that a public feast established in commemoration of an 
 event is a demonstration of the truth of that event? What, be- 
 cause young Bacchus is celebrated in a temple issuing from 
 Jupiter's thigh, Jupiter had really concealed Bacchus in his thigh ? 
 What, Cadmus and his wife were changed into serpents, in Boetia, 
 because the Boetians commemorated such an event in their cere- 
 monies? Did the temple of Castor and Pollux, at Rome, dem- 
 onstrate that these gods descended upon earth, in favor of the 
 Romans?" Voltaire, Philosophy of History. 
 
 But these arguments, or illustrations, do not apply to the Res- 
 urrection. There is no evidence that any of these fables were 
 celebrated immediately after the events were alleged to have taken 
 place. W. F. B.
 
 IIO HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 DISSERTATION ON THE PROTOTYPE OF JESUS 
 
 AND HIS MESSENGER TO THE GENTILES 
 
 -THE TRIAL QF CHRIST CONTRASTED 
 
 WITH PAUL'S JONAH BAR AMTTTAI 
 
 There is one story in the Bible which has been chosen to 
 point a moral or adorn a tale. In the estimation of the 
 wit or the philosopher we meet in the public luncheon- 
 house, the story of the prophet and the great fish is 
 the Ultima Thule of human credulity; and a preacher's 
 standing abreast or aback of "modern thought" abused 
 phrase! is to be determined by his exegesis of the first 
 two chapters of the Book of Jonah. If he regards the 
 account as historical, he is set down as an old fogey and 
 retired by the social club miscalled a church over 
 which he presides. Now, I contend that this story can 
 hardly be classed as a miracle. Pascal defines a miracle 
 I quote from memory "An event exceeding the natural 
 power of the means employed." To illustrate: there is 
 nothing in human spittle mixed with clay which will 
 cure congenital blindness. Elisha required Xaaman to 
 bathe in the Jordan, but natural water is not a specific for 
 leprosy. So these cures can be classed as miracles. On 
 the other hand, the afflictions visited upon the patriarch 
 of Uz were hr the due course of nature and human his- 
 tory. There is nothing miraculous about a hurricane or 
 a band of robbers or the black erysipelas. The difference 
 is that in one case God employs natural and the other 
 supernatural means. These two terms natural and su- ' 
 pernatural are simply names for our ignorance. There 
 is some force in Rousseau's objection that we can not
 
 JONAH AND PAUL III 
 
 point out an apparent miracle as an infraction of natural 
 law till we know all the laws of nature. While the writer 
 was an official in the state house of Nebraska, the work- 
 men about the building were in the habit of moving across 
 the carpets with shuffling feet and then lighting a gas 
 jet with the index finger. On one occasion, they em- 
 ployed this means to be rid of a negro employee. The 
 poor boy fled from the building in horror at what he 
 regarded as demoniacal magic. It was a miracle to him. 
 But how much ahead of that boy is Thomas A. Edison 
 except in the domain of purely relative knowledge. The 
 boy called his ignorance witchcraft; Edison calls his 
 electricity. But to return to Jonah: here is the biblical 
 narrative : 
 
 "Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of 
 Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry 
 against it, for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah 
 rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and 
 went down to Joppa ; and he found a ship going to Tarshish : so 
 he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them 
 unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord sent 
 out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in 
 the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners 
 were afraid and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the 
 wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. 
 But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay 
 and was fast asleep. So the shipmaster came to him, and said 
 unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper? Arise, call upon thy 
 God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not. 
 And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, 
 that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they 
 cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. Then said they unto him. 
 Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us ; What 
 is thine occupation ? and whence comest thou ? what is thy coun- 
 try? and of what people art thou? And he said unto them, I am 
 an Hebrew ; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, which hath 
 made the sea and the dry land. Then were the men exceedingly
 
 112 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 afraid, and said unto him, Why hast thou dene this? For the 
 men knew that he fled from the presence of the Lord, because 
 he had told them. Then said they unto him, What shall we do 
 unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us? for the sea wrought 
 and was tempestuous. And he said unto them, Take me up, and 
 cast me forth into the sea ; so shall the sea be calm unto you : for 
 I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. Never- 
 theless the men rowed hard to bring it to the land ; but they could 
 not: for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous against them. 
 Wherefore they cried unto the Lord, and said, We beseech thee, 
 O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man's life, and 
 lay not upon us innocent blood: for thou, O Lord, hast done as 
 it pleased thee. So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into 
 the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. Then the men 
 feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, 
 and made vows. Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to 
 swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three 
 days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God 
 out of the fish's belly, And said, I cried by reason of mine afflic- 
 tion unto the Lord, and he heard me ; out of the belly of hell cried 
 I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the 
 deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me 
 about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I 
 said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy 
 holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul : 
 the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about 
 my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the 
 earth with her bars was about me for ever : yet hast thou brought 
 up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. When my soul 
 fainted within me I remembered the Lord : and my prayer came 
 in unto thee, into thine holy temple. They that observe lying 
 vanities forsake their own mercy. But I will sacrifice unto thee 
 with the voice of thanksgiving : I will pay that that I have vowed. 
 Salvation is of the Lord. And the Lord spake unto the fish, and 
 it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land." 
 
 This account is referred to by Jesus Christ in the fol- 
 lowing manner: 
 
 "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and 
 there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet
 
 JONAH AND PAUL 113 
 
 Jonas : for as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's 1 
 belly : so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights 
 in the heart of the earth." Matthew, xii., 39, 40; see also Luke, 
 xi., 29. 
 
 Some people have claimed that the story of Jonah and 
 the fish was taken from Arion and the dolphin. To show 
 that there is little of similarity between the two, I subjoin 
 the tale of Arion taken from Herodotos: 
 
 "Now Periander was king of Corinth, and the Corinthians say 
 (and the Lesbians confirm their account) that a wonderful prodigy 
 occurred in his lifetime. They say that Arion of Methymna, who 
 was second to none of his time in accompanying the harp, and 
 who was the first that we are acquainted with, who composed, 
 named, and represented the dithyrambus at Corinth, was carried 
 to Taenarsus on the back of a dolphin. They say that this Arion, 
 having continued a long time with Periander, was desirous of 
 making a voyage to Italy and Sicily, and that having acquired 
 great wealth, he determined to return to Corinth ; that he set out 
 from Tarentium and hired a ship of certain Corinthians, because 
 he put more confidence in them than in any other nation, but that 
 these men, when they were in the open sea, conspired together to 
 throw him overboard and seize his money, and he, being aware 
 of this, offered them his money, and entreated them to spare his 
 life. However, he could not prevail upon them; but the sailors 
 ordered him to either kill himself, that he might be buried ashore, 
 or to leap immediately into the sea. They add that Arion, re- 
 duced to this strait, entreated them, since such was their deter- 
 mination, to permit him to stand on the poop in his full dress 
 and sing, and he promised when he had sung to make away with 
 himself. The seamen, pleased that they should hear the best 
 singer in the world, retired from the stern to the middle of the 
 vessel. They relate that Arion, having put on his robes, and taken 
 his harp, stood on the rowing benches and went through the Or- 
 thian strain; that, when the strain was ended, he leaped into the 
 sea, as he was in his full dress, and the sailors continued their 
 voyage to Corinth : but they say that a dolphin received him on 
 his back and carried him to Taenarus ; and that he, having landed, 
 
 'The original Greek is kStos seamonster. W. F. B. 
 8
 
 114 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 proceeded to Corinth in his full dress, and upon his arrival there 
 related all that had happened; but that Periander giving no credit 
 to his relation, put Arion under close confinement, and watched 
 anxiously for the seamen ; that when they appeared, he summoned 
 them and inquired if they could give any account of Arion; but 
 when they answered that he was safe in Italy, and that they had 
 left him flourishing at Tarentium : Arion in that instant appeared 
 before them, just as he was when he leaped into the sea; at which 
 they were so astonished that, being fully^convicted, they could no 
 longer deny the fact. These things are reported by the Corin- 
 thians and Lesbians ; and there is a small brazen statue of Arion 
 at Taenarsus, representing a man sitting on a dolphin."- -Book 
 1, 23, 24, Cory's Translations from Bachr's Text. 
 
 Lykophron's account of Herakles' adventure is un- 
 doubtedly taken from Jonah. Born at Cholkis in Euboea, 
 Lykophron lived at Alexandrea from 285 to 247 B.C. 
 This was during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, at 
 the time the Septuagent translation of the Old Testament 
 into Greek was completed, and it is as easy to see where 
 his story of Herakles came from, as it is to see that De- 
 foe got his prototype of Robinson Crusoe from the story 
 of Peter Serrano in Gascilasco's History of Peru. 
 
 Now what have we here? A man in Palestine re- 
 ceives a divine command to go to Nineveh, but to avoid 
 the commission, he starts for Spain. He ships, paying 
 his fare in advance. At sea the ship is caught by a 
 tempest. The passenger sleeps quietly in his berth till 
 roused from slumber. His inward consciousness reveals 
 the cause of the storm, which he discloses to the sailors, 
 advising them to heave him overboard. We may ignore 
 the casting of lots as a superstitious device of no signifi- 
 cance. The humane sailors, loath to commit a homicide, 
 struggle with the instinct of self-preservation and pull for 
 the shore, but all in vain. They finally consign their 
 passenger to the deep. He is swallowed by a seamonster, 
 but after three days is disgorged and escapes.
 
 JONAH AND PAUL 115 
 
 Now, is there any miracle about the fish section of this 
 narrative ? 
 
 "Fish large enough to swallow a man have doubtless been found 
 occasionally in the Mediterranean sea. The white shark swallows 
 what it takes into its mouth whole. It is physically unable to di- 
 vide its food piecemeal. Otto Fabricius tells us its wont is to 
 swallow down dead or living men at a gulp. In 1758 a sailor fell 
 overboard in the Mediterranean sea, when a shark took him in 
 his wide throat ; but the captain shot the shark and the sailor was 
 rescued from his perilous condition without injury. The captain 
 gave the man the fish, which was exhibited throughout Europe. 
 It was twenty feet long, with fins nine feet wide, and it weighed 
 3,924 pounds. Blumenbach [teacher of the great Humboldt] 
 makes mention of a white shark which weighed 10,000 pounds; 
 and tells us that horses have been found whole in these monsters 
 of the deep. A writer of the seventeenth century, on the Fish of 
 Marseilles, says that men of Nice assured him they once took a 
 fish of the Canis Carcharias family, 4,000 pounds in weight, in the 
 belly of which a man whole was found." Dr. Pusey, Minor 
 Prophets. 
 
 Is the fact that Jonah remained alive for twenty-six 
 hours, which would be three days according to the an- 
 cient reckoning any more remarkable than a case of 
 premature burial and resuscitation? 
 
 The learned writer in the Jewish Encyclopedia thinks 
 the story of Jonah an allegory. His literary judgment 
 is entitled to great respect. To that writer the word of 
 Jesus Christ is nothing; to me it is everything. 
 
 SAUL OF TARSUS. 
 
 Since the Ides of March, B.C. 44, no man has lived 
 whose career has left such an impress on the drama of 
 the world's history as the one whose name is at the head 
 of this section. Throughout the world there are spots 
 sacred by association. Sinai, Carmel, Thermopylae, St. 
 Helena suggest the names of Moses, Elijah, Leonidas
 
 Il6 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 and Napoleon. Who can even see on the map the little 
 ten-mile island, with the form of an hour-glass, which 
 stands like a time-keeping sentinel in the passage between 
 Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, without thinking of Vir- 
 ginia Dare and Jennings Wise? The isle of Malta will 
 be longest remembered, not because it shelters the lineal 
 descendants of Hannibal, or because it was once the 
 home of the Knights of St. John, but because it was the 
 scene of Paul's shipwreck, described in Acts xxvii. 
 
 It is not the purpose to write the life of the great 
 apostle to the Gentiles. Were such the case, the mate- 
 rials are few. Of the men who have done the most, we 
 know the least. Sosigenes, who marks an era in chro- 
 nology who was he? Echo answers "Sosigenes." Alas! 
 We know not if he be Greek or Egyptian. We can not 
 tell where or when he was born. All we know of his 
 life is from two short references in the Historia Naturalu 
 of the Elder Pliny. But we do know that he proposed a 
 calendar which with one amendment has endured to this 
 hour, and which, like the Monroe Doctrine, has borne a 
 Maverick brand the Julian calendar. 1 Fortunately the 
 great apostle to the Gentiles was attended during a por- 
 tion of his career by an industrious and observant Syrian 
 Boswell, who has preserved the record Acts, and given 
 us in the third synoptic the Gospel as preached by Paul. 
 We know that Paul was born at Tarsus when we can 
 not say; that he was educated at Jerusalem, where he 
 had a married sister; that some extraordinary event 
 turned him from a persecuting Pharisee to a zealous 
 Christian ; then we have his career as written in the Acts 
 up to two years after his arrival in Rome. There are 
 
 *It is now evident that Sosigenes, even, was not the author. 
 The decree of Canopus now in the museum at Cairo shows that 
 the principle was known in Egypt 238 B.C. W. F. R.
 
 JONAH AND PAUL 117 
 
 thirteen of his epistles of undoubted authenticity. In 
 II Corinthians, xi, 24-27, we have a part of his career 
 summarised. Vague tradition is not infallible, but we 
 may feel sure that Paul visited Spain; and that he was 
 beheaded at Rome. A Jew once said to the writer, 
 "Christianity would never have been heard of but for 
 Paul." I replied, ''What excellent judgment Jesus Christ 
 showed in picking him out !" Paul was deeply versed in 
 Jewish law, but there is no reason to think that he pos- 
 sessed the classic attainments commonly attributed to 
 him. He possessed a most consummate knowledge of 
 human nature. He would have made a statesman of the 
 first order. , When he got the Sadducees' and Pharisees 
 into a quarrel in the tumult in Jerusalem he showed as 
 much tact as did Gaius Julius Caesar in playing off 
 Pompey against Cassius in the Luca conference. In the 
 opening speech at Mars Hill he is as tactful as Chester- 
 field could have made it. Put in modern parlance, it 
 would read, "Gentlemen of Athens, I see that in all things 
 you are eminently devout. For, as I passed along, and 
 saw your devotions, I discovered an altar with this in- 
 scription: To the unknown God. Him whom you wor- 
 ship without fully knowing him I have come to ex- 
 plain to you." He had their ear at once. Then follows 
 as clear an exposition of the grandest conception of pure 
 theism, invincible ignorance and moral accountability to 
 be found in any language. Paul was an orator, perhaps 
 not as ornate as Burke or Tully, but fit to rank with Julius 
 Caesar in concise forcefulness, judging by the compari- 
 son of what we find in the Acts of the Apostles and Sal- 
 lust, Bellum Catilinarium. 
 
 The address to Festus, Agrippa and Bernice is a gem. 
 What Agrippa meant by saying "in a little, thou per- 
 suadest me," whether he was polite, serious or ironical,
 
 Il8 HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 or whether Paul himself understood him, I do not know, 
 but I do know that never was a quicker turn made than 
 was made in the reply. I can, in my mind's eye, see the 
 prisoner of two years standing, his eyes shining like dia- 
 monds, facing luxury, power, ease and refinement: "I 
 would to God that, both in little and in much, not only 
 thou but those who hear could this day become altogether 
 as I am, [holding his manicled hands above his head] 
 except these chains." 
 
 To the fact that Paul could truthfully utter the talis- 
 manic words civis romanus sum,, we owe the spread of 
 Christianity over the Roman world. And now let us 
 compare the trial of Christ with the trial of Paul and 
 draw a lesson therefrom. 
 
 Christ was arrested a little after midnight by a posse 
 and dragged before the high priest. A person who wishes 
 to know what a mockery of justice this trial was should 
 read Rosadi's book. It will suffice to say here that a 
 space of less than fifteen hours is crowded with his ar- 
 rest, his indictment, two changes of venue, his acquittal, 
 his crucifixion by lynch-law and his death. Why? 
 He was a provincial. Had Paul been a provincial, he 
 would have fared no better. 
 
 But how is it with Paul? In danger of a mob, he is 
 delivered by the commander of the castle of Antonia, 
 who proceeded to try him on the strength of his nerves, 
 when Paul informed him that he was a Roman citizen. 
 Paul is forthwith sent to Caesarea with a military escort 
 of 470 men to Felix. Here the pettifogger Tertullus 
 appeared against him, and he was detained in prison two 
 years habeas corpus was not invented till brought be- 
 fore Felix's successor, when the following brief dialogue 
 took place:
 
 JONAH AND PAUL 119 
 
 Paul: "Caesarem afello." 
 
 Festus : "Caesarem afpellastif Ad Caesarem ibis." 
 
 And Paul was sent to Rome at government expense. 
 
 You will search history in vain for a more glaring con- 
 trast than is exhibited in the treatment of Christ and of 
 Paul. There can never be any true liberty without ab- 
 solute equality before the law. Americans take warning. 
 Your danger is in the occult and insidious dry rot of 
 judicial interpretation. 
 
 On the fourteenth day of August, 1889, a federal judge 
 was traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco, 
 with a deputy United States marshal as an escort. At 
 Lathrop they got off the train for breakfast. They were 
 seated at the table, when a disappointed litigant, who had 
 killed his man in a duel and knocked out the tooth of a 
 United States marshal, approached the judge from be- 
 hind and slapped him alternately on the side and back of 
 the head as an old-fashioned pedagogue would slap an un- 
 ruly school boy. The deputy marshal sprang to his feet 
 and ordered him to stop. Turning his attention from 
 judge to deputy marshal, the assailant started to thrust his 
 hand into his own bosom, as if to draw a bowie-knife, 
 when the deputy marshal fired two shots into his body, 
 killing him instantly. No rational man can do otherwise 
 than justify this killing. But this is not the question. As 
 Gaius Julius Caesar said in his discussion of the case of 
 the Catilinarian Conspirators: 
 
 "All precedents productive of evil have had their origin from 
 what was good." 
 
 The deputy marshal was arrested under a process sued 
 out of a justice court of San Joaquin county. The deputy 
 marshal in turn sued out a writ of habeas corpus from 
 the federal circuit court, and, upon hearing, was dis-
 
 I2O HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 charged. 39 Federal Reports, 833. On appeal to the Su- 
 preme Court of the United States, the judgment below 
 was affirmed. The decision attracted little attention at 
 the time. The man who was killed deserved his fate; 
 the deputy marshal deserved his liberty: and what boots 
 it how it was obtained? It is by just such carelessness 
 that men are robbed of their rights and nations of their 
 liberties. The decision was by a divided court. The 
 majority opinion was upon the ground that in traveling 
 from one session of court to another the federal judge 
 was engaged in the performance of the duties of his of- 
 fice; that, while so engaged, he w r as under federal pro- 
 tection ; that the deputy marshal did nothing but his duty 
 in the line of his office, and could not be called to answer 
 before a State court. The effect of the decision is to 
 create two classes of people in this country of ours, one 
 under federal jurisdiction, and the other under state: 
 one set that can appeal to Caesar, like Paul, even before 
 trial ; and the plebeians or pariahs who are amenable to 
 the State tribunals. No sophistry will avoid this con- 
 clusion. If a federal judge is engaged in official business 
 when moving from one session of court to another, he 
 is so engaged when writing an opinion or studying a 
 case; ergo, a deputy marshal can, with impunity, break 
 the heads of offending .urchins who make a noise on the 
 streets and disturb the cogitations of his honor. This 
 official can police the city within earshot of the judge 
 and supersede the municipal jurisdiction. I quote from 
 the dissenting opinion in this case: 
 
 "If the act of Terry had resulted in the death of Mr. lustice 
 Field, would the murder of him have been a crime against the 
 United States? Would the government of the United States, with 
 all the supreme powers of which we hare heard so much in this 
 discussion, have been competent to prosecute in its own tribunals
 
 JONAH \AND PAUL 121 
 
 the murder of its own Supreme Court Justice, or even to inquire 
 into the heinous offense through its own tribunals? If yes, then 
 the slaying of Terry by the appellee, in the necessary prevention 
 of such an act, was authorised by the law of the United States, 
 and he should be discharged; and that, independently of any offi- 
 cial character, the situation being the same in the case of any citi- 
 zen. But if no, how stands the matter then? The killing of Terry 
 was not by authority of the United States, no matter by whom 
 done; and the only authority relied on for vindication must be 
 that of the State, and the slayer should be remanded to the State 
 courts to be tried. The question then recurs, Would it have been 
 a crime against the United States? There can be but one answer. 
 Murder is not an offense against the United States, except when 
 committed on the high seas or in some port or harbor without 
 the- jurisdiction of the State, or in the District of Columbia, or in 
 the Territories, or at other places where the national government 
 has exclusive jurisdiction. The United States government being 
 thus powerless to try and punish a man charged with murder, we 
 are not prepared to affirm that it is omnipotent to discharge from 
 trial and give immunity from any liability to trial where he is 
 accused of murder." In re Neagle, 135 U. S. 1, 98, 99. 
 
 The majority did hold that in a case where they could 
 not convict, they, without the aid of a jury, could acquit. 
 This decision is most vicious in principle and will be 
 most vicious in its results. It was a flagrant act of judicial 
 despotism.
 
 THE HISTORICAL MAN OF NAZARETH 
 
 BY WILBUR F. BRYANT 
 JACOB NORTH & CO. 
 
 The Historical Man of Nazareth supports the historic charac- 
 ter of the Gospel narratives, and answers various objections, not 
 only with an ability which carries conviction, but with an acute 
 logic which entertains while it instructs. Chancellor Huntington. 
 
 Bryant is a man of deep study and literary attainments. His 
 logic is sound and his arguments convincing. Maurice Ripperger, 
 O. F. M. Rector St. Francis de Sales Church. 
 
 I was very much impressed by the learned and scholarly at- 
 tainments of the author. The Historical Man of Nazareth is a 
 most interesting, instructive, and skilful treatment of the Life of 
 Christ from an historical standpoint. Rev. Michael A. Shine, 
 Rector Pro-Cathedral, Lincoln. 
 
 The author has treated in a masterly manner one of the great- 
 est dogmas of our religion. He possesses the rare ability of mak- 
 ing himself understood by all classes of people. George Agius, 
 D.D., Chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln. 
 
 "The Historical Man of Nazareth" is the ideal book for the 
 University man. Arthur F. Mullen. 
 
 I have subscribed for a copy of "The Historical Man of Naza- 
 reth," because I think it worth reading. William Jennings Bryan.
 
 AMONG THE SUBSCRIBERS FOR THIS BOOK ARE 
 
 GEORGE LAWSON SHELDON, Governor of Nebraska. 
 
 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS, Chancellor of University. 
 JASPER L. McBRIEN, Superintendent of Public Instruction. 
 
 DOCTOR SHERMAN, 
 
 Professor of English Language and Literature. 
 With the corps of State Officers and Faculty of the University.
 
 DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
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