Note 4 — Chapter VI · THE ART OF CRITICISM

Here the phrase “Jesus came into the world,” like all else he did or suffered, is, of course, to be understood in a Pickwickian sense, for he never came into the world at all. The Gospels are not only a romance concocted by “such students of religion as the first Christians were” (p. 65), and inspired by their study of Plato,4 and of the best elements in ancient mythology; they are a romance throughout—an allegory of a secret pre-Christian Nazarene society and of its secret cult (p. 34). Of this society, he tells us, we know nothing; esoterism and cult secrecy were its chief interests; the “silence of the Christians about it was intentional,”5 and, except for the special revelation vouchsafed the other day to Professor W. B. Smith, it would have remained for ever unknown, and Christianity for ever enigmatic.