Note 23 — Chapter IX · CONCLUSION

It is pessimism, yet again, that accepts the verdict: “Christianity is the truth of humanity.”23 Were it not that Dr. Schmiedel endorses it, I should have been inclined to use a stronger term. This too is myth-making. It would be strange indeed if any depth of truth were sounded by men who had not the first elements of a conscience for truth of statement, truth of history: whose very notion of truth was a production of fiction. The “truth of humanity” is something infinitely wider than the structure raised by the “prophets” and “apostles” of the Jesus-cult, out of pre-existing materials, some two thousand years ago; and humanity will outlive that presentment of its cosmos and its destinies as it has outlived others. If it should carry something of the one with it, so does it from the others—even as the one drew from its predecessors; and it will certainly jettison more than it will keep. I have not noted in the Testaments of the Patriarchs any such nullification of its doctrine of forgiveness as is embodied in the promise of future perdition for Chorazin and Bethsaida, or in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, to say nothing of the Jesuine doctrine of future torment. The hate that breathes in “Ye brood of vipers”; in the continual malediction against Scribes and Pharisees as universally hypocrites, “sons of Gehenna,” making their proselytes twice as bad as themselves; and in the Johannine “your father the devil”—all these are “Christian” specialties, turning to naught the Jewish precept of forgiveness.