Collected Works (Vol. III)

ELEUSIS 221 Christian writers with benefit (such is the revivifying force of our Elixir) by seeking the esserce in the Iirst Matter of the Work; and we could» commend many of them, notably St. Ignatius and even the rationalising Mansel and Newman, if they would only concentrate upon spiritual truth, instead of insisting on the truth of things, material and therefore immaterial, which only need the touch of a scholar’s wand to crumble into the base dust from which their bloodstained towers arose. Whoso has been crucified with Christ can but laugh when it is proved that Christ was never crucified. The historian understands nothing of what we mean, either by Christ or by crucifixion, and is thus totally in- competent to criticise our position. On the other hand, we are of course equally ill-placed to convert him; but then we do not wish to do so; certainly not gud historian. We leave him alone. Whoso hath ears to hear, let him hear! and the first and last ordeals and rewards of the Adept are comprised in the maxim “ Keep silence!” There should be no possible point of contact between the Church and the world: Paul began the ruin of Christianity, but Constantine completed it. The Church which begins to exteriorise is already lost. To control the ethics of the state is to adopt the ethics of the state: and the first duty of the state will be to expel the rival god Religion. In such a cycle we in Eng- land seem to be now revolving, and the new forced freedom of the Church is upon us. If only the destruction is sufficiently com- plete, if only all England will turn Atheist, we may perhaps be able to find some Chris- tians here and there. As long as ‘‘ church” means either a building, an assembly, or even has any meaning at all of a_ kind to be intelligible to the ordinary man, so long is Christ rejected, and the Pharisee supreme. Now the materialism which has always been the curse of Christianity was no doubt partly due to the fact that the early dis- ciples were poor men. You cannot bribe a rich man with loaves and fishes: only the overfed long for the Simple Life. True, Christ bought the world by the promise of Fasts and Martyrdoms, glutted as it was by its surfeit of Augustan glories; but the poor were in a vast majority, and snatched greedily at all the gross plea- sures and profits of which the educated and wealthy were sick even unto death. Further, the asceticism of surfeit is a false passion, and only lasts until a healthy hunger is attained; so that the change was an entire corruption, without redeeming aspect. ad there been five righteous men in Rome, a Cato, a Brutus, a Curtius, a Scipio, and a Julian, nothing would have occurred; but there was only the last, and he too late. No doubt Maximus, his teacher, was too holy an Adept to mingle in the affairs of the world; one indeed, verhaps; about to pass over to a higher sphere of aclion: such speculation is idle and im- pertinent; but the world was ruined, as never before since the fabled destruction of Atlantis, andI trust that I shall take my readers with me when I affirm so proud a belief in the might of the heart whose in- tegrity is unassailable, clean of all crime, that I lay it down as a positive dictum that only by the decay in the mental and moral virility of Rome and not otherwise, was it possible for the slavish greed and anarchy of the Faith of Paul to gain a foothold. This faith was no new current of youth, sweep- ing away decadence: it was a force of the slime: a force with no single salutary germ of progress inherent therein. . Mohammedanism, so often accused of materialism, did produce, at once, and in consequence, a revival of learning, a crowd of algebraists, astronomers, philo- sophers, whose names are still to be re- vered: but within the fold, from the death of Christ to the Renaissance — a purely pagan movement—we hear no more ven