Mr. Crowley and The Creeds

— 6 — actually making money, but to argue their eternal truth, or even their value at that time, is a further and false step. Does the fact that a cobra is alive prove it to be innocuous ? With the reported murder of Jesus of Nazareth I am not concerned ; but Vespasian’s “ Ut puto Deus fio ” is commonly thought to have been meant as a jest. Our Romanticist’s unique and magnificent dramatisation of the war between the sceptic or lover of truth, and the religious man or lover of life, may be well quoted against me. Though Vespasian did jest, though Christ’s “ It is finished ” were subjectively but the cry of his physical weakness, like Burton’s “ I am a dead man,” it is no less true that millions have regarded it as indeed a cry of triumph. That is so, subjectively, for them, but no more, and the one fact does not alter the other. Surely Our Fid. Def. will find little support in this claim on behalf of death. We all die ; it was the Resurrection and Ascension which stamped Christ as God. Our Philosopher will, I think, fight shy of these events. The two thieves were “ nailed up like vermin ” on either side of Christ by precisely the same people ; are they also gods ? To found a religion on the fact of death, murder though it were, is hardly more than African fetichism. Does death prove more than life ? Will Mr. Chesterton never be happy until he is hanged ? These then are the rear-guard actions of his retiring and beaten and army. The army itself is pretty well out of sight. There is a puff of artillery from afar to the effect that “ no man can contrive to be agnostic about Christianity.” This is very blank cartridge. Who is agnostic about the shape of the earth ? Who prides himself upon a profound reserve about the colour of a blue pig, or hesitates to maintain that grass is green ? Unless under the reservation that both subject and predicate are Unknowable in their essence, and that the copula of identity is but a convention — a form of Agnosticism which after all means nothing in this connection, for the terms of the criticism require the same reservation. Our Tamburlaine’sI subsequent remark that the poor infidel (failing in his desperate attempt to be agnostic) “ tries to prove something untrue ” is a peti- tio principii which would be a blunder in a schoolboy ; but in a man of Our Dialectician’s intelligence can only be impudence. The main army, as I said, is out of sight. There is, however, a cloud of I. Not to confuse with Tambourine or alter into Tamburlesque.