their extravagant interpretation of remarks attributed to Atys.
It is improbable that Tolstoy wrote a book to prove that all modern
ills could be cured by literal obedience to all the orders of Adonis.
We do not find wild Bolshevists calling themselves Mithraic Socialists
as many of them call themselves Christian Socialists. Leaving orthodoxy
and even sanity entirely on one side, the very heresies and insanities
of our time prove that after nearly two thousand years the issue
is still living and the name is quite literally one to conjure with.
Let the critics try to conjure with any of the other names.
In the real centres of modern inquiry and mental activity,
they will not move even a mystic with the name of Mithras
as they will move a materialist with the name of Jesus.
There are men who deny God and accept Christ.

But this lingering yet living power in the legend, even for
those to whom it is little more than a legend, has another
relevancy to the particular point here. Jesus of Nazareth,
merely humanly considered, has thus become a hero of humanitarianism.
Even the eighteenth-century deists in denying his divinity generally
took pains to exalt his humanity. Of the nineteenth-century
revolutionists it is really an understatement to say that they exalted
him as a man; for indeed they rather exalted him as a superman.
That is to say, many of them represented him as a man preaching
a decisively superior and ever strange morality, not only
in advance of his age but practically in advance of our age.
They made of his mystical counsels of perfection a sort of Socialism
or Pacifism or Communism, which they themselves still see rather
as something that ought to be or that will be; the extreme limit
of universal love. I am not discussing here whether they are
right or not; I say they have in fact found in the same figure
a type of humanitarianism and the care for human happiness.
Every one knows the striking and sometimes staggering utterances
that do really support and illustrate this side of the teaching.
Modern idealists are naturally moved by such things as the intensely
poetic paradox about the lilies of the field; which for them has
a joy in life and living things like that of Shelley or Whitman,
combined with a return to simplicity beyond that of Tolstoy or Thoreau.
Indeed I rather wonder that those, whose merely historic or humanistic
view of the case would allow of such criticism without incongruity,
have not