ct to his rejecting the story
as a tall story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot see
the point or end or upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacle
or spire of that sublime tower.

This dull type of doubt clouds the consideration of many
sacred things as it does that of the shrine of Bethlehem.
It is applied to the divine reality of Bethlehem itself,
as when sceptics still sneer at the littleness, the localism,
the provincial particularity and obscurity of that divine origin;
as if Christians could be confounded and silenced by a contrast
which Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons have
incessantly shouted and proclaimed. In this capital case, of course,
the same principle holds. A man may think the tale is incredible;
but it would never have been told at all if it had not been incongruous.
But this particular case of the lesser contrast, that between the imperial
pomp and the rustic poverty of the carpenter and the shepherds,
is alone enough to illustrate the strange artistic fallacy involved.
If it be the point that an emperor came to worship a carpenter,
it is as artistically necessary to make the emperor imperial
as to make the carpenter humble; if we wish to make plain to plain
people that before this shrine kings are no better than shepherds,
it is as necessary that the kings should have crowns as that
the shepherds should have crooks. And if modern intellectuals
do not know it, it is because nobody has really been mad enough
even to try to make modern intellectualism popular. Now this
conception of pomp as a popular thing, this conception of a concession
to common human nature in colour and symbol, has a considerable
bearing on many misunderstandings about the original enthusiasm
that spread from the cave of Bethlehem over the whole Roman Empire.
It is a curious fact that the moderns have mostly rebuked
historic Christianity, not for being narrow, but for being broad.
They have rebuked it because it did prove itself the desire of
all nations, because it did satisfy the cravings of many creeds,
because it did prove itself to idolaters as something as magic
as their idols, or did prove itself to patriots something as lovable
as their native land. In many other matters indeed, besides this
popular art, we may find examples of the same illogical prejudice.
Nothing betrays more curiously the bias of historians against
the Christian faith than the fact that they blame in Christians
the very