omes inevitable. And yet the celibate is still
more ridiculous than the married man: the priest, in accepting the
alternative of celibacy, disables himself; and the best priests are
those who have been men of this world before they became men of the
world to come. But as the taking of vows does not annul an existing
marriage, and a married man cannot become a priest, we are again
confronted with the absurdity that the best priest is a reformed rake.
Thus does marriage, itself intolerable, thrust us upon intolerable
alternatives. The practical solution is to make the individual
economically independent of marriage and the family, and to make
marriage as easily dissoluble as any other partnership: in other words,
to accept the conclusions to which experience is slowly driving both our
sociologists and our legislators. This will not instantly cure all the
evils of marriage, nor root up at one stroke its detestable tradition
of property in human bodies. But it will leave Nature free to effect a
cure; and in free soil the root may wither and perish.

This disposes of all the opinions and teachings of Jesus which are
still matters of controversy. They are all in line with the best modern
thought. He told us what we have to do; and we have had to find the way
to do it. Most of us are still, as most were in his own time, extremely
recalcitrant, and are being forced along that way by painful pressure of
circumstances, protesting at every step that nothing will induce us to
go; that it is a ridiculous way, a disgraceful way, a socialistic way,
an atheistic way, an immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to be
ashamed of themselves and must be made to turn back at once. But they
find that they have to follow the vanguard all the same if their lives
are to be worth living.

AFTER THE CRUCIFIXION.

Let us now return to the New Testament narrative; for what happened
after the disappearance of Jesus is instructive. Unfortunately, the
crucifixion was a complete political success. I remember that when
I described it in these terms once before, I greatly shocked a most
respectable newspaper in my native town, the Dublin Daily Express,
because my journalistic phrase showed that I was treating it as an
ordinary event like Home Rule or the Insurance Act: that is (though this
did not occur to the editor), as a real event which had really happened,
instead of a portion of the Church service. I can only repeat, assuming
as I am that