ine Christianity is, and
owes its enormous vogue to being, a premium on sin. Its consequences
have had to be held in check by the worldlywise majority through a
violently anti-Christian system of criminal law and stern morality. But
of course the main restraint is human nature, which has good impulses as
well as bad ones, and refrains from theft and murder and cruelty, even
when it is taught that it can commit them all at the expense of Christ
and go happily to heaven afterwards, simply because it does not always
want to murder or rob or torture.

It is now easy to understand why the Christianity of Jesus failed
completely to establish itself politically and socially, and was easily
suppressed by the police and the Church, whilst Paulinism overran the
whole western civilized world, which was at that time the Roman Empire,
and was adopted by it as its official faith, the old avenging gods
falling helplessly before the new Redeemer. It still retains, as we may
see in Africa, its power of bringing to simple people a message of hope
and consolation that no other religion offers. But this enchantment is
produced by its spurious association with the personal charm of Jesus,
and exists only for untrained minds. In the hands of a logical Frenchman
like Calvin, pushing it to its utmost conclusions, and devising
"institutes" for hardheaded adult Scots and literal Swiss, it becomes
the most infernal of fatalisms; and the lives of civilized children are
blighted by its logic whilst negro piccaninnies are rejoicing in its
legends.

PAUL'S QUALITIES

Paul, however, did not get his great reputation by mere imposition and
reaction. It is only in comparison with Jesus (to whom many prefer him)
that he appears common and conceited. Though in The Acts he is only
a vulgar revivalist, he comes out in his own epistles as a genuine
poet,--though by flashes only. He is no more a Christian than Jesus was
a Baptist; he is a disciple of Jesus only as Jesus was a disciple of
John. He does nothing that Jesus would have done, and says nothing that
Jesus would have said, though much, like the famous ode to charity, that
he would have admired. He is more Jewish than the Jews, more Roman
than the Romans, proud both ways, full of startling confessions and
self-revelations that would not surprise us if they were slipped into
the pages of Nietzsche, tormented by an intellectual conscience that
demanded an argued case even at the cost of sophistry