Thus the gospels as memoirs and suggestive statements of sociological
and biological doctrine, highly relevant to modern civilization, though
ending in the history of a psycopathic delusion, are quite credible,
intelligible, and interesting to modern thinkers. In any other light
they are neither credible, intelligible, nor interesting except to
people upon whom the delusion imposes.

"THE HIGHER CRITICISM."

Historical research and paleographic criticism will no doubt continue
their demonstrations that the New Testament, like the Old, seldom tells
a single story or expounds a single doctrine, and gives us often an
accretion and conglomeration of widely discrete and even unrelated
traditions and doctrines. But these disintegrations, though technically
interesting to scholars, and gratifying or exasperating, as the case
may be, to people who are merely defending or attacking the paper
fortifications of the infallibility of the Bible, have hardly anything
to do with the purpose of these pages. I have mentioned the fact that
most of the authorities are now agreed (for the moment) that the date
of the birth of Jesus may be placed at about 7 B.C.; but they do not
therefore date their letters 1923, nor, I presume, do they expect me to
do so. What I am engaged in is a criticism (in the Kantian sense) of an
established body of belief which has become an actual part of the mental
fabric of my readers; and I should be the most exasperating of triflers
and pedants if I were to digress into a criticism of some other belief
or no-belief which my readers might conceivably profess if they were
erudite Scriptural paleographers and historians, in which case, by the
way, they would have to change their views so frequently that the gospel
they received in their childhood would dominate them after all by its
superior persistency. The chaos of mere facts in which the Sermon on the
Mount and the Ode to Charity suggest nothing but disputes as to whether
they are interpolations or not, in which Jesus becomes nothing but
a name suspected of belonging to ten different prophets or executed
persons, in which Paul is only the man who could not possibly have
written the epistles attributed to him, in which Chinese sages,
Greek philosophers, Latin authors, and writers of ancient anonymous
inscriptions are thrown at our heads as the sources of this or that
scrap of the Bible, is neither a religion nor a criticism of religion:
one does not off