ig.

Here then come in the importance of the repudiation by Jesus of
proselytism. His rule "Don't pull up the tares: sow the wheat: if you
try to pull up the tares you will pull up the wheat with it" is the
only possible rule for a statesman governing a modern empire, or a voter
supporting such a statesman. There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus
that cannot be assented to by a Brahman, a Mahometan, a Buddhist or a
Jew, without any question of their conversion to Christianity. In some
ways it is easier to reconcile a Mahometan to Jesus than a British
parson, because the idea of a professional priest is unfamiliar and even
monstrous to a Mahometan (the tourist who persists in asking who is the
dean of St. Sophia puzzles beyond words the sacristan who lends him a
huge pair of slippers); and Jesus never suggested that his disciples
should separate themselves from the laity: he picked them up by the
wayside, where any man or woman might follow him. For priests he had not
a civil word; and they showed their sense of his hostility by getting
him killed as soon as possible. He was, in short, a thoroughgoing
anti-Clerical. And though, as we have seen, it is only by political
means that his doctrine can be put into practice, he not only never
suggested a sectarian theocracy as a form of Government, and would
certainly have prophesied the downfall of the late President Kruger if
he had survived to his time, but, when challenged, he refused to teach
his disciples not to pay tribute to Caesar, admitting that Caesar, who
presumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as much as any disciple,
had his place in the scheme of things. Indeed the apostles made this
an excuse for carrying subservience to the State to a pitch of idolatry
that ended in the theory of the divine right of kings, and provoked
men to cut kings' heads off to restore some sense of proportion in the
matter. Jesus certainly did not consider the overthrow of the Roman
empire or the substitution of a new ecclesiastical organization for the
Jewish Church or for the priesthood of the Roman gods as part of his
program. He said that God was better than Mammon; but he never said
that Tweedledum was better than Tweedledee; and that is why it is now
possible for British citizens and statesmen to follow Jesus, though they
cannot possibly follow either Tweedledum or Tweedledee without bringing
the empire down with a crash on their heads. And at that I must leave
it.

LONDO