re
mediocrity, towards which Thou hast drifted for two thousand years, a flag;
and in which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee
and cannot curse Thee now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been
greater, stranger and more Divine than any man's has been. The chosen
people, the garden, the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story,
not of Mary, but of Magdalen. The God descending to the harlot! Even the
great pagan world of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty, that my soul
goes out to and hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to
show us as this.

Come to me, ye who are weak. The Word went forth, the terrible disastrous
Word, and before it fell the ancient gods, and the vices that they
represent, and which I revere, are outcast now in the world of men; the
Word went forth, and the world interpreted the Word, blindly, ignorantly,
savagely, for two thousand years, but nevertheless nearing every day the
end--the end that Thou in Thy divine intelligence foresaw, that finds its
voice to-day (enormous though the antithesis may be, I will say it) in the
_Pall Mall Gazette_. What fate has been like Thine? Betrayed by Judas
in the garden, denied by Peter before the cock crew, crucified between
thieves, and mourned for by a harlot, and then sent bound and bare, nothing
changed, nothing altered, in Thy ignominious plight, forthward in the
world's van the glory and symbol of a man's new idea--Pity. Thy day is
closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever
before--Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old
world, declare to be darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which
is imminent, which is the twentieth century. The bearers have relinquished
Thy cross, they leave Thee in the hour of Thy universal triumph, Thy crown
of thorns is falling, Thy face is buffeted with blows, and not even a reed
is placed in Thy hand for sceptre; only I and mine are by Thee, we who
shall perish with Thee, in the ruin Thou hast created.

Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the
sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful
injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty
aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for
injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice! What
care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Ph