ee history as an understandable drama. He
had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the
two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the
twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest,
the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the
element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated
tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable
in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the
prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest
religion is the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the
founders of all the great existing religions of the world had been like
himself--only that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative
force, and they had been great men of enormous initiative--men reaching
out, and never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion
to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when
Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common
that they had sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from
rites and ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and
sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of
God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification.
But none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing
temper in men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust
of the discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of
indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education,
the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught
and crippled every new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus
for example gave man neither a theology nor a church organization; His
sacrament was an innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited,
imitative men he left to carry on his work speedily restored all these
three abominations of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and
sacrifice. Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient
victim of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into
a horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme
feat of the ironies of chance....

"It is curious how I drift back to Jesus," said Scrope. "I have never
seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke
a