e much in common.
They are all instances of what may be called mythological metaphysics.
The dogma is, that, left to his own devices, man tends to take the path
of sin. He is, moreover, alienated from God, who, because of his
perfection, cannot condone imperfection and demands an atonement which
cannot be made by man himself. Hence, the need arises for a savior to
mediate between man and God. What a construction is this in which
myth, rabbinical theology and pagan dualistic cosmologies are drawn
together to furnish the setting for a juridical drama! How can those
who accept the teaching of modern science and realize the more
subjective and personal spirit of modern ethics conserve any portion of
this strange creation of past ages? The idea of evolution, as applied
to both nature and man, undermines the whole fantastic drama. Man has
arisen painfully from a brutish condition, instead of falling from a
perfect state. The contrast between flesh and spirit can no longer be
taken literally as corresponding to a sort of physical division of the
universe into spheres of good and evil which can have no commerce with
one another. This is ethical poetry which is not sufficiently aware
that it is poetry. Instead of seeking to re-interpret the belief in an
external, sacrificial savior, mediating between God and man in vague,
mystically symbolic language which suggests a depth it does not
possess, the sensible thing is to drop the whole outlook frankly, as
outgrown, and as having essentially lost its meaning. We saw that
Jesus, himself, would probably {158} not have comprehended its
intricacies, and certainly would not have accepted it as true of his
own mission. Instead, it represents the theosophic speculations of the
Ancient World. So long as the thinker toys with these imaginative
speculations which have no direct foundation in the knowledge and
experience of to-day, so long will he live in a mental fog unable to
see the really pressing social and ethical problems of the present.

When we once shake ourselves loose from these mythical, gnostic and
rabbinical ideas, with their legal and poetical conceptions of ethics,
and their naive picture of the world as the seat of ethical forces
struggling in a physical way against one another; when we once realize
that it is meaningless to apply ethical distinctions to matter, we are
led to press past these Hellenistic accretions to the simpler and
nobler traditions which Christ