Let the critics try to conjure with any of the other names.
In the real centres of modern inquiry and mental activity,
they will not move even a mystic with the name of Mithras
as they will move a materialist with the name of Jesus.
There are men who deny God and accept Christ.
But this lingering yet living power in the legend, even for
those to whom it is little more than a legend, has another
relevancy to the particular point here. Jesus of Nazareth,
merely humanly considered, has thus become a hero of humanitarianism.
Even the eighteenth-century deists in denying his divinity generally
took pains to exalt his humanity. Of the nineteenth-century
revolutionists it is really an understatement to say that they exalted
him as a man; for indeed they rather exalted him as a superman.
That is to say, many of them represented him as a man preaching
a decisively superior and ever strange morality, not only
in advance of his age but practically in advance of our age.
They made of his mystical counsels of perfection a sort of Socialism
or Pacifism or Communism, which they themselves still see rather
as something that ought to be or that will be; the extreme limit
of universal love.
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