Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and read
it steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and you
will certainly have one impression, whether of a myth or of a man.
It is that the exorcist towers above the poet and even the prophet;
that the story between Cana and Calvary is one long war with demons.
He understood better than a hundred poets the beauty of
the flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle.
And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that there
is at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers,
an unfathomable evil.
In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhaps
the mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we know
about ethics and economics, knew a little more than we are
beginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena.
I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant
article in the _Hibbert Journal_, in which Christ's admission
of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity.
The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory
through all the changing years, ran thus: "If he was God,
he knew there was no such thing as diabolical possession.
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