Preface to Androcles and the Lion | Page 7

Jesus was to the High Priest, who looked
forward to the coming of a Messiah, one that might conceivably have
been true, and might therefore have misled the people in a very
dangerous way. That was why he treated Jesus as an imposter and a
blasphemer where we should have treated him as a madman.
THE GOSPELS WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
All this will become clear if we read the gospels without prejudice.
When I was young it was impossible to read them without fantastic

confusion of thought. The confusion was so utterly confounded that it
was called the proper spirit to read the Bible in. Jesus was a baby; and
he was older than creation. He was a man who could be persecuted,
stoned, scourged, and killed; and he was a god, immortal and
all-powerful, able to raise the dead and call millions of angels to his aid.
It was a sin to doubt either view of him: that is, it was a sin to reason
about him; and the end was that you did not reason about him, and read
about him only when you were compelled. When you heard the gospel
stories read in church, or learnt them from painters and poets, you came
out with an impression of their contents that would have astonished a
Chinaman who had read the story without prepossession. Even sceptics
who were specially on their guard, put the Bible in the dock, and read
the gospels with the object of detecting discrepancies in the four
narratives to show that the writers were as subject to error as the writers
of yesterday's newspaper.
All this has changed greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is
so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly
becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old
tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books" lingers more
strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations
into modern English have been introduced perforce to save its bare
intelligibility. It is quite easy today to find cultivated persons who have
never read the New Testament, and on whom therefore it is possible to
try the experiment of asking them to read the gospels and state what
they have gathered as to the history and views and character of Christ.
THE GOSPELS NOW UNINTELLIGIBLE TO NOVICES.
But it will not do to read the gospels with a mind furnished only for the
reception of, say, a biography of Goethe. You will not make sense of
them, nor even be able without impatient weariness to persevere in the
task of going steadily through them, unless you know something of the
history of the human imagination as applied to religion. Not long ago I
asked a writer of distinguished intellectual competence whether he had
made a study of the gospels since his childhood. His reply was that he
had lately tried, but "found it all such nonsense that I could not stick it."
As I do not want to send anyone to the gospels with this result, I had
better here give a brief exposition of how much of the history of
religion is needed to make the gospels and the conduct and ultimate

fate of Jesus intelligible and interesting.
WORLDLINESS OF THE MAJORITY.
The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a
great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It consists
of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of persons
deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own souls and
other peoples'; and this section consists mostly of those who are
passionately affirming the established religion and those who are
passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few.
Thus you never have a nation of millions of Wesleys and one Tom
Paine. You have a million Mr. Worldly Wisemans, one Wesley, with
his small congregation, and one Tom Paine, with his smaller
congregation. The passionately religious are a people apart; and if they
were not hopelessly outnumbered by the worldly, they would turn the
world upside down, as St. Paul was reproached, quite justly, for
wanting to do. Few people can number among their personal
acquaintances a single atheist or a single Plymouth Brother. Unless a
religious turn in ourselves has led us to seek the little Societies to
which these rare birds belong, we pass our lives among people who,
whatever creeds they may repeat, and in whatever temples they may
avouch their respectability and wear their Sunday clothes, have robust
consciences, and hunger and thirst, not for righteousness, but for rich
feeding and comfort and social position and attractive mates and ease
and pleasure and respect and consideration: in short, for love and
money. To these people one morality