Councils of the Church which resembled modern political conventions, and
in which pagan Emperors did not hesitate to exert their influence over
the metaphysical bishops of the factions. Recriminations, executions,
murders--so the chronicles ran.

The prophet, the idealist disappeared, the priest with his rites and
ceremonies and sacrifices, his power to save and damn, was once more in
possession of the world.

The Son of Man was degraded into an infant in his mother's arms. An
unhealthy, degenerating asceticism, drawn from pagan sources, began with
the monks and anchorites of Egypt and culminated in the spectacle of
Simeon's pillar. The mysteries of Eleusis, of Attis, Mithras, Magna
Mater and Isis developed into Christian sacraments--the symbol became
the thing itself. Baptism the confession of the new life, following
the customs of these cults, became initiation; and from the same
superstitious origins, the repellent materialistic belief that to eat
of the flesh and drink of the blood of a god was to gain immortality:
immortality of the body, of course.


Ah, when the superstitions of remote peoples, the fables and myths, were
taken away; when the manufactured history and determinism of the
Israelites from the fall of man to the coming of that Messiah, whom the
Jews crucified because he failed to bring them their material Kingdom,
were discredited; when the polemic and literal interpretations of
evangelists had been rejected, and the pious frauds of tampering monks;
when the ascetic Buddhism was removed; the cults and mysteries, the
dogmas of an ancient naive philosophy discarded; the crude science of a
Ptolemy who conceived the earth as a flat terrestrial expanse and hell