the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done and
suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins
of Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was
Emperor of Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those
whose names are legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs:
oppressed nationalities, factory children, thieves, people in
prison, outcasts, those who are dumb under oppression and whose
silence is heard only of God; and not merely imagining this but
actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come
in contact with his personality, even though they may neither bow
to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find that the
ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow
revealed to them.

I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true.
Shelley and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also
is the most wonderful of poems. For 'pity and terror' there is
nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The
absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a
height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and
Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong
Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it
would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain.
Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in
Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the
whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world
is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more
than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer
simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic
effect, can be said to equal or even approach the last act of