Preface to Androcles and the Lion | Page 5

and standing, and greater
practical sense. I have no sympathy with vagabonds and talkers who try
to reform society by taking men away from their regular productive
work and making vagabonds and talkers of them too; and if I had been
Pilate I should have recognized as plainly as he the necessity for
suppressing attacks on the existing social order, however corrupt that
order might be, by people with no knowledge of government and no
power to construct political machinery to carry out their views, acting
on the very dangerous delusion that the end of the world was at hand. I
make no defence of such Christians as Savonarola and John of Leyden:
they were scuttling the ship before they had learned how to build a raft;
and it became necessary to throw them overboard to save the crew. I
say this to set myself right with respectable society; but I must still
insist that if Jesus could have worked out the practical problems of a
Communist constitution, an admitted obligation to deal with crime
without revenge or punishment, and a full assumption by humanity of
divine responsibilities, he would have conferred an incalculable benefit
on mankind, because these distinctive demands of his are now turning
out to be good sense and sound economics.
I say distinctive, because his common humanity and his subjection to
time and space (that is, to the Syrian life of his period) involved his
belief in many things, true and false, that in no way distinguish him
from other Syrians of that time. But such common beliefs do not
constitute specific Christianity any more than wearing a beard, working
in a carpenter's shop, or believing that the earth is flat and that the stars
could drop on it from heaven like hailstones. Christianity interests
practical statesmen now because of the doctrines that distinguished
Christ from the Jews and the Barabbasques generally, including
ourselves.
WHY JESUS MORE THAN ANOTHER?
I do not imply, however, that these doctrines were peculiar to Christ. A
doctrine peculiar to one man would be only a craze, unless its
comprehension depended on a development of human faculty so rare
that only one exceptionally gifted man possessed it. But even in this
case it would be useless, because incapable of spreading. Christianity is

a step in moral evolution which is independent of any individual
preacher. If Jesus had never existed (and that he ever existed in any
other sense than that in which Shakespear's Hamlet existed has been
vigorously questioned) Tolstoy would have thought and taught and
quarrelled with the Greek Church all the same. Their creed has been
fragmentarily practised to a considerable extent in spite of the fact that
the laws of all countries treat it, in effect, as criminal. Many of its
advocates have been militant atheists. But for some reason the
imagination of white mankind has picked out Jesus of Nazareth as THE
Christ, and attributed all the Christian doctrines to him; and as it is the
doctrine and not the man that matters, and, as, besides, one symbol is as
good as another provided everyone attaches the same meaning to it, I
raise, for the moment, no question as to how far the gospels are original,
and how far they consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The
record that Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a
demonstration that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a
literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that
the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not
just now concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records of fact;
for I am not acting as a detective, but turning our modern lights on to
certain ideas and doctrines in them which disentangle themselves from
the rest because they are flatly contrary to common practice, common
sense, and common belief, and yet have, in the teeth of dogged
incredulity and recalcitrance, produced an irresistible impression that
Christ, though rejected by his posterity as an unpractical dreamer, and
executed by his contemporaries as a dangerous anarchist and
blasphemous madman, was greater than his judges.
WAS JESUS A COWARD?
I know quite well that this impression of superiority is not produced on
everyone, even of those who profess extreme susceptibility to it.
Setting aside the huge mass of inculcated Christ-worship which has no
real significance because it has no intelligence, there is, among people
who are really free to think for themselves on the subject, a great deal
of hearty dislike of Jesus and of contempt for his failure to save himself
and overcome his enemies by personal bravery and cunning as
Mahomet did. I have heard this feeling expressed far more impatiently
by persons brought up in England as Christians than by