AFTERWORD

Now, the last word will again be left to the atheist H.L. Mencken.

But in one respect, at least, Christianity is vastly superior to every other religion in being today, and, indeed, to all save one of the past: it is full of a lush and lovely poetry. The Bible is unquestionably the most beautiful book in the world. Allow everything you please for the barbaric history in the Old Testament and the silly Little Bethel theology in the New, and there remains a series of poems so overwhelmingly voluptuous and disarming that no other literature, old or new, can offer a match for it. Nearly all of it comes from the Jews, and their making of it constitutes one of the most astounding phenomena in human history. Save for a small minority of superior individuals, nearly unanimously agnostic, there is not much in their character, as the modern world knows them, to suggest a genius for exalted thinking. Even Ernest Renan, who was very friendly to them, once sneered at the "esprit semitique" as "sans etendu, sans diversite, et sans philosophie." As commonly encountered, they strike other peoples as predominantly unpleasant, and everywhere on earth they seem to be disliked. This dislike, despite their own belief to the contrary, has nothing to do with their religion: it is founded, rather, on their bad manners, their curious lack of tact. They have an extraordinary capacity for offending and alarming the "Goyim", and not infrequently, from the earliest days down to our own time, it has engendered brutal wars upon them. Yet these same rude, unpopular, and often unintelligent folk, from time almost immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the Western world, and beyond all comparisons its greatest poets. It was Jews who wrote the magnificent poems called the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Books of Job and Ruth; it was Jews who set platitudes to deathless music in Proverbs; and it was Jews who gave us the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the incomparable ballad of the Christ child, and the twelfth chapter of Romans. I incline to believe that the scene recounted in John VIII, 3-11, is the most poignant drama ever written in the world, as the Song of Solomon is unquestionably the most moving love song, and the Twenty-third Psalm the greatest of hymns. All these transcendent riches Christianity inherits from a little tribe of sedentary Bedouins, so obscure and unimportant that secular history hardly knows them. No heritage of modern man is richer and none has made a more brilliant mark upon human thought, not even the legacy of the Greeks. All this, of course, may prove either one of two things: that the Jews, in their heyday, were actually superior to all the greatest peoples who disdained them, or that poetry is only an inferior art. My private inclination is to embrace the latter hypothesis, but I do not pause to argue the point. The main thing is that Christianity, alone among the modern world religions, has inherited an opulent aesthetic content, and is thus itself a work of art. Its external habiliments, of course, are not unique. There are Buddhist temples that are quite as glorious as Gothic cathedrals, and in Shinto there is a dramatic liturgy that is at least as impressive as the Roman Mass. But no other religion is so beautiful in its very substance - none other can show anything to match the great strophes of flaming poetry which enter into every Christian gesture of ceremonial and give an august inner dignity to Christian sacred music. Nor does any other, not even the parent Judaism, rest upon so noble a mythology. The story of Jesus, as told in the Synoptic Gospels, and especially in Luke, is touching beyond compare. It is, indeed, the most lovely story that the human fancy has ever devised, and the fact that large parts of it cannot be accepted as true surely does no violence to its effectiveness, for it is of the very essence of poetry that it is not true: its aim is not to record facts but to conjure up entrancing possibilities. The story of Jesus is the sempiternal Cinderella story, lifted to cosmic dimensions. Beside it the best that you will find in the sacred literature of Moslem and Brahman, Parsee and Buddhist, seems flat, stale, and unprofitable.

(from TREATISE ON THE GODS by H.L. Mencken
Part V : Its State Today -Chapter 9)