Judged even by our modern tests of emancipated art or ideal economics, it is admitted that Christ understood all that is rather crudely embodied in Socialism or the Simple Life.
I purposely insist first on this optimistic, I might almost say this pantheistic or even this pagan aspect of the Christian Gospels.
For it is only when we understand that Christ, considered merely as a prophet, can be and is a popular leader in the love of natural things, that we can feel that tremendous and tragic energy of his testimony to an ugly reality, the existence of unnatural things.
Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and read it steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and you will certainly have one impression, whether of a myth or of a man.
It is that the exorcist towers above the poet and even the prophet; that the story between Cana and Calvary is one long war with demons.
He understood better than a hundred poets the beauty of the flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle.
And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that there is at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers, an unfathomable evil.
In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhaps the mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we know about ethics and economics, knew a little more than we are beginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena.
I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant article in the _Hibbert Journal_, in which Christ's admission of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity.
The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory through all the changing years, ran thus: "If he was God, he knew there was no such thing as diabolical possession." It did not seem to strike the _Hibbert_ critic that this line of criticism raises the question, not of whether Christ is God, but of whether the critic in the _Hibbert Journal_ is God.
About that mystery as about the other I am for the moment agnostic; but I should have thought that the meditations of Omniscience on the problem of evil might be allowed, even by an agnostic, to be a little difficult to discover.

Of Christ in the Gospels and in modern life I will merely for the moment say this; that if he was God, as the critic put it, it seems possible that he knew the next discovery in science, as well as the last, not to mention (what is more common in rationalistic culture) the last but three.
And what will be the next discovery in psychological science nobody can imagine; and we can only say that if it reveals demons and their name is Legion, we can hardly be much surprised now.

But at any rate the days are over of Omniscience like that of the _Hibbert_ critic, who knows exactly what he would know if he were God Almighty.
What is pain?
What is evil?
What did they mean by devils?
What do we mean by madness?
The rising generation, when asked by a venerable Victorian critic and catechist, "What does God know ?" will hardly think it unreasonably flippant to answer, "God knows." There was something already suggested about the steep scenery through which I went as I thought about these things; a sense of silent catastrophe and fundamental cleavage in the deep division of the cliffs and crags.

They were all the more profoundly moving, because my sense of them was almost as subconscious as the subconsciousness about which I was reflecting.
I had fallen again into the old habit of forgetting where I was going, and seeing things with one eye off, in a blind abstraction.
I awoke from a sort of trance of absentmindedness in a landscape that might well awaken anybody.

It might awaken a man sleeping; but he would think he was still in a nightmare.