know you not of Mithra the king, and of Zoroaster the prophet of the Persians, who woke from man’s ancient sleep and stood at the bed of our dreaming?
We ourselves become man anointed when we meet in the Temple Invisible, once every thousand years. Then comes one forth embodied, and at His coming our silence turns to singing.
Yet our ears turn not always to listening nor our eyes to seeing.
Jesus the Nazarene was born and reared like ourselves; His mother and father were like our parents, and He was a man.
But the Christ, the Word, who was in the beginning, the Spirit who would have us live our fuller life, came unto Jesus and was with Him.
And the Spirit was the versèd hand of the Lord, and Jesus was the harp.
The Spirit was the psalm, and Jesus was the turn thereof.
And Jesus, the Man of Nazareth, was the host and the mouthpiece of the Christ, who walked with us in the sun and who called us His friends.
In those days the hills of Galilee and her valleys heard but His voice. And I was a youth then, and trod in His path and pursued His footprints.
I pursued His footprints and trod in His path, to hear the words of the Christ from the lips of Jesus of Galilee.
Now you would know why some of us call Him the Son of Man.
He Himself desired to be called by that name, for He knew the hunger and the thirst of man, and He beheld man seeking after His greater self.
The Son of Man was Christ the Gracious, who would be with us all.
He was Jesus the Nazarene who would lead His brothers to the Anointed One, even to the Word which was in the beginning with God.
In my heart dwells Jesus of Galilee, the Man above men, the Poet who makes poets of us all, the Spirit who knocks at our door that we may wake and rise and walk out to meet truth naked and unencumbered.
A Young Priest of Capernaum
He was a magician, warp and woof, and a sorcerer, a man who bewildered the simple by charms and incantations. And He juggled with the words of our prophets and with the sanctities of our forefathers.
Aye, He even bade the dead be His witnesses, and the voiceless graves His forerunners and authority.
He sought the women of Jerusalem and the women of the countryside with the cunning of the spider that seeks the fly; and they were caught in His web.
For women are weak and empty-headed, and they follow the man who would comfort their unspent passion with soft and tender words. Were it not for these women, infirm and possessed by His evil spirit, His name would have been erased from the memory of man.
And who were the men who followed Him?
They were of the horde that are yoked and trodden down. In their ignorance and fear they would never have rebelled against their rightful masters. But when He promised them high stations in His kingdom of mirage, they yielded to His fantasy as clay to the potter.
Know you not, the slave in his dreaming would always be master; and the weakling would be a lion?
The Galilean was a conjuror and a deceiver, a man who forgave the sins of all sinners that He might hear Hail and Hosanna from their unclean mouths; and who fed the faint heart of the hopeless and the wretched that He might have ears for His voice and a retinue at His command.
He broke the Sabbath with those who break that He might gain the support of the lawless; and He spoke ill of our high priests that He might win attention in Sanhedrin, and by opposition increase His fame.
I have said often that I hated that man. Ay, I hate Him more than I hate the Romans who govern our country. Even His coming was from Nazareth, a town cursed by our prophets, a dunghill of the Gentiles, from which no good shall ever proceed.
A Rich Levite in the Neighbourhood of Nazareth
He was a good carpenter. The doors He fashioned were never unlocked by thieves, and the windows he made were always ready to open to the east wind and to the west.
And He made chests of cedar wood, polished and enduring, and ploughs and pitchforks strong and yielding to the hand.
And He carved lecterns for our synagogues. He carved them out of the golden mulberry; and on both sides of the support, where the sacred book lies, He chiselled wings outspreading; and under the support, heads of bulls and doves, and large-eyed deer.
All this He wrought in the manner of the Chaldeans and the Greeks. But there was that in His skill which was neither Chaldean nor Greek.
Now this my house was builded by many hands thirty years ago. I sought builders and carpenters in all the towns of Galilee. They had each the skill and the art of building, and I was pleased and satisfied with all that they did.
But come now, and behold two doors and a window that were fashioned by Jesus of Nazareth. They in their stability mock at all else in my house.
See you not that these two doors are different from all other doors? And this window opening to the east, is it not different from other windows?
All my doors and windows are yielding to the years save these which He made. They alone stand strong against the elements.
And see those crossbeams, how he placed them; and these nails, how they are driven from one side of the board, and then caught and fastened so firmly upon the other side.
And what is passing strange is that that labourer who was worthy the wages of two men received but the wage of one man; and that same labourer now is deemed a prophet in Israel.
Had I known then that this youth with saw and plane
