Thursday, April 5, 2012

"...for He opposed to him the God who felt Himself weak."

The doctrine that pain and death are not real at all, except in so far as their victims are cowardly enough to submit to them, is a diabolical doctrine, obviously calculated to produce all the purely diabolical qualities, such as intellectual cruelty and contempt for the weak. . . . Christ came on earth to smash the man who felt himself strong. And He did, in the most effective and final manner, smash the man who felt himself strong; for He opposed to him the God who felt Himself weak. Human beings henceforward were not to be humiliated by the limitations of pain and death; for Deity itself has admitted them. Christian Science says that pain is not a reality. Christianity says that pain is so great a reality that even the Creator could feel it. Christian Science says that a man need not think of death at all. Christianity says that even God thought of it with awe. Marred by a million other mistakes, betrayed and tortured through the agony of eighteen centuries, Christianity has never lost its strongest and most distinctive note, the physical note; the talk of the body and the blood. Ever since the Crucifixion a certain actuality, and, therefore, a certain sanctity, has clung round the hard pain of prosaic men.

-April 11, 1908, Daily News

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