This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which
popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical
discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second
half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world,
also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy
in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used
as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem;
who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night.
It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle
when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces;
and it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar
under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born.
But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical
in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd.
God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures,
curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures
that he made had come to life.
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end,
has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands
that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads
of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest,
all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest
in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see.
He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly
and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable
something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something
that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true.
When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local
infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in,
sung, shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns,
carols, rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may
be suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention
to something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems
to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke....Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely
make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn
into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique.
Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.
-The Everlasting Man (1925)
Merry Christ's Mass!
:-)
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