Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

THE PRESENT SITUATION I 89
without significance that a historian of Israel,
brought up among celibate
Catholic monks, should
view with equanimity both the death of Christianity
and the survival of the gay people.
Renan boasted
that he alone in his century had understood Jesus and
Francis of Assisi. Well, long before St. Francis
was born, Gnostics had made the same boast about
their understanding of Jesus, and on their amulets
we see to this day the phallic serpent of the sun.
A historian should be the last person to boast.
Christianity is not dead; it has hardly begun to
live. It was a Hebraic revelation, and the experiment
of meeting modern problems in the spirit of
a purified Hebraism has never been tried. We have
tried a Puritan version of Hebraism; and it has
failed. We have tried Hellenized and Solarized
versions of Hebraism, and they have failed. But
the religion which brings eternity into time, which
gives a holy earnestness to practical effort, which
brings respect for law without idolatry of the law
—this is to be the achievement of the future. We
do not pretend to be able to state it in adequate
terms. We do not prophesy some sudden revolution
which will overcome the distance between
primitive types of men now surviving and the
higher type of man toward which our Lord pointed
us—though neither in biology nor in religion