under the ægis of a triumphant and even an avenging Messiah. It is this Messianic dream perpetuated in the modern Cabala which nineteen hundred years ago the advent of Christ on earth came to disturb.
The Coming of the Redeemer
The fact that many Christian doctrines, such as the conception of a Trinity, the miraculous birth and murder of a Deity, had found a place in earlier religions has frequently been used as an argument to show that the story of Christ was merely a new version of various ancient legends, those of Attis, Adonis, or of Osiris, and that consequently the Christian religion is founded on a myth. The answer to this is that the existence of Christ on earth is an historic fact which no serious authority has ever denied. The attempts of such writers as Drews and J.M. Robertson to establish the theory of the "Christ-Myth," which find an echo in the utterances of Socialist orators, have been met with so much able criticism as to need no further refutation. Sir James Frazer, who will certainly not be accused of bigoted orthodoxy, observes in this connexion:
The doubts which have been cast on the historical reality of Jesus are, in my judgement, unworthy of serious attention.... To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth, as some would do, is hardly less absurd than it would be to do the same for Mohammed, Luther, and Calvin.<sup></sup>
May not the fact that certain circumstances in the life of Christ were foreshadowed by earlier religions indicate, as Eliphas Lévi observes, that the ancients had an intuition of Christian mysteries?
To those therefore who had adhered to the ancient tradition, Christ appeared as the fulfilment of a prophecy as old as the world. Thus the wise men came from afar to worship the Babe of Bethlehem, and when they saw