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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
great yogi or mystic--possibly, too, he was known as Jesus-who preached the doctrine of the kingdom of heaven is not improbable, though he would seem to have been the ingenious author of, rather than the chief actor in, the immortal Drama of Life, which, in all probability, would never have seen the light of day if it could have been foreseen with reference to it that it might pass current as a narrative of actual facts. It is to be noted that we are not dealing here with a case where an historical nucleus is needed to account for subsequent deification; the documents before us are purely mythological in their nature, and cannot be construed as history. The only real personage at the back of this huge tangle of mythical lore is the composer of the original work which seems to have furnished the source and substratum of the elaborate and mutually contradictory accounts of the gospels; but unfortunately he has not deemed it fit to reveal himself to the world. That he was a man of considerable wisdom and enlightenment and familiar with some of the most abstruse doctrines of mysticism and yoga is evident from his work, though, for obvious reasons, we are precluded from regarding the gospel-narratives as his auto-biography. Assuming, however, that he was the central figure whom the gospel-writers vied with each other in covering over with wreaths of beautiful allegory, the historical substratum
Revolution we have not only the works of Volney and Dupuis, reducing the gospel biography to a set of astronomical myths, but the anonymous German work mentioned by Strauss as reducing it to an ideal which had a prior existence in the Jewish mind, though admitting divergences."
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