Christianity is, of course, not the only religion that has found the best explanation of human life in the idea of an incarnate and suffering god. We might, therefore, prefer not to take this tale too seriously - there are disquieting points about it. Here we had a man of Divine character walking and talking among us - and what did we find to do with him? The common people, indeed, "heard him gladly"; but our leading authorities in Church and State considered that he talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths. So we bribed one of his friends to hand him over quietly to the police, and we tried him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance, and had him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, "thanking God we were rid of a knave." All this was not very creditable to us, even if he was (as many people thought and think) only a harmless crazy preacher. But if the Church is right about him, it was more discreditable still; for the man we hanged was God Almighty.



So that is the outline of the official story - the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull - this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero.



from The Greatest Drama, by Dorothy L. Sayers, who was born on this date, the feast of Saint Anthony of Padua, in 1893.