Jesus Christ was not popular, nor were his principles. For a time, no doubt, people heard him gladly. He went about among them doing good, healing, compassionate. But when they realized how discordant with themselves his prophetic message really was they hounded him to death. 'Not this man but Barabbas,' they cried. Barabbas was far more popular than this prophet without honour in the country that should have known him best, and did know enough of him to be sure that he and his interests were alien from them and theirs.
It is this that stands in the gate of popularity over against an uncorrupted Christian religion, this separation from the people and their interests as they commonly are. The kingdom for which Jesus lived and died, the community of wisdom and love and self-giving, is not desired by the societies in which narrower self-interests reign. 'Change your minds,' the prophet must always say to his people, 'repent, change your minds about everything in the world, about yourselves, and about God.'
Can we wonder that bit by bit compromise creeps in? Anything so subversive must be accommodated here and there to things as they are, for things as they are have to remain—somehow. The popular conception of right government and right morals, the popular craving for magic and for royal roads and easy-going machines, for an assured salvation or an infallible guide, permeates insensibly the religion which a poetic religious genius has revealed. The divine voice is drowned in the shouting of men who will be heard and listened to. So, whether great Rome or the little Bethel be established in popularity, the Christian religion must have been corrupted in it to meet the desires and condone the sins and errors of the people who have so disastrously been won without being transformed.
Christianity became popular. Shall we, then, look for its truth in popular presentations of it? If science were popular, should we seek its truth that way? Or do we take popular philosophy, or the view of the world or of the British Constitution presented in newspapers, as our guide to the truth of these things? Yet it seems that when a man studies the Christian religion he does just what he would regard himself as a fool for doing in regard to any other serious matter. He takes it in its established and popular or once popular guise, and then says—'this, this, is what the Christian religion is.' And if another presentation is offered him, say that of the Gospels or the great mystics, prophets, saints, who have been nurtured in the true faith, and fed by the divine wisdom of Christ, he says it is not Christianity at all, because Christianity is and must be taken as the religion of Christians in the multitude, not as the private discoveries or inventions of certain gifted or peculiar men—those saints, prophets, mystics—or even as Jesus Christ himself, living, dying, living for ever, whom Nietzsche took to be the only Christian.