Mr. Allen Upward, better known to fame as a war correspondent, has attempted to give us “a reading of the history of Christianity down to the time of Christ,” and however much we may disagree with some of his conclusions we must at least applaud the sincerity and the originality as well as the erudition of his effort. Mr. Upward finds in the dawn of Christianity a story that has been told mystically from age to age. Its words and signs are inherited from a primeval language, from prehistoric peoples, and from tales that are still the Bible of the peasant and the child. It is, he says, a recrystallization of universal fears and hopes, carried out in the crucible of a planetary heat wave, whose coming had been more or less distinctly felt by “a series of true prophets from Zoroaster to John the Baptist.” Mr. Upward believes that Christ was an historical personage, but that the story of his life is an allegorical repetition of the greater story that is as old as the world it— self. To this end he collects all the threads of folklore within his reach, all the “superstitions” that perhaps are not superstitions, and that tend to show the stirrings of a higher consciousness and knowledge that culminates in the genius and the savior. If sometimes he seems to be inadequate or superficial we must remember the greatness, the almost incredible magnitude of the quarries from which he hews.
