The Wanderings of a Spiritualist

The voyage back from New Zealand to Melbourne was pleasant and / uneventful, though the boat was small and there was a sea rough enough / to upset many of the passengers. We were fortunate in our Captain, / Doorby, who, I found, was a literary confrere with two books to his / credit, one of them a record of the relief ship _Morning_, in which he / had served at the time of Scott's first expedition, the other a little / book, "The Handmaiden of the Navy," which gave some of his adventures / and experiences in the merchant service during the great war. He had / been torpedoed once, and had lost, on another occasion, nearly all his / crew with plague, so that he had much that was interesting to talk / about. Mr. Blake, of the _Strand Magazine_, was also on board. A / Unitarian Minister, Mr. Hale, was also a valuable companion, and we had / much discussion over the origins of Christianity, which was the more / interesting to me as I had taken advantage of the voyage to re-read the / Acts and Paul's Epistles. There are no documents which can be read so / often and yet reveal something new, the more so when you have that / occult clue which is needful before Paul can be understood. It is / necessary also to know something of Mythra worship and the other / philosophies which Paul had learned, and woven into his Christianity. I / have stated elsewhere my belief that all expressions about redemption by / blood, the blood of the lamb, etc., are founded upon the parallel of the / blood of the bull which was shed by the Mythra-worshippers, and in which / they were actually baptised.

Enlarging upon this, Mr. Hale pointed out / on the authority, if I remember right, of Pfleiderer's "Christian / Origins," that in the Mythra service something is placed over the / candidate, a hide probably, which is called "putting on Mythra," and / corresponds with Paul's expression about "putting on Christ. " Paul, with / his tremendous energy and earnestness, fixed Christianity upon the / world, but I wonder what Peter and those who had actually heard Christ's / words thought about it all. We have had Paul's views about Christ, but / we do not know Christ's views about Paul. He had been, as we are told by / himself, a Jewish Pharisee of the strictest type in his youth at / Jerusalem, but was a Roman citizen, had lived long at Tarsus, which was / a centre of Mithraism, and was clearly famous for his learning, since / Festus twitted him with it. The simple tenets of the carpenter and the / fishermen would take strange involved forms in such a brain as that. His / epistles are presumably older than the gospels, which may, in their / simplicity, represent a protest against his confused theology.