These are the kind of thoughts which in combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased.
First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious--such people as the Irish--are weak, unpractical, and behind the times.

I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.
There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--and always like a god.

Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the _a fortiori_.
His "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds.

The diction used _about_ Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive.