Christianity - A Journey from Facts to Fiction — Page 152
152 Christianity – A Journey from Facts to Fiction P. D. Ouspensky, a prominent Russian journalist of the early twentieth century, writing on the subject of the re-advent of Jesus Christ as shared almost the same view. It is by no means a new idea that Christ as , if born on earth later, not only could not be the head of the Christian Church, but probably would not even belong to it, and in the most brilliant periods of the might and power of the Church would most certainly have been declared a heretic and burned at the stake. Even in our more enlightened times, when the Christian Churches, if they have not lost their anti-Christian features, have at any rate begun to conceal them, Christ as could have lived without suffering the persecution of the ‘scribes and Pharisees’ perhaps only somewhere in a Russian hermitage. * This is the only real process by which divine messengers and reformers are raised. Any concept other than this is hollow, spurious and meaningless. It always happens that at a time when the prophetic fulfilment of prophecies about the advent of Divine reformers takes place, the people for whose redemption they are sent fail to recognise him. In that period of history they have already transformed the image of their reformer from reality to fantasy. They begin to expect a fantasy to appear and materialize, while what happens is * P. D. Ouspensky, 'A New Model of the Universe', p. 149-150, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubener & Co. , Ltd 1938