DOSTOEVSKY'S Idiot, Prince Lyov Myshkin, has often been compared with Christ. Of course such a comparison can be made. One can compare with the Saviour every man who lays bare magical truth, who no longer separates thought from life, and who on that account lives a life of solitude among hostile neighbours. From that point of view there seems to be no great likeness between Myshkin and Jesus. Only one trait in Myshkin's character, but that an important one, appears to me as Christlike. I allude to his timid, morbid purity. The secret fear of sex and of procreation is a trait which must be reckoned with in the message of Christ for it plays a distinct part in his world mission. Even the superficial portrait of Jesus by Renan does not entirely overlook this feature.
But it is curious—little as I sympathize with the constant comparison between Myshkin and Christ—that I also see the two intermingled in some strange fashion. This occurred to me only latterly and in connexion with a point of comparative insignificance. It came into my mind one day, while I was thinking of the Idiot, that my first thought of him was always an apparently secondary one. In the first flash of my imagination, I always see him in one particular minor side-scene, in itself not specially significant. And so it is with Christ. When any association suggests to me a presentation of Jesus or when the word of Christ meets my ear or my eye, then I never see Him on the Cross or in the desert, or as a miracle-worker or as a raiser of the dead. I see Him in that moment when He drinks the cup of solitude to the dregs in the Garden of Gethsemane, when His soul is torn by the agony of death through which He must pass to His higher birth, and how He then in a last moving and childlike longing for comfort, turns to His disciples. He turns to them for a little human warmth, for a fleeting illusion of affection in the midst of His bitter loneliness. He turns to them—and the disciples are asleep. There lie excellent Peter and beautiful
