Herod 

Today has been one of those perfect winter days, cold, brilliant and utterly still, when the bark of a shepherd’s dog carries for miles, and the great wild mountains come up close to the city walls…

Barges are unloading soil fertilizer at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular.

…Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun….

Yet even inside this little civilized patch itself where at the cost of heaven knows how much grief and bloodshed it has been made unnecessary for anyone over the age of twelve to believe in fairies ….so many are still homesick for that disorder wherein every passion formerly enjoyed a frantic license….and everywhere, including this province, new prophets spring up every day to sound the old barbaric note…..

Reason is helpless..For the Public has grown too sophisticated. Under all the charming metaphors  and symbols, it detects the stern command " Be and act heroically";behind the myth of divine origin it senses the real human excellence that is a reproach to its own baseness…So with a bellow of rage it kicks Poetry downstairs .."..I asked for a God who should be as like me as possible. What use to me is a God whose divinity consists in doing difficult things..The God I want and intend to get must be someone I can recognize immediately...There must be nothing in the least extraordinary…Produce him at once, please I’m sick of waiting”

Today, apparently, judging by the trio who came to see me this morning with an ecstatic grin on their scholarly faces, the job has been done. “God has been born” they cried, “we have seen him ourselves".  

One needn’t be much of a psychologist to realize that if this rumour is not stamped out now in a few years it is capable of diseasing the whole Empire.

………Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: “I’m such a sinner that God has to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.” Every crook will argue: “I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.”….The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen. Civilization must be saved even if this means sending for the military as I suppose it does. How dreary. Why is it that in the end civilization always has to call in these professional tidiers to whom it is all one whether it be Pythagoras or a homicidal lunatic they are instructed to exterminate?. O dear, Why couldn’t this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can’t they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is. And suppose, just for the sake of argument, that it isn’t, that this story is true, that this child is in some inexplicable manner both God and Man, that he grows up, lives, and dies, without committing a single sin? Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far worse. For it could only mean this; that once having shown them  how, God would expect every man…to lead a sinless life in the flesh and on earth….And for me personally at this moment it would mean that God had given me the power to destroy Himself.

I refuse to be taken in. He could not play such a horrible practical joke. Why should He dislike me so? I’ve worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. How   dare He allow me to decide? I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven’t had sex for a month. I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born.

From: The Massacre of the Innocents

For the Time Being

W.H. Auden