This letter ended by saying that if all the reforms suggested were carried out much would still remain to be done.  It would still be advisable to “humanise the governors of prisons, to civilise the warders, and to Christianise the Chaplains.”

This letter was the last effort of the new Oscar, the Oscar who had manfully tried to put the prison under his feet and to learn the significance of sorrow and the lesson of love which Christ brought into the world.

In the beautiful pages about Jesus which form the greater part of De Profundis, also written in those last hopeful months in Reading Gaol, Oscar shows, I think, that he might have done much higher work than Tolstoi or Renan had he set himself resolutely to transmute his new insight into some form of art.  Now and then he divined the very secret of Jesus: 

“When he says ‘Forgive your enemies’ it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate.  In his own entreaty to the young man, ’Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor,’ it is not of the state of the poor that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that wealth was marring.”

In many of these pages Oscar Wilde really came close to the divine Master; “the image of the Man of Sorrows,” he says, “has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god succeeded in doing."...  And again: 

“Out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely enough, destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on Cithaeron or Enna, has ever done.  The song of Isaiah, ’He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief:  and we hid as it were our faces from him,’ had seemed to him to prefigure himself, and in him the prophecy was fulfilled.”

In this spirit Oscar made up his mind that he would write about “Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life” and about “The artistic life considered in its relation to conduct.”

By bitter suffering he had been brought to see that the moment of repentance is the moment of absolution and self-realisation, that tears can wash out even blood.  In “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” he wrote: 

    And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
      The hand that held the steel: 
    For only blood can wipe out blood,
      And only tears can heal: 
    And the crimson stain that was of Cain
      Became Christ’s snow-white seal.

This is the highest height Oscar Wilde ever reached, and alas! he only trod the summit for a moment.  But as he says himself:  “One has perhaps to go to prison to understand that.  And, if so, it may be worth while going to prison.”  He was by nature a pagan who for a few months became a Christian, but to live as a lover of Jesus was impossible to this “Greek born out of due time,” and he never even dreamed of a reconciling synthesis....