worker, nor as the fierce unreal torment of the cross, comes close to my soul.  I do not understand the Agony in the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play in an unknown tongue.  The la t cry of despair is the one human touch, discordant with all the rest of the story.  One cry of despair does not suffice.  The Christian’s Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not flesh enough, not earth enough.  He was never foolish and hot-eared and inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, nor tangled his miracles.  I could love him I think more easily if the dead had not risen and if he had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back more enhaloed and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own tragedy.

When I think of the Resurrection I am always reminded of the “happy endings” that editors and actor managers are accustomed to impose upon essentially tragic novels and plays...

You see how I stand in this matter, puzzled and confused by the Christian presentation of Christ.  I know there are many will answer—­as I suppose my friend the Rev. R.J.  Campbell would answer—­that what confuses me is the overlaying of the personality of Jesus by stories and superstitions and conflicting symbols; he will in effect ask me to disentangle the Christ I need from the accumulated material, choosing and rejecting.  Perhaps one may do that.  He does, I know, so present Him as a man inspired, and strenuously, inadequately and erringly presenting a dream of human brotherhood and the immediate Kingdom of Heaven on earth and so blundering to his failure and death.  But that will be a recovered and restored person he would give me, and not the Christ the Christians worship and declare they love, in whom they find their Salvation.

When I write “declare they love” I throw doubt intentionally upon the universal love of Christians for their Saviour.  I have watched men and nations in this matter.  I am struck by the fact that so many Christians fall back upon more humanized figures, upon the tender figure of Mary, upon patron saints and such more erring creatures, for the effect of mediation and sympathy they need.

You see it comes to this:  that I think Christianity has been true and is for countless people practically true, but that it is not true now for me, and that for most people it is true only with modifications.  Every believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother, but if systematically I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men I should imply too much and so tell a lie.

2.14.  Of other religions.