altogether drowned in the abyss as though they had never been.
There is a certain outrage about this annihilation of the very
memory of pain against which humanity protests.

But it is necessary at this point to beware of the old pathetic
fallacy of human thought, the fallacy of assuming that to be true,
which we desire to be true. What our complex vision reveals as to
the nature of the gods does not satisfy in any obvious or facile
manner this bitter need of humanity. If it did so satisfy it, then for
some profound and mysterious reason man's own aesthetic sense
would revolt against it, would indignantly reject it, as too smooth
an answer to life's mystery.

For man's aesthetic sense seems in some strange way to be in
league with a certain inveterate tragedy in things, which no facile
optimism can ever cajole or melt.

That the gods are aware of our existence can hardly be doubted. That
they feel pity for us, in this or that significant hour, can easily
be imagined. That the evil in us draws towards us what is evil in
them seems likewise a not unnatural possibility. That the love in
us draws towards us the love in them is a thing in complete
accordance with our own relation to forms of life lower than
ourselves. That even at certain moments the gods may, by a kind
of celestial vampirizing, use the bodily senses of men to "fill out,"
as it were, what is lacking in their own materiality, is a
conceivable speculation.

But it is not in any definite relation between the individual soul of
man and the individual soul of any one of the immortals that our
hope lies. If this were all that we could look for, our condition
would be as miserable as the condition of those unhappy ones who
seek intermittent and fantastic relief in attempted intercourse with
the psychic and the occult.

Our hope lies in that immemorial and traditional human gesture
which has, in the unique figure of Christ, gathered up and focussed,
as it were, all the vague and floating intimations of super-human
sympathy, all the shadowy rumours and intimations of super-human
help, which move to and fro in the background of our apprehension.

The figure of Christ has thus become something more than a mere
name arbitrarily given by us to some nameless god. The figure of
Christ has become a symbol, an intermediary, a kind of cosmic
high-priest, standing between all that is mortal and all that is
immortal in the world, and by means of the love and pity that