is in
him partaking of the nature of every living thing.

When, therefore, out of the bitterness of our fate we cry aloud
upon the Unknown, the answer to our cry comes from the heart
of Christ. In other words it comes from the epitome and
personification of all the love in the universe. For to the figure of
Christ has been brought, down the long ages of the world, all the
baffled, thwarted, broken, unsatisfied love in every soul that has
ever lived. It is in the heart of Christ that all the nameless sorrows
and miseries, of the innumerable lives that Nature gives birth to,
are stored up and remembered. Not one single pang, felt by plant
or animal or bird or fish or man or planet, but is embalmed for
ever in that mysterious store-house of the universal pity. Thus, if
there were no other superhuman Beings in the world and if apart
from the creative energy of all souls Christ would never have
existed, as it is now He _does_ exist because He _has_ been
created by the creative power of all souls.

But while in one sense the figure of Christ is the supreme work of
art of the world, the culminating achievement of the anonymous
creative energy of all souls, the turning of the transitory into the
eternal, of the mortal into the immortal, of the human into the
divine; in another sense the figure of Christ is a real and living
personality, the one personality among the gods, whose nature we
may indeed assume that we understand and know.

How should we not understand it, when it has been in so large a
measure created by our sorrow and our desire?

But the fact that the anonymous striving of humanity with the
objective mystery has in a sense created the figure of Christ does
not reduce the figure of Christ to a mere Ideal. As we have seen
with regard to the primordial ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness,
nothing can be an Ideal which has not already, in the eternal
system of things, existed as a reality.

What we call the pursuit of truth, or the creation of truth, what we
call the pursuit of beauty or the creation of beauty, is always a
_return_ to something which has been latent in the eternal nature
of the system of things. In other words, in all creation there is a
rediscovery, just as in all discovery there is creation.

The figure of Christ, therefore, the everlasting intermediary
between mortality and immortality, has been at once created and
discovered by humanity. When any living soul approaches the
figure of Chri