s to be a mere conception of the intellect, and
becomes an objective reality which we can touch and appeal to
with our emotion, our imagination, and our aesthetic sense.
But although Christ as our symbolic image of the invisible
companions, must be assumed to be the objective standard of all
our ideas of truth, it is obvious that we cannot escape from
subjectivity in our individual interpretation of his deeper and truer
vision.

Thus there are two parallel streams of growth and change. There is
growth and change in the soul of Christ as he continually
approximates nearer and nearer to his eternally receding ideal.
And there is growth and change in the accumulated harmony of
our individual ideas about his ideal, as each human soul and each
generation of human souls restates this ideal in terms of its own
limited vision.

Each new restatement of this accumulated interpretation of the
ideal of the son of man brings necessarily with it an innate
conviction of its truth because it finds an immediate response in
every individual soul in so far as such individual souls are able to
overcome their intrinsic evil or malice.

What Jesus did for the universe was to recognize in it the peculiar
nature of that love which is its essential life. He would have done
yet more for it had he been able to disassociate his vision from the
conception of an imaginary father of the universe and from his
traditional interest in the tribal god of his ancestors. But Jesus
remains the one human soul who has revealed to us in his own
subjective vision the essential secret of the vision of the
immortals. And that he has done so is proved by the fact that all
his words and actions have come to be inextricably associated with
the Christ-idea.

In this way Jesus remains the profoundest of all human philosophers
and the subtlest of all human psychologists; and although
we have the right to disassociate the Christ-idea from the
sublime illusion of Jesus which led him to confuse the invisible
companions of humanity with the tribal God of the Hebrews, we
are compelled to recognize that Jesus has done so much for
humanity by the depth of his psychological insight that we do not
experience any shock when in the ritual of the Church the name of
the son of David becomes identical with the name of Christ.

The essential thing to establish is that there are greater depths in
the Christ-idea than even Jesus was able to fathom; and that
compared with the so