t from the beginning.

Thus the name, the word, which we arrive at as the only possible
symbol of our hope is found to be, as soon as we reach it, no
longer merely a symbol but the outward sign of an invisible and
eternal truth. And thus although it remains that we are forced to
recognize that the world is full of gods and that the Person we
name Christ is only one of an innumerable company of invisible
companions to whom in our loneliness we have a right to turn, yet
just because the vision of humanity has found in Christ a
completer, subtler, more beautiful, more revolutionary figure upon
which to fix its hope than it has found in Buddha or Confucius or
Mahomet, or any other name, the figure of Christ has become the
supreme and solitary embodiment of the Ideal to which we look,
and about this figure has come to gather itself and focus itself all
the hopeless longing with which the soul of man turns to the souls
of the immortals.

These divine people of the abyss, these sons of the universe, are
for us henceforth and must be now for us for ever summed up and
embodied in this one figure, the only one among them all whose
nature and being has been drawn so near to us that we can
appropriate it to ourselves.

It remains that the unity of time and space contains an
immeasurable company of immortals; but of these immortals only
one has been articulated and outlined, and so to speak "touched
with the hand," by the troubled passion of humanity. Henceforth,
therefore, while the necessity of the complex vision compels us to
think of the invisible company of the sons of the universe as a vast
hierarchy of supernatural beings, the necessity of the complex
vision compels us also to recognize, that of this company, only
one--only one until the end of time--can be the true symbol of
what our heart desires.

It is better to think of the evocation of this figure as due to the pity
of the gods themselves and to the anonymous craving of humanity
than to think of him as dependent upon the historic evidence as to
the personality of Jesus. The soul requires something more certain
than historic evidence upon which to base its faith. It requires
something closer and more certain even than the divine "logoi"
attributed to the historic Jesus. It requires a living and a personal
soul for ever present to the depths of its own nature. It requires a
living and a personal soul for ever ready to answer the cry of its
love. The misery and unha