mries?" she asked
softly.

"I don't," he answered earnestly. "Knowing people is a subjective
affair. I know you as one person. Your brother knows you as another. You
may know yourself as very different from either of the two. It's the
same way with Jesus. We both made his acquaintance in the same way, so
we are both entitled to our opinion. But look here. You think Imrie's
nearer to Jesus than I am, don't you?"

"Why, really, I...." she stammered and coloured slightly.

"Of course you do. Well, I ask you this. Do you honestly think that
Imrie's Jesus--the Jesus he serves up to you on Sundays,--the cold,
logical, snobbish abstraction--would ever have gotten anybody so sore
that they'd crucify him? Of course you don't. Well what do you think
that congregation would do to me if I got up in the pulpit and gave _my_
Jesus--the fiery, human, uninspired, blood-red revolutionary that I
conceive him to be? You know without my telling you. Why, they'd have me
arrested if I used his own thoughts expressed in modern language--yes,
if I used his actual words--and _applied_ them. Suppose Imrie took that
stuff about the millstone, and applied it to Corey's cash girls and
delivery boys. Do you think the old man would be anxious to hear Imrie
again?"

"You seem to have thought a great deal about Jesus," said Judith, with a
faintly veiled sarcasm. But he did not sense that.

"Yes," he said naively. "Haven't you?"

She was silent at the unconscious rebuke, profoundly stirred by the
paradoxicality of the situation. She wanted to answer him in the
affirmative, wanted to very, very much. But she knew that she could not.
Jesus was not the living, breathing companion of every day that he
seemed to be to this irreverent infidel. He was far more sacred to her,
but far less a vital factor in the commonplaces of existence. She was
honest enough to admit it. But he appeared not to notice her tacit
confession.

"You see," he went on patiently, as if expounding a very simple problem
to a rather young and stupid child, "your stained-glass faith isn't
founded on Jesus at all. You're a Paulist. Like him, you're a Roman
citizen, an aristocrat, a mystic. Jesus wasn't any of those things. He
was the next thing to a slave, a man of the common people, and for all
purposes of comparison, a thorough-going materialist. He had no dogma
to preach, other than that the kingdom of the earth should belong to the
dwellers therein. But Paul was a different sor