t of God as love. Very good. I am
quite convinced that love is _the_ religion, _the_ tie which binds all
things together and to a common source and cause. And I am equally
convinced that Jesus is the only person recorded in history who ever
lived a life of pure reflection of the love which he called God. And
so you see why I am chipping and hewing away at the theological
conception of the Christ, and trying to get at the reality buried deep
beneath in the theological misconceptions of the centuries. I am quite
convinced that if men loved one another, as Jesus bade them do, all
war, strife, disease, poverty, and discord of every sort would vanish
from human experience. But--and here is a serious question--did Jesus
ask the impossible? Did he command us to love the sinful, erring
mortal whom we see in our daily walk--or did he--did he have a new
thought, namely, that by loving the real man, for which, perhaps, this
human concept stands in the human mind, _that this very act would
change that distorted concept and cause it to yield its place to the
real one_? I believe Jesus to have been the wisest man who ever trod
this earth. But I likewise believe that no man has ever been more
deplorably misunderstood, misquoted, and misinterpreted than he. And
so I am delving down, down beneath the mass of human conjecture and
ridiculous hypothesis which the Church Fathers and our own theologians
have heaped up over this unique character, if perchance I may some day
discover just what he was, just what he really said, and just what the
message which he sought to convey to mankind."

He leaned over and laid a hand on Jose's arm. "My young friend," he
said earnestly, "I believe there are meanings in the life and words of
Jesus of which the Church in its astounding self-sufficiency has never
even dreamed. Did he walk on the water? Did he feed the multitude with
a few loaves? Did he raise Lazarus? Did he himself issue from the
tomb? No more momentous questions were ever asked than these. For, if
so, _then the message of Jesus has a bearing on the material universe,
on the human mind, and the whole realm of thought that is utterly
revolutionary_! What was that message? Did the man's own apostles and
immediate followers understand it? Did Paul? Certain we are, however,
that the theology which Rome gave to her barbarian conquerors was
wholly different from that taught by Jesus and his disciples. And we
know that the history of Europe from th