ied and continuing under the power of
death for a time."

As I write the words I wonder that the thing should ever have seemed to
any one to be more than a wretched piece of God-jugglery, devoid of
integrity. Are we to conceive God then as a being of carnal appetites,
humiliated by being born into the family of an honest carpenter, instead
of into the family of a King? This is the somewhat snobbish imputation.

Let us be done with gods playing at being human, or at being half god and
half human. The time has come when, to prolong its usefulness, the Church
must concede--nay, proclaim--the manhood of Jesus; must separate him from
that atrocious scheme of human sacrifice, the logical extension of a
primitive Hebrew mythology--and take him in the only way that he commands
attention: As a man, one of the world's great spiritual teachers.
Insisting upon his godship can only make him preposterous to the modern
mind. Jesus, born to a carpenter's wife of Nazareth, declares himself, one
day about his thirtieth year, to be the Christ, the second person in the
universe, who will come in a cloud of glory to judge the world. He will
save into everlasting life those who believe him to be of divine origin.
Yet he has been called meek! Surely never was a more arrogant character in
history--never one less meek than this carpenter's son who ranks himself
second only to God, with power to send into everlasting hell those who
disbelieve him! He went abroad in fine arrogance, railing at lawyers and
the rich, rebuking, reproving, hurling angry epithets, attacking what we
to-day call "the decent element." He called the people constantly "Fools,"
"Blind Leaders of the Blind," "faithless and perverse," "a generation of
vipers," "sinful," "evil and adulterous," "wicked," "hypocrites," "whited
sepulchres."

As the god he worshipped was a tribal god, so he at first believed himself
to be a tribal saviour. He directed his disciples thus: "Go not into the
way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But
go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel"--(who emphatically
rejected and slew him for his pretensions). To the woman of Canaan whose
daughter was vexed with a devil, he said: "It is not meet to take the
children's bread to cast it to dogs." Imagine a God calling a woman a dog
_because she was not of his own tribe!_

And the vital test of godhood he failed to meet: It is his own test,
whereby he disproves his go