Christ return? Must the
earth be saved again and again and a billion times again? Awful thought
of a God descending to a horrible death to cleanse the nameless myriads
from sins which they seek ever as flies treacle. More ghastly still is
the thought that the atheist Scandinavian put into the mouth of his
Julian the Apostate: When our Christ is not saving this earth from
eternal damnation then he may be visiting remote planets or inaccessible
stars, where coloured double suns of blinding brilliancy revolve
terrifically in twin harness. There, too, are souls to be rescued. What
a grand idea! It is Ibsen's, as is the interpretation of the Third
Kingdom. It should have been Nietzsche's. Why this antinomianism? Why
this eternal conflict of evil and good, of night and day, of sweet and
sour, of God and devil, of Ormuzd and Ahriman?"

The exotic names transposed his thoughts to another avenue. If Christ is
to come again, and the holy word explicitly states that He will, why not
Buddha? Why not Brahma? Why not ...? Again a hiatus. This time something
snapped in his head. He sank back in his chair. Buddha! Was there ever a
Buddha? And if there was not, was there ever such a personality as
Christ's? Scholar that he was he knew that myth-building was a pastime
for the Asiatic imagination, great, impure, mysterious Asia--Asia the
mother of all religions, the cradle of the human race. To deny the
objective existence of Christ would set at rest all his doubts, one
overwhelming doubt swallowing the minor doubts. He had never speculated
at length upon the Christ legend, for did not Renan, yes, that silky
heretic, believe in the personality of Jesus, believe and lovingly
portray it? The Nietzsche doctrine of the eternal recurrence had so
worked upon his sensitive mental apparatus that he could have almost
denied the existence of Christ rather than deny that our universe
repeats itself infinitely. Eternity is a wheel, earthly events are the
spokes of this whirring wheel. It was the seeming waste of divine
material that shocked his nerves. One crucifixion--yes; but two or two
quintillions and infinitely more!

Brother Hyzlo stared at the crucifix. Was it only a symbol, as some
learned blasphemers averred? The human figure so painfully extended
upon it was a God, a God who descended from high heaven to become a
shield between the wrath of His Father and humanity. Why? Why should the
God who created us grow angry with our shortcomings? We