als.

Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as every other babe ever born
into the world. He was of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of
mankind. The scriptural account of his "immaculate conception" is a
beautiful myth, but scarcely more of a miracle than the conception of
all other babes.

Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but
for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of
which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an
intellectual, moral and spiritual human being.

The chronicles of his time and of later days are filled with
contradictory and absurd stories about him and he has been disfigured
and distorted by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by
ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their blind bigotry and
savage superstition, but there is no impenetrable myth surrounding the
personality of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being or an
allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others have shown us, a flesh
and blood Man in the fulness of his matchless powers and the
completeness of his transcendent consecration.

To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and pervasive as a historic
character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx. He has persisted
in spite of two thousand years of theological emasculation to destroy
his revolutionary personality, and is today the greatest moral force in
the world.

The vain attempt persisted in through twenty centuries of ruling class
interpolation, interpretation and falsification to make Jesus appear the
divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and soother of the
oppressed, instead of the master proletarian revolutionist and sower of
the social whirlwind--the vain attempt to prostitute the name and
teachings and example of the martyred Christ to the power of Mammon, the
very power which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates his
transcendent genius and proclaims the immortality of his work.

Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except that at twelve his
parents took him to Jerusalem, where he confounded the learned doctors
by the questions he asked them. We have no knowledge as to what these
questions were, but taking his lowly birth, his poverty and suffering
into account, in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which now dazzled
his vision, and in the light of his subsequent career we are not left to
conjecture as to the nature of th