rate. Between the rejection of the stories as wholly
fabulous and the acceptance of them as the evangelists themselves meant
them to be accepted, there will be many shades of belief and disbelief,
of sympathy and derision. It is not a question of being a Christian or
not. A Mahometan Arab will accept literally and without question parts
of the narrative which an English Archbishop has to reject or explain
away; and many Theosophists and lovers of the wisdom of India, who never
enter a Christian Church except as sightseers, will revel in parts of
John's gospel which mean nothing to a pious matter-of-fact Bradford
manufacturer. Every reader takes from the Bible what he can get. In
submitting a precis of the gospel narratives I have not implied any
estimate either of their credibility or of their truth. I have simply
informed him or reminded him, as the case may be, of what those
narratives tell us about their hero.

CHRISTIAN ICONOLATRY AND THE PERILS OF THE ICONOCLAST.

I must now abandon this attitude, and make a serious draft on the
reader's attention by facing the question whether, if and when the
medieval and Methodist will-to-believe the Salvationist and miraculous
side of the gospel narratives fails us, as it plainly has failed the
leaders of modern thought, there will be anything left of the mission
of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels into the
waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our
libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the
position of the man in Bunyan's riddle who found that "the more he threw
away, the more he had. "We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or
iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship
which is given to pictures and statues of him, and to finished and
unalterable stories about him. The test of the prevalence of this is
that if you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person, or even as a
still active God, such worshippers are more horrified than Don Juan was
when the statue stepped from its pedestal and came to supper with
him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you may doubt whether he
ever existed; you may reject Christianity for Judaism, Mahometanism,
Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the iconolaters, placidly contemptuous,
will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen. But if you venture
to wonder how Christ would have looked if he had shaved and had his hair
cut, or wha