and religious
observance out of which I and most of my readers have come. How do these
beliefs on which I base my rule of conduct stand to Christianity?

They do not stand in any attitude of antagonism. A religious system so
many-faced and so enduring as Christianity must necessarily be saturated
with truth even if it be not wholly true. To assume, as the Atheist and
Deist seem to do, that Christianity is a sort of disease that came
upon civilization, an unprofitable and wasting disease, is to deny that
conception of a progressive scheme and rightness which we have taken
as our basis of belief. As I have already confessed, the Scheme of
Salvation, the idea of a process of sorrow and atonement, presents
itself to me as adequately true. So far I do not think my new faith
breaks with my old. But it follows as a natural consequence of my
metaphysical preliminaries that I should find the Christian theology
Aristotelian, over defined and excessively personified. The painted
figure of that bearded ancient upon the Sistine Chapel, or William
Blake's wild-haired, wild-eyed Trinity, convey no nearer sense of God
to me than some mother-of-pearl-eyed painted and carven monster from
the worship of the South Sea Islanders. And the Miltonic fable of the
offended creator and the sacrificial son! it cannot span the circle of
my ideas; it is a little thing, and none the less little because it is
intimate, flesh of my flesh and spirit of my spirit, like the drawings
of my youngest boy. I put it aside as I would put aside the gay figure
of a costumed officiating priest. The passage of time has made his
canonicals too strange, too unlike my world of common thought and
costume. These things helped, but now they hinder and disturb. I cannot
bring myself back to them...

But the psychological experience and the theology of Christianity are
only a ground-work for its essential feature, which is the conception
of a relationship of the individual believer to a mystical being at once
human and divine, the Risen Christ. This being presents itself to the
modern consciousness as a familiar and beautiful figure, associated with
a series of sayings and incidents that coalesce with a very distinct and
rounded-off and complete effect of personality. After we have cleared
off all the definitions of theology, He remains, mystically suffering
for humanity, mystically asserting that love in pain and sacrifice in
service are the necessary substance of Salva