tion. Whether he actually
existed as a finite individual person in the opening of the Christian
era seems to me a question entirely beside the mark. The evidence at
this distance is of imperceptible force for or against. The Christ we
know is quite evidently something different from any finite person,
a figure, a conception, a synthesis of emotions, experiences and
inspirations, sustained by and sustaining millions of human souls.

Now it seems to be the common teaching of almost all Christians, that
Salvation, that is to say the consolidation and amplification of one's
motives through the conception of a general scheme or purpose, is to be
attained through the personality of Christ. Christ is made cardinal to
the act of Faith. The act of Faith, they assert, is not simply, as I
hold it to be, BELIEF, but BELIEF IN HIM.

We are dealing here, be it remembered, with beliefs deliberately
undertaken and not with questions of fact. The only matters of fact
material here are facts of experience. If in your experience Salvation
is attainable through Christ, then certainly Christianity is true for
you. And if a Christian asserts that my belief is a false light and that
presently I shall "come to Christ," I cannot disprove his assertion. I
can but disbelieve it. I hesitate even to make the obvious retort.

I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I assert that this great
and very definite personality in the hearts and imaginations of mankind
does not and never has attracted me. It is a fact I record about myself
without aggression or regret. I do not find myself able to associate Him
in any way with the emotion of Salvation.

I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of a divine-human
friend and mediator. If it were possible to have access by prayer, by
meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to such a being whose feet
were in the darknesses, who stooped down from the light, who was at once
great and little, limitless in power and virtue and one's very brother;
if it were possible by sheer will in believing to make and make one's
way to such a helper, who would refuse such help? But I do not find such
a being in Christ. I do not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish
I could. To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as
an incomprehensibly sinless being neither God nor man. His sinlessness
wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his white self unchanged.
He had no petty weakne