sses.

Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses. If I am
to have that love, that sense of understanding fellowship, which is,
I conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this idea of a personal
Saviour, then I need someone quite other than this image of virtue, this
terrible and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of thorns, his
blood-stained hands and feet. I cannot love him any more than I can
love a man upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I do not think
I should feel a need for him. I had rather then a hundred times have
Botticelli's armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope I do not seem
to want to shock in writing these things, but indeed my only aim is to
lay my feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealized person can be.
It happens that in my younger days I found a character in the history
of literature who had a singular and extraordinary charm for me, of
whom the thought was tender and comforting, who indeed helped me through
shames and humiliations as though he held my hand. This person was
Oliver Goldsmith. His blunders and troubles, his vices and vanities,
seized and still hold my imagination. The slights of Boswell, the
contempt of Gibbon and all his company save Johnson, the exquisite
fineness of spirit in his "Vicar of Wakefield," and that green suit of
his and the doctor's cane and the love despised, these things together
made him a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I thought of him as
others pray. When I think of that youthful feeling for Goldsmith, I know
what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte who has seen a candle
can imagine the sun. But the Christian Christ in none of his three
characteristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from whom I am cut off
by the wanton and indecent purity of the Immaculate Conception), nor
as the white-robed, spotless miracle worker, nor as the fierce unreal
torment of the cross, comes close to my soul. I do not understand the
Agony in the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play in an unknown
tongue. The la t cry of despair is the one human touch, discordant with
all the rest of the story. One cry of despair does not suffice. The
Christian's Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not
flesh enough, not earth enough. He was never foolish and hot-eared
and inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, nor tangled his
miracles. I could love him I think more easily if the dead had not risen
and if h