ssion and loyalty He reigns in peace in the
kingdoms of the world.... Christ reigns in the individual who feebly
watches His footprints in the tangled mazes of life. {197} He reigns
in the community that is bound together in His name. As Divine
Humanity, and the Son of God, He reigns gloriously around us in the New
Dispensation.'[12]

Or listen to the rhapsody with which Mrs. Besant, once an Atheist, now
a Theosophist, depicts His influence from age to age: 'His the steady
inpouring of truth into every brain ready to receive it, so that hand
stretched out to hand across the centuries and passed on the torch of
knowledge, which thus was never extinguished. His the Form which stood
beside the rack and in the flames of the burning pile, cheering His
confessors and His martyrs, soothing the anguish of their pains and
filling their hearts with His peace. His the impulse which spoke in
the thunder of Savonarola, which guided the calm wisdom of Erasmus,
which inspired the deep ethics of the God-intoxicated Spinoza.... His
the beauty that allured Fra {198} Angelico and Raphael and Leonardo da
Vinci, that inspired the genius of Michael Angelo, that shone before
the eyes of Murillo, and that gave the power that raised the marvels of
the world, the Duomo of Milan, the San Marco of Venice, the Cathedral
of Florence. His the melody that breathed in the Masses of Mozart, the
sonatas of Beethoven, the oratorios of Handel, the fugues of Bach, the
austere splendour of Brahms. Through the long centuries He has striven
and laboured, and, with all the mighty burden of the Churches to carry,
He has never left uncared for and unsolaced one human heart that cried
to Him for help.'[13] When we read sentences like these by themselves
we say, Here is unqualified acceptance of the Christian Faith. And
even when we are told that we must not take the sentences in their
literal and natural meaning, that they apply not to Him Whose earthly
{199} career is sketched in the Gospels, but to an Ideal Being evolved
out of the writer's imagination, we are surely entitled to answer, It
is of Jesus that the words are spoken, whether their meaning is to be
taken literally or figuratively; if they have any meaning at all, they
indicate a Being without a parallel. That there should be so
extraordinary a conflict of opinion regarding Him, that the greatest
intellects as well as the simplest souls should hail Him as Divine,
that the most critical should