t death in every form, against the great death of the
race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness,
misconception, and perversion. He it is and no other who can deliver us
"from the body of this death." This is the battle that grows plainer;
this is the purpose to which he calls us out of the animal's round of
eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and laughing and weeping, fearing
and failing, and presently of wearying and dying, which is the
whole life that living without God can give us. And from these great
propositions there follow many very definite maxims and rules of life
for those who serve God. These we will immediately consider.

3. THE CRUCIFIX

But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind
of intermediate faith between the worship of the God of Youth and the
vaguer sort of Christianity. There are a number of people closely in
touch with those who have found the new religion who, biased probably
by a dread of too complete a break with Christianity, have adopted a
theogony which is very reminiscent of Gnosticism and of the Paulician,
Catharist, and kindred sects to which allusion has already been made.
He, who is called in this book God, they would call God-the-Son or
Christ, or the Logos; and what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled
Being, they would call God-the-Father. And what we speak of here as
Life, they would call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that
perish, Man. And they would assert, what we of the new belief, pleading
our profound ignorance, would neither assert nor deny, that that
Darkness, out of which came Life and God, since it produced them must be
ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them. And that ultimately
Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from death by him, would
be reconciled with God the Father.* And this great adventurer out of the
hearts of man that we here call God, they would present as the same with
that teacher from Galilee who was crucified at Jerusalem.

* This probably was the conception of Spinoza. Christ for
him is the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and
chiefly in the mind of man. Through him we reach the
blessedness of an intuitive knowledge of God. Salvation is
an escape from the "inadequate" ideas of the mortal human
personality to the "adequate" and timeless ideas of God.

Now we of the modern way would offer the following criticisms u