pon this
apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion. Firstly,
we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the veiled being nor
about that being's relations to God and to Life. We do not recognise any
consistent sympathetic possibilities between these outer beings and our
God. Our God is, we feel, like Prometheus, a rebel. He is unfilial. And
the accepted figure of Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in
the tone of our worship. It is not by suffering that God conquers death,
but by fighting. Incidentally our God dies a million deaths, but the
thing that matters is not the deaths but the immortality. It may be he
cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross
or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock. These may be necessary
sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in
themselves bring victory. They may be necessary, but they are not
glorious. The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-drenched
figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, "My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" these things jar with our spirit. We little men
may well fail and repent, but it is our faith that our God does not fail
us nor himself. We cannot accept the Christian's crucifix, or pray to
a pitiful God. We cannot accept the Resurrection as though it were an
after-thought to a bitterly felt death. Our crucifix, if you must have
a crucifix, would show God with a hand or a foot already torn away from
its nail, and with eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a
face without pain, pain lost and forgotten in the surpassing glory of
the struggle and the inflexible will to live and prevail. . . .

But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible the
wounds, so long as he does not droop. God is courage. God is courage
beyond any conceivable suffering.

But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns the
figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the figure of
God, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for divine action. The
figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think of it as being no
more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man who proclaimed the
loving-kindness of God and the supremacy of God's kingdom over
the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of his pain and
exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes something altogether
distinct from a theological symbol. Imme