offices of religion. It proclaims that Jesus was not a human
individual or person at all, but a Divine being energising in two
natures, the Divine and the human, so that when he used the pronoun
"I," it was the Deity himself, not a man, who spoke. I say this is a
gross misstatement by exaggeration, unknown to the prophet himself,
unknown to his followers and biographers, and unknown to many Christian
writers before the fatal epoch of Athanasius, who emphatically assert
that Jesus is not to be worshipped as the Father.[1] The doctrine errs
also by defect, because it fails to recognise the divinity of all the
sons of the Supreme. Jesus is made to be exclusively Divine, the sole
possessor of Divine sonship, and only through him are others put in the
way of attaining to the same privilege. "But as many as received him,"
says the Alexandrian rhapsodist who wrote the prologue to the fourth
gospel, "he gave them the power or the faculty to be made the sons of
God, as many as believe in his name."

This account of the matter we conceive to be immeasurably below the
truth. No mediator is needed between the soul and the Soul of our
souls; no intercessor or redeemer. This perverse conception originated
in the supposition that man was, and is, a fallen and a falling being,
owing to the fatal legacy bequeathed by our presumptive parent, Adam;
but Genesis being wholly and avowedly mythical in its opening chapters,
the Pauline dialectic in the fifth chapter of the Romans falls to the
ground, and with it the laborious argumentations of the epistle to the
Hebrews, which essays to prove that the most sternly anti-sacerdotal
prophet who ever lived was a full-fledged priest; the man who never
conducted a ritualistic service in his life set forth as "a high priest
for ever according to the order of Melchisedech," the only and eternal
redeemer of humanity from the consequences of the misdeeds of an
aboriginal parent who had no existence. No; before Agamemnon men were
brave, before Aristides they were just, before Jesus they were in their
innermost selves divine, and this in essence is the doctrine of the
"Over-soul," associated, as far as this expression goes, with the name
of the latest of the prophets of ethics, Emerson.

We are all incarnations, flesh-takings, of the infinite. Not only so,
but the very unconscious universe, the silent, but ever-living nature
is but the garment which clothes the Invisible, and in clothing reveals