or a long time to come. The text
alluded to is made further impossible because it is based upon the
supposition that Christ and His fishermen conversed together in Latin
or Greek, even to the extent of making puns in that language. Surely
the want of moral courage and intellectual honesty among Christians
will seem as strange to our descendants as it appears marvellous to us
that the great thinkers of old could have believed, or at least have
pretended to believe, in the fighting sexual deities of Mount Olympus.

Revision is, indeed, needed, and as I have already pleaded, a change of
emphasis is also needed, in order to get the grand Christian conception
back into the current of reason and progress. The orthodox who,
whether from humble faith or some other cause, do not look deeply into
such matters, can hardly conceive the stumbling-blocks which are
littered about before the feet of their more critical brethren. What
is easy, for faith is impossible for reflection. Such expressions as
"Saved by the blood of the Lamb" or "Baptised by His precious blood"
fill their souls with a gentle and sweet emotion, while upon a more
thoughtful mind they have a very different effect.

Apart from the apparent injustice of vicarious atonement, the student
is well aware that the whole of this sanguinary metaphor is drawn
really from the Pagan rites of Mithra, where the neophyte was actually
placed under a bull at the ceremony of the TAUROBOLIUM, and was
drenched, through a grating, with the blood of the slaughtered animal.
Such reminiscences of the more brutal side of Paganism are not helpful
to the thoughtful and sensitive modern mind. But what is always fresh
and always useful and always beautiful, is the memory of the sweet
Spirit who wandered on the hillsides of Galilee; who gathered the
children around him; who met his friends in innocent good-fellowship;
who shrank from forms and ceremonies, craving always for the inner
meaning; who forgave the sinner; who championed the poor, and who in
every decision threw his weight upon the side of charity and breadth of
view. When to this character you add those wondrous psychic powers
already analysed, you do, indeed, find a supreme character in the
world's history who obviously stands nearer to the Highest than any
other. When one compares the general effect of His teaching with that
of the more rigid churches, one marvels how in their dogmatism, their
insistence upon forms, their