mped with the name of the
Founder. He is responsible for it, and bearing that responsibility is
the mighty sacrifice He makes; and the result is inevitable; for in a
world imperfect no perfection can be perfectly mirrored. As the
sun-ray falling upon water is twisted and distorted, so is it with the
rays of a perfect truth falling in amongst a community of imperfect
men; and no action down here can be a perfect action, for "action," it
is written in an ancient book, "is surrounded with evil as a fire is
surrounded with smoke." The imperfection of the medium makes the smoke
round every Word of Fire, every Word of Truth. And the Founder must
endure the pungency of the smoke, if He would speak the Word of Fire.
The realisation of that, however dimly, however imperfectly, makes the
passion of gratitude in the human heart to those Men who bear their
infirmities and open up the way to God for man. It is that which in
some forms of popular Christianity has been distorted in speaking of
the sacrifice of the Christ, when it has been made a sacrifice, not
for man, sinful and foolish, but to the Father of all perfection, who
needs no sacrifice of suffering in order to reconcile Him to the
children sprung from His life. That is one of the distortions of the
ignorance of man; that the falsification which has been spoken in the
name of religion and has obscured the perfect love of God--for every
divine Man who comes out is a manifestation of the divine heart, and a
revelation of God to man. And how could it be that the Master of
Compassion, who wins human hearts by the tenderness of His love, could
be a Revealer of God, if there were not in God a compassion mightier
than His own, and profounder than His humanity, as God is greater than
man? But the splendor of the truth dazzled the eyes of those to whom
it was presented, and their own ignorance, and fear, and limitation,
imposed upon that perfect sacrifice the terrible aspect of a sacrifice
to God--an aspect which it assumed, not only in Christianity, but in
other faiths as well. For the most part, not always, in the elder
religions they understood that the story of the life and death was an
allegory, a "myth," as they called it, revealing a deeper truth. And
so they avoided the pain and the sense of revulsion which has roused
the conscience of civilised man to revolt against the cruder
presentments of the doctrine; the great truth of the sacrifice is
true, but it is not a legal, a co