t was best in it. There are no
inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of humanity. The religion of
the day with all its faults and mistakes, will go on unshaken so long
as there is nothing else of equal loveliness and potency to put in its
place. The Jesus of the churches will remain paramount so long as the
man of to-day imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge
from loving the Jesus of history.

'But _why?_ you will ask me. What does the Jesus of history matter to
me?'

And so he was brought to the place of great men in the development of
mankind--to the part played in the human story by those lives in which
men have seen all their noblest thoughts of God, of duty, and of law
embodied, realized before them with a shining and incomparable beauty.

... 'You think--because it is becoming plain to the modern eye that the
ignorant love of his first followers wreathed his life in legend, that
therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, you can put him aside
as though he had never been? Folly! Do what you will, you cannot escape
him. His life and death underlie our institutions as the alphabet
underlies our literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed
are wrought ineffaceably into the civilization of Africa and Asia, so
the life of Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilization,
the nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your
being and into mine. We are what we are to-night, as Englishmen and
as citizens, largely because a Galilean peasant was born and grew to
manhood, and preached, and loved, and died. And you think that a fact so
tremendous can be just scoffed away--that we can get rid of it, and of
our share in it, by a ribald paragraph and a caricature!'

'No. Your hatred and your ridicule are powerless. And thank God they are
powerless. There is no wanton waste in the moral world, any more than
in the material. There is only fruitful change and beneficent
transformation. Granted that the true story of Jesus of Nazareth was
from the beginning obscured by error and mistake; granted that those
errors and mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are
now its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time are now
threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen the hold of Jesus
on the love and remembrance of man. What then? The fact is merely a call
to you and me, who recognize it, to go, back to the roots of things, to
re-conceive the