. They
are indeed divine. If they did not occur in Judea, they have occurred
ever since. Continuously, in the hearts of the devout, they are
repeated.

Unhappily there were heretics then as now. To the Gnostics, Jesus was
an aeon that had never been. To the Docetists, he was a phantasm. There
are always brutes that can believe but in the reality of things. There
are others to whom the symbolic is dumb. In the Gospels there is much
that is figurative, there is more that is ineffable, there are
suggestions sheerly ideal.

"In my Father's house are many mansions," the Saviour declared. In his
own ministry there are as many lights. He was a vagrant and he created
pure sentiment. He was a nihilist and he inspired a new conception of
life. He said he had not come to destroy and he changed the face of
the earth. He remitted the sins of a harlot and condemned both
marriage and love. There are other antitheses, deeper contradictions.
These perhaps are more apparent than real. Behind them there may have
been the co-ordination of a central thought. Of many gospels but few
remain. Among the lost evangels was one that Valentinian said was
imparted only to the more spiritual of the disciples. It may be that
in it a main idea was elucidated and, perhaps, as a consequence, the
meaning of the esoteric proclamation: "Before Abraham was I am."

Yet though now the authoritative explanation be lacking, its
significance seems to run beneath the texts. At the first apparition
of Jesus, the chief preoccupation of those that stood about was what
prophet of the old days had returned in the new. Some thought him
Elijah. Others Jeremiah. Antipas feared that he was the Baptist
revived. Jesus himself asked the disciples whom he was said to be.
Later he assured them that the awaited return of Elijah had been
accomplished in John. That assurance, together with the perplexities
regarding him and the esoteric announcement which he made concerning
himself, can hardly indicate anything else than a belief in
reincarnation.

The belief, common to all antiquity, though not necessarily valid on
that account, is not discernible in Hebrew thought, perhaps for the
reason that it is not perceptible in Babylonian. Yet the myth of Eden
barely conceals it. It is almost obvious in the allegory of Beth-el.
Solomon said: "I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning or
ever earth was." If the idea contained in that statement was not a
part of the philosophy