r_, I think, entitled "An Agnostic's
Progress," and asked if he had sensed it through me at all.

H. D.--Yes. We will begin with that this morning. I am very glad you
read it, for it is curiously like my own experiences in the same line.

Since coming over here, and thereby coming into such direct touch with
you, I have been able to grasp the key to much that puzzled me on the
other side.

As my views became more spiritualised I saw there _must_ be more truth
in the Christian religion than outsiders supposed, and yet I knew it
could not be absolutely true _in the form in which it has been handed
down_.

_That_ was for me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and
catastrophic incursion upon a cosmos of Law and Order.

It would mean God working in the highest departments of His Creation, as
He is never seen to work in the lower ones. And my faith in Him
prevented my entertaining such an idea! Schemes and plans of salvation
belong to the comparative childhood of the race, not to the full-grown
spiritual man. They are still in the fairy-tale stage, holding a truth,
but acting only as the husk of the truth.

The unity of the race; the necessity for self-sacrifice in realising
that unity: that by giving our life for our brothers we save our _Life_,
which is that unity in which the brethren are included--all this I could
accept in Christ's teaching or the teaching of the Apostles; but the
rest: the detail, the carefully arranged _scheme_ of the Atonement,
etc., as dogmatic doctrines--all these seemed to me so obviously the
desperate attempts of man at a certain stage of development to fit in
spiritual facts with the most probable theories; and to say that men who
wrote of these things were inspired, and _therefore infallible_, was
absurd.

Even in my short life, I had seen the world pass through several stages
of belief and assimilate them in turn.

As a child, I was told that God was angry with people for sinning and
breaking His commandments, and so Jesus Christ offered to come and die
on the cross to appease His just wrath.

That seemed a great puzzle to me, because, although it might account for
what happened _before_ Christ came and _until_ He came, I could not
understand why God _should go on letting people come into the world_ who
would break His laws, and make Him still more angry for centuries and
centuries. That seemed to me, as a child, so unnecessary.

Later I was told it was not God's anger b