criticisms upon this apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion.  Firstly, we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the veiled being nor about that being’s relations to God and to Life.  We do not recognise any consistent sympathetic possibilities between these outer beings and our God.  Our God is, we feel, like Prometheus, a rebel.  He is unfilial.  And the accepted figure of Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in the tone of our worship.  It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but by fighting.  Incidentally our God dies a million deaths, but the thing that matters is not the deaths but the immortality.  It may be he cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock.  These may be necessary sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in themselves bring victory.  They may be necessary, but they are not glorious.  The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-drenched figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” these things jar with our spirit.  We little men may well fail and repent, but it is our faith that our God does not fail us nor himself.  We cannot accept the Christian’s crucifix, or pray to a pitiful God.  We cannot accept the Resurrection as though it were an after-thought to a bitterly felt death.  Our crucifix, if you must have a crucifix, would show God with a hand or a foot already torn away from its nail, and with eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a face without pain, pain lost and forgotten in the surpassing glory of the struggle and the inflexible will to live and prevail. . . .

But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible the wounds, so long as he does not droop.  God is courage.  God is courage beyond any conceivable suffering.

But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns the figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the figure of God, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for divine action.  The figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think of it as being no more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man who proclaimed the loving-kindness of God and the supremacy of God’s kingdom over the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of his pain and exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes something altogether distinct from a theological symbol.  Immediately that we cease to worship, we can begin to love and pity.  Here was a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of great courage, of the utmost tolerance and the subtlest sympathy, a saint of non-resistance. . . .

We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of non-resistance.  We are the militant followers of and participators in a militant God.  We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle being upon whose nobility the theologians trade.  But submission is the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him.  A Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the spirit of our worship.*