where they gave welcome to all in doubt.  I soon found that the Theism they professed was free from the defects which revolted me in Christianity.  It left me God as a Supreme Goodness, while rejecting all the barbarous dogmas of the Christian faith.  I now read Theodore Parker’s “Discourse on Religion”, Francis Newman’s “Hebrew Monarchy”, and other works, many of the essays of Miss Frances Power Cobbe and of other Theistic writers, and I no longer believed in the old dogmas and hated while I believed; I no longer doubted whether they were true or not; I shook them off, once for all, with all their pain, and horror, and darkness, and felt, with relief and joy inexpressible, that they were all but the dreams of ignorant and semi-savage minds, not the revelation of a God.  The last remnant of Christianity followed swiftly these cast-off creeds, though, in parting with this, one last pang was felt.  It was the doctrine of the Deity of Christ.  The whole teaching of the Broad Church School tends, of course, to emphasise the humanity at the expense of the Deity of Christ, and when the eternal punishment and the substitutionary atonement had vanished, there seemed to be no sufficient reason left for so stupendous a miracle as the incarnation of the Deity.  I saw that the idea of incarnation was common to all Eastern creeds, not peculiar to Christianity; the doctrine of the unity of God repelled the doctrine of the incarnation of a portion of the Godhead.  But the doctrine was dear from association; there was something at once soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God, between a perfect man and divine supremacy, between a human heart and an almighty strength.  Jesus as God was interwoven with all art, with all beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Child in his mother’s arms, the Divine Man in his Passion and in his triumph, the human friend encircled with the majesty of the Godhead—­did inexorable Truth demand that this ideal figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human love, should pass into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?

VIII.

The struggle was a sharp one ere I could decide that intellectual honesty demanded that the question of the Deity of Christ should be analysed as strictly as all else, and that the conclusions come to from an impartial study of facts should be faced as steadily as though they dealt with some unimportant question.  I was bound to recognise, however, that more than intellectual honesty would be here required, for if the result of the study were—­as I dimly felt it would be—­to establish disbelief in the supernatural claims of Christ, I could not but feel that such disbelief would necessarily entail most unpleasant external results.  I might give up belief in all save this, and yet remain a member of the Church of England:  views on Inspiration,