Dr. Jacks leaves these perplexities alone.  For him, God is the Universal Spirit, the Absolute Reality immanent in all phenomena, the Love which reason finds in Goodness and intuition discovers in Beauty, the Father of men, the End and the very Spirit of Evolution.  And Jesus, so far as human thought can reach into the infinite, is the Messenger of God, the Revealer both of God’s Personality and man’s immortality, the great Teacher of liberty.  What else He may be we do not know, but may discover in other phases of our ascent.  Enough for the moment of duration which we can human life to know that He unlocks the door of our prison-house, reveals to us the character of our Father which is in Heaven, and the nature of the universe in which we move and have our being.

If this should appear vague to the dogmatist who finds it impossible either to love God or to do the will of Christ without going into the arithmetic of Athanasius, and reciting an unintelligible creed, and celebrating in Christian forms the rites of those mystery religions which competed with each other for the superstition of the Greco-Roman world in the third century, he will find no vagueness at all in Dr. Jacks’s interpretation of the teaching of Jesus.  He may perhaps find in that interpretation a simplicity, a clarity, and a directness which are not wholly convenient to his idea of a God Who repents, is angry, and can be mollified.

Whether Jesus was born of a Virgin or not, whether He raised dead bodies to life or not, whether He Himself rose from the grave with His physical body or not, certain is it, and beyond all dispute of every conceivable kind, that He taught men a way of life, that He brought them a message, that He Himself regarded His message as good news.

How carelessly men may think in this matter is shown to us rather strikingly in a page of Some Loose Stones, a book to which reference has already been made.  After writing about dogma, and endeavouring to show that the traditionalist is on firmer ground than the modernist, because he can say, “Here is the Truth,” while the modernist can only say, “We will tell you what the truth is when we have found it,” suddenly, with scarcely a draw of his breath, Father Knox exclaims: 

The real trouble is that they (the modernists) have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, that they have radically misconceived the whole nature of the Christian message, which is, to be one for all minds, for all places, for all times.

Note that word message.  What confusion of thought!

The message of Christ is one thing; paganised dogma concerning Christ is another.  The message of Christ does indeed remain for all minds, for all places, for all times, inexhaustible in its meaning, unalterable in its nature; the dogmas of theology, on the other hand, demand Councils of the Church for their definition, and an infallible Pope for their interpretation.  They change, have changed even in the unchangeable Catholic Church, and will change with every advance of the positive sciences and with every ascent of philosophy towards reality; but the message stands, plain to the understanding of a child, yet still rejected by the world.  Christianity, as Dr. Jacks says, has been more studied than practised.