Moses until your soul’s stomach can take the strong meat of him—­for he is strong meat—­and come simply to Jesus, the meek and gentle—­the Redeemer, who died that his blood might cleanse our sin-stained souls.  Centre your aspirations upon Him, for He is the rock of our salvation, if we believe, or the rock of our wrecking to endless torment if we disbelieve.  Do not deny our God who is Jesus, nor disown Jesus who is our God, nor yet question the inerrance of Holy Writ—­yea, with its everlasting burnings.  “He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.”

I am sad.  I have lived too long.

GRANDFATHER.

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Grandad: It’s all so plain, you must see it.  I told you I had crossed to the farther bank.  Here is what one finds there:  Taking him as God, Jesus is ineffectual.  Only as an obviously fallible human man does he become beautiful; only as a man is he dignified, worthy, great—­or even plausible.

The instinct of the Jews did not mislead them.  Jesus was too fine, too good, to have come from their tribal god; yet too humanly limited to have come from God, save as we all come from Him.

Since you insist that he be considered as God, I shall point out those things which make him small—­as a God.  I would rather consider him as a man and point out those things which make him great to me—­things which I cannot read without wet eyes—­but you will not consider him as man, so let him be a God, and let us see what we see.  It is customary to speak of his “sacrifice.”  What was it?  Our catechism says, “Christ’s humiliation consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God and the cursed death of the cross; in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time.”

As I write the words I wonder that the thing should ever have seemed to any one to be more than a wretched piece of God-jugglery, devoid of integrity.  Are we to conceive God then as a being of carnal appetites, humiliated by being born into the family of an honest carpenter, instead of into the family of a King?  This is the somewhat snobbish imputation.

Let us be done with gods playing at being human, or at being half god and half human.  The time has come when, to prolong its usefulness, the Church must concede—­nay, proclaim—­the manhood of Jesus; must separate him from that atrocious scheme of human sacrifice, the logical extension of a primitive Hebrew mythology—­and take him in the only way that he commands attention:  As a man, one of the world’s great spiritual teachers.  Insisting upon his godship can only make him preposterous to the modern mind.  Jesus, born to a carpenter’s wife of Nazareth, declares himself, one day about his thirtieth year, to be the Christ, the second person