When our Christ is not saving this earth from eternal damnation then he may be visiting remote planets or inaccessible stars, where coloured double suns of blinding brilliancy revolve terrifically in twin harness.  There, too, are souls to be rescued.  What a grand idea!  It is Ibsen’s, as is the interpretation of the Third Kingdom.  It should have been Nietzsche’s.  Why this antinomianism?  Why this eternal conflict of evil and good, of night and day, of sweet and sour, of God and devil, of Ormuzd and Ahriman?”

The exotic names transposed his thoughts to another avenue.  If Christ is to come again, and the holy word explicitly states that He will, why not Buddha?  Why not Brahma?  Why not ...?  Again a hiatus.  This time something snapped in his head.  He sank back in his chair.  Buddha!  Was there ever a Buddha?  And if there was not, was there ever such a personality as Christ’s?  Scholar that he was he knew that myth-building was a pastime for the Asiatic imagination, great, impure, mysterious Asia—­Asia the mother of all religions, the cradle of the human race.  To deny the objective existence of Christ would set at rest all his doubts, one overwhelming doubt swallowing the minor doubts.  He had never speculated at length upon the Christ legend, for did not Renan, yes, that silky heretic, believe in the personality of Jesus, believe and lovingly portray it?  The Nietzsche doctrine of the eternal recurrence had so worked upon his sensitive mental apparatus that he could have almost denied the existence of Christ rather than deny that our universe repeats itself infinitely.  Eternity is a wheel, earthly events are the spokes of this whirring wheel.  It was the seeming waste of divine material that shocked his nerves.  One crucifixion—­yes; but two or two quintillions and infinitely more!

Brother Hyzlo stared at the crucifix.  Was it only a symbol, as some learned blasphemers averred?  The human figure so painfully extended upon it was a God, a God who descended from high heaven to become a shield between the wrath of His Father and humanity.  Why?  Why should the God who created us grow angry with our shortcomings?  We are His handiwork.  Are we then to blame for our imperfections?  Is not Jesus, instead of a mediator, rather a votive offering to the wounded vanity of the great Jehovah?  Was not Prometheus—­a light broke in upon Hyzlo.  Prometheus, a myth, Buddha a myth.  All myths.  There were other virgin-born saviours.  Krishna, Mithra, Buddha.  Vishnu had not one but nine incarnations.  Christianity bears alarming resemblances to Mithraism.  Mithra, too, was born in a cave.  The dates of Christ’s birth and death may be astronomical:  the winter and vernal equinoxes.  But the conflict of the authorities regarding these dates is mortifying.  The four gospels are in reality four witnesses warring against each other.  They were selected haphazard at a human council.  They were not composed until the latter part of the second century, and the synoptic