It is probable that towards the close he was approaching nearer to formal Christianity than he knew.  We are told that he “does not reverence the Bible or Christian Theology in themselves, but for the beautiful spirituality which faintly breathes through them like a vague wind blowing through intricate forests.”  His quarrel with Christianity was that it had never done justice to beauty, that it had a gloom upon it, and an unlovely austerity.  This indeed is a strange accusation from so perfect an interpreter of the Celtic gloom as he was, and the retort tu quoque is obvious enough.  There have indeed been phases of Christianity which seemed to love and honour the ugly for its own sake, yet there is a rarer beauty in the Man of Sorrows than in all the smiling faces of the world.  This is that hidden beauty of which the saints and mystics tell us.  They have seen it in the face more marred than any man’s, and their record is that he who would find a lasting beauty that will satisfy his soul, must find it through pain conquered and ugliness transformed and sorrow assuaged.  The Christ Beautiful can never be seen when you have stripped him of the Crown of Thorns, nor is there any loveliness that has not been made perfect by tears.  Thus though there is truth in Sharp’s complaint that Christianity has often done sore injustice to beauty as such, yet it must be repeated that this exponent of the Celtic heart somehow missed the element in Christianity which was not only like, but actually identical with, his own deepest truth.

Sharp often reminds one of Heine, with his intensely human love of life, both in its brightness and in its darkness.  Where that love is so intense as it was in these hearts, it is almost inevitable that it should sometimes eclipse the sense of the divine.  Thus Sharp tells us that “Celtic paganism lies profound still beneath the fugitive drift of Christianity and civilisation, as the deep sea beneath the coming and going of the tides.”  He was indeed so aware of this underlying paganism, that we find it blending with Christian ideas in practically the whole of his work.  Nothing could be quoted as a more distinctive note of his genius than that blend.  It is seen perhaps most clearly in such stories as The Last Supper and The Fisher of Men.  In these tales of unsurpassable power and beauty, Fiona Macleod has created the Gaelic Christ.  The Christ is the same as He of Galilee and of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and His work the same.  But he talks the sweet Celtic language, and not only talks it but thinks in it also.  He walks among the rowan trees of the Shadowy Glen, while the quiet light flames upon the grass, and the fierce people that lurk in shadow have eyes for the helplessness of the little lad who sees too far.  Such tales are full of a strange light that seems to be, at one and the same time, the Celtic glamour and the Light of the World.