I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I assert that this great and very definite personality in the hearts and imaginations of mankind does not and never has attracted me.  It is a fact I record about myself without aggression or regret.  I do not find myself able to associate Him in any way with the emotion of Salvation.

I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of a divine-human friend and mediator.  If it were possible to have access by prayer, by meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to such a being whose feet were in the darknesses, who stooped down from the light, who was at once great and little, limitless in power and virtue and one’s very brother; if it were possible by sheer will in believing to make and make one’s way to such a helper, who would refuse such help?  But I do not find such a being in Christ.  I do not find, I cannot imagine, such a being.  I wish I could.  To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as an incomprehensibly sinless being neither God nor man.  His sinlessness wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his white self unchanged.  He had no petty weaknesses.

Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses.  If I am to have that love, that sense of understanding fellowship, which is, I conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this idea of a personal Saviour, then I need someone quite other than this image of virtue, this terrible and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of thorns, his blood-stained hands and feet.  I cannot love him any more than I can love a man upon the rack.  Even in the face of torments I do not think I should feel a need for him.  I had rather then a hundred times have Botticelli’s armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope I do not seem to want to shock in writing these things, but indeed my only aim is to lay my feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealized person can be.  It happens that in my younger days I found a character in the history of literature who had a singular and extraordinary charm for me, of whom the thought was tender and comforting, who indeed helped me through shames and humiliations as though he held my hand.  This person was Oliver Goldsmith.  His blunders and troubles, his vices and vanities, seized and still hold my imagination.  The slights of Boswell, the contempt of Gibbon and all his company save Johnson, the exquisite fineness of spirit in his “Vicar of Wakefield,” and that green suit of his and the doctor’s cane and the love despised, these things together made him a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I thought of him as others pray.  When I think of that youthful feeling for Goldsmith, I know what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte who has seen a candle can imagine the sun.  But the Christian Christ in none of his three characteristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from whom I am cut off by the wanton and indecent purity of the Immaculate Conception), nor as the white-robed, spotless miracle