The poem "Christmas Eve" becomes much more understandable when these facts about Methodism are borne in mind--facts which were evidently in the poet's mind, although the poem itself has the character of a symbolic rather than a personal utterance. The speaker might be regarded as a type of the religious conscience of England. In spite of whatever direct visions of the divine such a type of conscience may gain through the contemplation of nature and the revelations of the human heart, its relations to the past cause it to feel the need of some sectarian form of religion--a sort of inherited need to be orthodox in one form or another. This religious conscience has its artistic side; it can clothe its inborn religious instincts in exquisite imaginative vision. Also, it has its clear-sighted reasoning side. This is able unerringly to put its finger upon any flaw of doctrine or reasoning in the forms of religion it contemplates. Hence, Catholic doctrine, which was claiming the allegiance of those who were willing to put their troublesome intellects to sleep and accept authority where religion was concerned, does not satisfy this keen analyzer. Nor yet is it able to see any religious reality in such a myth of Christ rehabilitated as an ethical prophet as the Göttingen professor constructs in a manner so reminiscent of a passage in Strauss's "Life of Jesus," where he is describing the opinions of the rationalists' school of criticism, that a comparison with that passage is enlightening. Having swept away completely the supernatural basis of religion, the rationalist is able still to conceive of Jesus as a divine Messenger, a special favorite and charge of the Deity: "He had implanted in him by God the natural conditions only of that which he was ultimately to become, and his realization of this destiny was the result of his own spontaneity. His admirable wisdom he acquired by the judicious application of his intellectual powers and the conscientious use of all the aids within his reach; his moral greatness, by the zealous culture of his moral dispositions, the restraint of his sensual inclinations and passions, and a scrupulous obedience to the voice of his conscience; and on these alone rested all that was exalted in his personality, all that was encouraging in his example." The difficulty to this order of mind of the direct personal revelation lies in the fact that it is convincing only to those who experience it, having no basis in authority, and may even for them lose its force.