"The Chaldeans and Egyptians," he went on, after a moment's reflective pause, "gave the Hebrews their account of the creation of the universe, the fall of man, the flood, and many other bits of mythical lore. And into these stories the Hebrews read the activity of their God, and drew from them deep moral lessons. Egypt gave the Hebrews at least a part of the story of Joseph, as embodied in the hieroglyphics which may be read on the banks of the Nile to-day. They probably also gave the Hebrews the account of the creation found in the second chapter of Genesis, for to this day you can see in some of the oldest Egyptian temples pictures of the gods making men out of lumps of clay. The discovery of the remains of the 'Neanderthal man' and the 'Ape-man of Java' now places the dawn of human reason at a period some three to five hundred thousand years prior to our present century, and, combined with the development of the science of geology, which shows that the total age of the earth's stratified rocks alone cannot be much less than fifty-five millions of years, serves to cast additional ridicule upon the Church's present attitude of stubborn adherence to these prehistoric scriptural legends as literal, God-given fact. But, to make the right use of these legends--well, that is another thing." "And that?" The explorer hesitated. "I find it difficult to explain," he said at length. "But, remember what I have already said, there is, there _must_ be, a foundation beneath all these legends which admonish mankind to turn from evil to good. And, as I also said, that foundation must be very broad. I have said that I was in search of a religion. Why not, you may ask, accept the religious standard which Jesus set? That was the new concept of God as love. Very good. I am quite convinced that love is _the_ religion, _the_ tie which binds all things together and to a common source and cause. And I am equally convinced that Jesus is the only person recorded in history who ever lived a life of pure reflection of the love which he called God. And so you see why I am chipping and hewing away at the theological conception of the Christ, and trying to get at the reality buried deep beneath in the theological misconceptions of the centuries. I am quite convinced that if men loved one another, as Jesus bade them do, all war, strife, disease, poverty, and discord of every sort would vanish from human experience. But--and here is a serious question--did Jesus ask the impossible? Did he command us to love the sinful, erring mortal whom we see in our daily walk--or did he--did he have a new thought, namely, that by loving the real man, for which, perhaps, this human concept stands in the human mind, _that this very act would change that distorted concept and cause it to yield its place to the real one_? I believe Jesus to have been the wisest man who ever trod this earth. But I likewise believe that no man has ever been more