Yet, after all, this manufactured Christ did not content him. It is easy to make a selection of His words and teachings that please the individual, and to leave the rest. It is easy, but it is not satisfying. And the worst is, that one person is as much entitled to make his selection as another. Gerald, being honest with himself, could not but own that there are words, and actions too, of Christ which do not harmonise with any such selective process. It was a pain to him that so much must be left out. The divine and the human elements are the warp and the woof in the sacred biography. The result of selection is destruction. An accomplished critic, in the exercise of his selective faculty, has decided that Christ could not have spoken the parable of the Prodigal Son. Is the result to discredit the parable of the Prodigal Son, or to discredit the principle of selection? Heaven help us when the Christ of God is dissolved in the crucible of critical taste! I do not say that a human Christ is not worth having; I only say that he is not the Christ of Christendom. Perhaps Gerald Eversley felt it to be so too; for he wrote, ‘No man is happy in a God whom he fashions for himself. The objects of worship are given, not made; they proceed from God to man, not from man to God. Science can analyse, but it cannot create. It can explain every hue of the rainbow, but it cannot set the rainbow in the heaven.’ He had ceased to worship the divine Son of Man; was it likely that he would worship His shadow? Jesus Christ was to him one whom he could admire or reverence, like Socrates or Marcus Aurelius; He was no more a Guide for life and for death. So Gerald Eversley faced faith on the ocean of life like a vessel without rudder or compass. The sanctions of his life, its encouragements, its consolations were lost. He was without faith in the world. To the obligation of the moral law he still clung. It was not in his nature to commit the baseness of discovering in infidelity a pretext for sin. The supremacy of honour, truth, charity, purity, was still the law of his life. Whether these high principles of conduct were self-sufficient, whether they could for ever flourish in a climate that knew not the golden sunlight, he did not ask, he did not wish to ask. He was trying to live the Christian life without Christ. He was not happy.