And here I emphasize again that great truth which nature has impressed upon me--that, just so long as man considers himself the one and only chosen part of God, and therefore next to him in greatness, just that long will his egoism and self-conceit blind him to the greatness and glory of the real truth, and to the glory of the faith which might be his. I believe that Christ was a great teacher, that he was a great student of his times, and incorporated into his teachings all that was highest and best in the teachings of other great men who had lived and died before him. And I have always regretted that Christ was unfortunate to have for his historians a set of men who were unequal to their task, many of them narrow-minded, moved by “visions” and superstitions instead of fact, men who believed in all the miracles of the imagination from conversing with angels to stopping the sun,--men utterly incapable of writing down calmly and truthfully those mighty teachings of Christ which, had they been written as they were spoken, would have meant so much for the world to-day. For I believe, in my own heart, that Christ was the greatest lover of nature that history knows of to the present day. I believe that in the many years of his “disappearance,” Christ was not only studying the teachings of the past, but that, close to the breast of nature, he was learning the splendid truths of life--all life--which were afterward the very heart and soul of his messages to mankind. I believe that Christ, could he return to earth to-day, would say: “My biographers have given you a wrong impression of me, and they have misquoted me. What my soul was called upon to teach nineteen hundred years ago, they have clothed in the raiment of superstition, of misunderstanding, and of impossible miracle. For I am a man, even as thee and thine. But I have found the true faith. And that faith, as I told them then, depends utterly upon the dropping of the scales of self from man’s eyes, and his understanding of _all life_. For that I gladly died.”