H. D.--Yes. We will begin with that this morning. I am very glad you read it, for it is curiously like my own experiences in the same line. Since coming over here, and thereby coming into such direct touch with you, I have been able to grasp the key to much that puzzled me on the other side. As my views became more spiritualised I saw there _must_ be more truth in the Christian religion than outsiders supposed, and yet I knew it could not be absolutely true _in the form in which it has been handed down_. _That_ was for me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a cosmos of Law and Order. It would mean God working in the highest departments of His Creation, as He is never seen to work in the lower ones. And my faith in Him prevented my entertaining such an idea! Schemes and plans of salvation belong to the comparative childhood of the race, not to the full-grown spiritual man. They are still in the fairy-tale stage, holding a truth, but acting only as the husk of the truth. The unity of the race; the necessity for self-sacrifice in realising that unity: that by giving our life for our brothers we save our _Life_, which is that unity in which the brethren are included--all this I could accept in Christ's teaching or the teaching of the Apostles; but the rest: the detail, the carefully arranged _scheme_ of the Atonement, etc., as dogmatic doctrines--all these seemed to me so obviously the desperate attempts of man at a certain stage of development to fit in spiritual facts with the most probable theories; and to say that men who wrote of these things were inspired, and _therefore infallible_, was absurd. Even in my short life, I had seen the world pass through several stages of belief and assimilate them in turn. As a child, I was told that God was angry with people for sinning and breaking His commandments, and so Jesus Christ offered to come and die on the cross to appease His just wrath. That seemed a great puzzle to me, because, although it might account for what happened _before_ Christ came and _until_ He came, I could not understand why God _should go on letting people come into the world_ who would break His laws, and make Him still more angry for centuries and centuries. That seemed to me, as a child, so unnecessary. Later I was told it was not God's anger but His sense of justice that had to be appeased and satisfied, which was a distinct step in advance. A little later, however, I read that this was not the hidden truth of the doctrine. The religious world (the thoughtful section of it) now arrived at the idea that it was not God who needed to be satisfied or appeased in any of His attributes, but MAN, and that GOD--in the person of his Son--came into the world to reconcile the world to Him, and not Himself to the world. This was a complete _bouleversement_ of the whole situation, though it came so gradually that few appreciated that fact.