The last suggestion appeared to me by far the most luminous. In human life it is invariably the _lower_ nature that needs to be reconciled and conciliated; whilst the higher nature, in proportion to its development, is forgiving and tolerant and wide-minded, and does not prate about its own high sense of justice requiring to be appeased. The best type of _man_ punishes a wrong-doer in order that he may learn to do better and leave off tormenting and wronging his fellow-creatures; not to appease any instinct in his own breast, for that would be egotism, no matter how we might try to disguise the fact. Now if it would be a blot upon the best conceivable _man_ to be egotistical, _a fortiori_ must it be upon God. To conceive otherwise is to make God in the likeness of the lower and not the higher humanity. I thought all that out very clearly. Still this crux remained for me, that to be suddenly, at any arbitrary moment in the world's history, obliged, as it were, to send an absolutely divine part of Himself into the world, was the way a _man_ would act faced by an unforeseen catastrophe, but not the way in which God has acted throughout the rest of our history. A succession of teachers, enlightening the world by degrees, and culminating in the ANOINTED Son of God--the Flower of Humanity--_this_ is entirely in line with the processes of Nature and the laws of God, so far as we know them. All progress has its culminating point. AEons have passed to produce the most exquisite crystals, the highest forms of vegetation, of animals, of men. Then came the slow processes of civilising and educating men; the dim instincts of fear and propitiation, merging, by slow degrees, in the first conceptions of Love, as something apart from desire, and so forth. Was I to be expected to shut my eyes to all these known facts, and bolt down the theories contained in one Book, written by human authors, no matter how admirable? I felt it was impossible. Then I remembered with relief that these very dogmas, as a matter of fact, were in so fluent a state, that my own bare fifty years of living had seen at least four different high-water marks! Here again therefore, under my very eyes, was the universal law of progress working, the moment it _could_ work, by being released from the swaddling-clothes of the Roman Catholic Church, which, so far as it is orthodox, is fossilised. I saw also that the whole body of dissent had moved on, taking up its pegs and planting them a little further on each time; till a City temple, with its widening theology, was an established fact. Progress everywhere--slow, but sure--and the pace getting quicker, even in my short span! Still, the _uniqueness_ of Jesus of Nazareth and His influence over the nineteen centuries was a puzzle.