We might as well now come directly to the question whether the Jesus of the Gospels was an _ideal_ rather than a historical individual—an _impersonation_ rather than a person. And here we take the broad ground that whether there was a real man or not makes no difference whatever, because the writings themselves are largely _ideal_, and so make the man what he was not. No two persons worship the same God, the “personified Infinite.” The conception of God must itself be limited and incomplete, and therefore inadequate and largely ideal. No two persons believe in the same Jesus, so there must be as many ideals as there are believers. The habit of exaggerating, of deifying those whom we have been taught to regard as the greatest and best, is a well-known disposition of the human mind. Indeed, “the function of the Church is the cultivation of the ideal.” This is so palpable that the legends of all religions recognize this principle to such an extent that most of them represent their “saviors” as having been born of virgin mothers. Catholics flock to their temples and in parrot-like utterances worship an ideal Jesus and an equally ideal Virgin, and thus cultivate only the ideal side of their nature. It is very much easier to excite the imagination than to convince the understanding; and this is the real secret of the strength of Catholicism and of the weakness of Protestantism. Catholic worship is mainly spectacular, an appeal to the senses, and is therefore attractive alike to the uneducated and the educated. They believe the Gospels _literally_, because they have had the principal incidents recorded in them set forth before their eyes from their very birth, and they cannot be reasoned out of what they have never been reasoned into.