But we are told that Jesus must have been a real person or he never could have exerted the influence that he has for the last eighteen hundred years upon so many millions of people. Let us see: If Jesus ever dwelt upon this earth, it must have been several hundred years ago. Not one of the many millions who have worshipped him since his few years of sojourn here but have done so in view of what they have heard of him or read of him. They never saw him and never heard his voice. He wrote nothing, and never authorized any one else to write anything. After the lapse of nearly two centuries the four Gospels appeared. Very little is told of him there. If you take out what is repeated concerning him therein, you would not have, in length, what would make a modern sermon; and that would be found full of contradictions, absurdities, and impossibilities. Those who have believed on him have believed on what they called _testimony_ concerning him; and that testimony would have produced the same effect whether true or false if they really _believed_ it. The real existence of an alleged person is not essential to excite admiration if it is really _believed_ that he existed. The Swiss loved and honored William Tell just as much as if he had not in these latter years been proved a myth. The world’s history teems with the heroic deeds of many noble persons (impersonations) who never had an existence, and the literature of the race would greatly suffer by striking out all that is fictitious. The reason that the ideal Christ has exerted so much greater influence than any other impersonation is because so many skilful artists have bestowed their best labor upon it, and because the figure is so ancient and contains so many features that commend themselves to the human mind and heart. We find in _Natural Genesis_, by the English poet Gerald Massey, a passage which so beautifully portrays our own view of this subject that we cannot forbear copying it: “It has often been said that if there were no historic Christ then the writers who represented such a conception of the divine man must have included amongst them one who was equal to the Christ. But the mythical Christ was not the outcome of any such conception. It was not a work of the individual mind at all, but of the human race—a crowning result of evolution _versus_ any private conception of a hero. This was the hero of all men, who never was and was never meant to be human, but from the beginning was divine; a mythical hero without mortal model, and equally without fault or flaw. This was the star-god who dawned through the outermost darkness; this was the moon-god who brought the message of renewal and immortality; this was the sun-god who came with the morning to all men; this in the Kronian stage was the announcer of new life and endless continuity at the opening of every cycle, and in the psychotheistic phase the typical son of the Eternal as manifester and representative in time.