“I am not asserting that all this was pure fiction—that no one stood where men imagined they saw a God on earth. But I do recognize the extreme difficulty of satisfying a free and sincere mind as to how much or how little did ‘happen,’ and the extreme hardihood of asserting at this day that there was anything in the person or life of Jesus to vest in him the claim to be the enduring definitive centre of religious thought and association under any name or title whatsoever. Neither the character of the records nor the manner of their origination authorizes that postulate of perfection through which alone such claim could vest in any being. The veneration of ages for his name deserves respect as the satisfaction of a natural demand during a certain stage of human progress. But it does not prove him an exception to the law that the worship of personages must give way to the worship of principles—the centrality of an individual to the centrality of ideas—the divinity or ‘lordship’ of a man to the deity of the infinitely wise and good. It illustrates that law. Christism in due time passes, like polytheism, and a larger faith succeeds. Thus the theory refutes itself. “The Christian idealization demands that all imperfections in the New-Testament Jesus shall be ascribed to the misapprehensions of the disciples and the ignorance of the biographers. It is confident that Jesus must have been greater than the record shows. But we do not know that he was even so great as the record shows. We are confidently told that such an ideal as can be there discerned presupposes its actual—that no man could have drawn such a character except from life. ‘Such a grand figure is not hewn out of air.’ But it is quite possible to carry this kind of divination too far. “If a man could be that, why could not a man or an age conceive that it ought to be? All that can fairly be assumed is, that there must have been an impressive life (or lives) behind all the construction; and this is not denied. But the necessities of the religious life in that time produced Jesus. Why could they not magnify their own product and improve upon it ideally as they developed into new and larger demands? If we are to insist that the idealizing faculty cannot go beyond actuality, no meaning will be left to the word ideal, and no such faculty will remain. This is the irony to which the old belief comes.... “A pure and simple worship of the Infinite and Eternal is the necessity of philosophy; it is the goal of science; it is the true ground of trust and prayer and love, of philosophic Theism and spiritual Pantheism alike; it is the parent of prophets, of mystics, of reformers, of all true builders of man’s social unity and religious communion.” No reasonable man can doubt that the Christ of Paul and the Gospels is largely, if not altogether, ideal; and in the succeeding chapter we proceed to give more specifically our reasons for thinking so. CHAPTER XII. JESUS AND OTHER CHRISTS