Thus the great fame of the Nazarene, which rests upon the idea not that He was the incarnation of perfection but the Incarnation of God, is sought to be preserved and appropriated by an eclectic modernism which denies the very basis of His title to supreme distinction. Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Paine are thought to have been a little crude in some of their anti-religious tirades. But they addressed a people that was at least familiar with its Bible. They never presupposed such childish ignorance of history and scripture as is everywhere taken for granted in “This Believing World.” Browne, who naturally has small use for the Church of Rome, is sympathetic towards such leaders of the Reformation as Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. But not even Protestantism wins his unqualified approval. He says[158] that “Protestantism includes every type of religious thought,” and “only slowly, and with many pangs” is “shaking off the religion about Christ. Only slowly, very slowly, is it beating its way back to the religion of Jesus.” This seems like a fairly clear thesis, uttered by one who has never read either the New Testament or the Old, and who consequently is able to look upon Christianity, or “the religion of Jesus” (i.e., the religion which he thinks was taught by Jesus), as an excellent system of human morality of which he has heard good report, and holds that it should not be confused with supernaturalism, or “the religion about Christ,” of which he has heard bad and understands has been invented somehow without historical warrant. Were this all, I might pass him unmentioned. One cannot stop to complain of every popular author who speaks without information. But the total depravity of the Browne method of thinking, of argument, of logic--to employ such words in his connection; the illimitable naïveté with which he propounds mutually exclusive and antagonistic assumptions in that agreeable and easy-flowing style of his, positively cries out for remark. How he “gets by with it,” is more than I can understand. “This Believing World” is logical only in two particulars. It follows the same author’s short history of the Jews, entitled, “Stranger than Fiction”; and it is dedicated to H. G. Wells. Such substance as it has marks it as a less aureate branch sprung from Fraser’s “The Golden Bough.” “In the beginning,” it begins, after certain preliminaries--we are now in fact on page 27,--“In the beginning was fear; and fear was in the heart of man.... Boulders toppled and broke his bones; diseases ate his flesh; death seemed ever ready to lay him low. And he, poor gibbering half-ape nursing his wound in some draughty cave, could only tremble.”