Once more: A believer in the divinity of Jesus--I am going to say--invents the following text: "The Father and I are _one_." An opponent to this Trinitarian dogma introduces a correction which robs the above text of its authority: "The Father is greater than I," and makes Jesus admit openly that there are some things known to the father only. It is difficult not to see in these passages the beginnings of the terrible controversies which, starting with Peter and Paul, have come down to our day, _and which will not end_ until Jesus shall take his place among the mythical saviors of the world. To harmonize these many and different Jesuses into something like unity or consistency a thousand books have been written by the clergy. They have not succeeded. How can a Jesus represented at one time as the image of divine perfection, and at another as protesting against being called "good," for "none is good, save one, God,"--how can these two conceptions be reconciled except by a resort to artificial and arbitrary interpretations? If such insurmountable contradictions in the teachings and character of another would weaken our faith in his historicity, then we are justified in inferring that in all probability Jesus was only a name--the name of an imaginary stage hero, uttering the conflicting thoughts of his prompters. Again, such phrases as, "and he was caught up in a cloud,"--describing the ascension and consequent disappearance of Jesus, betray the anxiety of the authors of the Gospels to bring their marvelous story to a close. Not knowing how to terminate the career of an imaginary Messiah, his creators invented the above method of dispatching him. "He was caught up in a cloud,"--but for that, the narrators would have been obliged to continue their story indefinitely. In tragedy the play ends with the death of the hero, but if the biographers of Jesus had given a similar excuse for bringing their narrative to a _finale_, there would have been the danger of their being asked to point out his grave. "He was caught up in a cloud," relieved them of all responsibility to produce his remains if called upon to do so, and, at the same time, furnished them with an excuse to bring their story to a close. It would hardly be necessary, were we all unbiased, to look for any further proofs of the mythical and fanciful nature of the Gospel narratives than this expedient to which the writers resorted. To questions, "Where is Jesus?" "What became of his body?" etc., they could answer, "He was caught up in a cloud." But a career that ends in the clouds was never begun on the earth. [Illustration: 117 Coin of the XII Century, Showing Halo Around Lamb's Head.]