"Of course you do. Well, I ask you this. Do you honestly think that Imrie's Jesus--the Jesus he serves up to you on Sundays,--the cold, logical, snobbish abstraction--would ever have gotten anybody so sore that they'd crucify him? Of course you don't. Well what do you think that congregation would do to me if I got up in the pulpit and gave _my_ Jesus--the fiery, human, uninspired, blood-red revolutionary that I conceive him to be? You know without my telling you. Why, they'd have me arrested if I used his own thoughts expressed in modern language--yes, if I used his actual words--and _applied_ them. Suppose Imrie took that stuff about the millstone, and applied it to Corey's cash girls and delivery boys. Do you think the old man would be anxious to hear Imrie again?" "You seem to have thought a great deal about Jesus," said Judith, with a faintly veiled sarcasm. But he did not sense that. "Yes," he said naïvely. "Haven't you?" She was silent at the unconscious rebuke, profoundly stirred by the paradoxicality of the situation. She wanted to answer him in the affirmative, wanted to very, very much. But she knew that she could not. Jesus was not the living, breathing companion of every day that he seemed to be to this irreverent infidel. He was far more sacred to her, but far less a vital factor in the commonplaces of existence. She was honest enough to admit it. But he appeared not to notice her tacit confession. "You see," he went on patiently, as if expounding a very simple problem to a rather young and stupid child, "your stained-glass faith isn't founded on Jesus at all. You're a Paulist. Like him, you're a Roman citizen, an aristocrat, a mystic. Jesus wasn't any of those things. He was the next thing to a slave, a man of the common people, and for all purposes of comparison, a thorough-going materialist. He had no dogma to preach, other than that the kingdom of the earth should belong to the dwellers therein. But Paul was a different sort of chap. He changed the propaganda so that it read 'kingdom of heaven,' which was a very different thing, and much more comfortable for the shaking seats of the mighty. Then the Greek philosophers got interested in that strange abortion called Christianity, added Eleusinian mysteries and what not, devised the doctrine of the immaculate conception to cover the illegitimacy of Jesus, adapted the idea of the trinity from Egyptian theology and...." "You must study a great deal, too?" she asked, breaking in on the fluent rush of his words. "Yes," he said, almost apologetically; "it's great stuff. I like it."