In one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the synoptic Gospels. The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in Salammbô, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless, Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurévilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans, Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the Index before it was written. And yet we find in it George Moore among the prophets.