materialistic inventions about his "miraculous" begetting, and by the
morbid speculations about virginity and the like that arose out of
such grossness. They were still further complicated by the idea of the
textual inspiration of the scriptures, which presently swamped thought
in textual interpretation. That swamping came very early in the
development of Christianity. The writer of St. John's gospel appears
still to be thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already
hopelessly in the net of the texts. The writer of St. John's gospel
was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man. He was emasculated
mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry. He quotes; his
predecessor thinks.

But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions of
early Christian thought in passing. His business here is the definition
of a position. The writer's position here in this book is, firstly,
complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator, and secondly,
entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer. That, so to speak, is
the key of his book. He cannot bring the two ideas under the same term
God. He uses the word God therefore for the God in our hearts only,
and he uses the term the Veiled Being for the ultimate mysteries of the
universe, and he declares that we do not know and perhaps cannot know in
any comprehensible terms the relation of the Veiled Being to that living
reality in our lives who is, in his terminology, the true God. Speaking
from the point of view of practical religion, he is restricting and
defining the word God, as meaning only the personal God of mankind, he
is restricting it so as to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence
from our religious thought and leave nothing but the essentials of the
religious life.

Many people, whom one would class as rather liberal Christians of an