Oscar shows, I think, that he might have done much higher work than
Tolstoi or Renan had he set himself resolutely to transmute his new
insight into some form of art. Now and then he divined the very secret
of Jesus:

"When he says 'Forgive your enemies' it is not for the sake of the
enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more
beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all
that thou hast and give to the poor,' it is not of the state of the poor
that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that
wealth was marring."

In many of these pages Oscar Wilde really came close to the divine
Master; "the image of the Man of Sorrows," he says, "has fascinated and
dominated art as no Greek god succeeded in doing."... And again:

"Out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality
infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely
enough, destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and
the real beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on
Cithæron or Enna, has ever done. The song of Isaiah, 'He is despised
and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we
hid as it were our faces from him,' had seemed to him to prefigure
himself, and in him the prophecy was fulfilled."

In this spirit Oscar made up his mind that he would write about "Christ
as the precursor of the romantic movement in life" and about "The
artistic life considered in its relation to conduct."

By bitter suffering he had been brought to see that the moment of