"What if Nietzsche were right? The first Christian, the only Christian,
died on the cross, he has said. What an arraignment of our precious
faith, Jesus Christ, our Lord God! What sweet names are Thine! How could
Nietzsche not feel the music of that Hebrew-Greek combination? Perhaps
he did; perhaps he masked a profound love behind his hatred. Jesus our
Lord! Hebrew-Greek. But why Greek? Why ...?" Another pause in this
sequestered chamber where the buzzing of an insect could assume a
thunderous roar. "The eternal return. Why should Christ return? Must the
earth be saved again and again and a billion times again? Awful thought
of a God descending to a horrible death to cleanse the nameless myriads
from sins which they seek ever as flies treacle. More ghastly still is
the thought that the atheist Scandinavian put into the mouth of his
Julian the Apostate: When our Christ is not saving this earth from
eternal damnation then he may be visiting remote planets or inaccessible
stars, where coloured double suns of blinding brilliancy revolve
terrifically in twin harness. There, too, are souls to be rescued. What
a grand idea! It is Ibsen's, as is the interpretation of the Third
Kingdom. It should have been Nietzsche's. Why this antinomianism? Why
this eternal conflict of evil and good, of night and day, of sweet and
sour, of God and devil, of Ormuzd and Ahriman?"

The exotic names transposed his thoughts to another avenue. If Christ is
to come again, and the holy word explicitly states that He will, why not
Buddha? Why not Brahma? Why not ...? Again a hiatus. This time something
snapped in his head. He sank back in his chair. Buddha! Was there ever a
Buddha? And if there was not, was there ever such a personality as
Christ's? Scholar that he was he knew that myth-building was a pastime
for the Asiatic imagination, great, impure, mysterious Asia--Asia the
mother of all religions, the cradle of the human race. To deny the