I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I assert that this great
and very definite personality in the hearts and imaginations of mankind
does not and never has attracted me. It is a fact I record about myself
without aggression or regret. I do not find myself able to associate Him
in any way with the emotion of Salvation.

I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of a divine-human
friend and mediator. If it were possible to have access by prayer, by
meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to such a being whose feet
were in the darknesses, who stooped down from the light, who was at once
great and little, limitless in power and virtue and one's very brother;
if it were possible by sheer will in believing to make and make one's
way to such a helper, who would refuse such help? But I do not find such
a being in Christ. I do not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish
I could. To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as
an incomprehensibly sinless being neither God nor man. His sinlessness
wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his white self unchanged.
He had no petty weaknesses.

Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses. If I am to
have that love, that sense of understanding fellowship, which is, I
conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this idea of a personal
Saviour, then I need someone quite other than this image of virtue, this
terrible and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of thorns, his
blood-stained hands and feet. I cannot love him any more than I can love
a man upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I do not think I
should feel a need for him. I had rather then a hundred times have
Botticelli's armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope I do not seem
to want to shock in writing these things, but indeed my only aim is to