lay my feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealized person can be.
It happens that in my younger days I found a character in the history of
literature who had a singular and extraordinary charm for me, of whom
the thought was tender and comforting, who indeed helped me through
shames and humiliations as though he held my hand. This person was
Oliver Goldsmith. His blunders and troubles, his vices and vanities,
seized and still hold my imagination. The slights of Boswell, the
contempt of Gibbon and all his company save Johnson, the exquisite
fineness of spirit in his "Vicar of Wakefield," and that green suit of
his and the doctor's cane and the love despised, these things together
made him a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I thought of him as
others pray. When I think of that youthful feeling for Goldsmith, I know
what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte who has seen a candle
can imagine the sun. But the Christian Christ in none of his three
characteristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from whom I am cut off
by the wanton and indecent purity of the Immaculate Conception), nor as
the white-robed, spotless miracle worker, nor as the fierce unreal
torment of the cross, comes close to my soul. I do not understand the
Agony in the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play in an unknown
tongue. The la t cry of despair is the one human touch, discordant with
all the rest of the story. One cry of despair does not suffice. The
Christian's Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not flesh
enough, not earth enough. He was never foolish and hot-eared and
inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, nor tangled his
miracles. I could love him I think more easily if the dead had not risen
and if he had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back more
enhaloed and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own tragedy.

When I think of the Resurrection I am always reminded of the "happy
endings" that editors and actor managers are accustomed to impose upon