And yet religion, as Mr. Irwin Edman shows in a remarkable article on "Religion for the Faithless,"[1] an article beautifully glowing with the mystical ardor of the intellect—religion is something that we don't get away from; it is a necessary and inevitable form and mode of our innermost living.
Only the intelligent layman, when, like the curious Greeks, he "would see Jesus," when he wishes to draw near to a master of religious living, turns more and more away from the theologians to the accredited interpreters of magic—turns to men who use their imaginations when they attempt to explain that colossal imagination which imagined Christendom and dreamed of a kingdom of heaven within the realm of Herod Antipas and in the city of Mayor Hylan.
But these literary men, object historical students and serious pious people, we don't want them and their unlicensed imaginations filling the space between us and Jesus. We wish the truth and nothing but the truth. "Renan, indeed," says William G. Hutchinson, prefacing "The Life of Jesus," "is a good instance of the egoistic historian, the narrator who is rather lyrical than dramatic; the Jesus with whom he presents us is a Renanized Jesus—a Jesus who is gentle, ironical, at times almost gay—a Jesus, in short, who in many features resembles M. Ernest Renan. But what would we have?"
What, indeed? So it has been from the beginning. The Jesus of Matthew was a Matthewized Jesus, of John a Johnized Jesus, of Paul a Paulized Jesus. Every man finds his own Jesus as he finds his own God; and in neither does he discover aught that was not previously patent or latent in himself. This is
