Part 11 (2/2)

So we persist in asking, not ”Is it true? true to our souls?” or, ”Has the Lord said it?” but, ”What say the learned men, the influential men, the eloquent men?” Shame upon these time-serving concessions, as unmanly as they are fallacious. Go back to the hovels, rather, and take the witnessing of the illiterate souls whose hearts, waiting there in poverty or pain, or under the shadow of some great affliction, the Lord Himself hath opened.'--F. D. HUNTINGDON, _Christian Believing and Living_.

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APPENDIX XXIV

'It is foreign to our purpose to discuss the various theories which have been advanced to explain the genesis and power of the Christian Religion from the cynical Gibbon to the sentimental Renan and the Rationalist Strauss. One remark may be permitted. It has been our lot to read an immense amount of literature on this subject, and with no bias in the orthodox direction, we are bound to admit that no theory has yet appeared which from purely natural causes explains the remarkable life and marvellous influence of the Founder of Christianity.'--HECTOR MACPHERSON, _Books to Read and How to Head Them_.

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APPENDIX XXV

The Song of a Heathen Sojourning in Galilee, A.D. 32.

If Jesus Christ is a man, And only a man, I say That of all mankind I cleave to Him, And to Him will I cleave alway.

If Jesus Christ is a G.o.d, And the only G.o.d, I swear I will follow Him through heaven and h.e.l.l, The earth, the sea, and the air!

RICHARD WATSON GILDER.

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APPENDIX XXVI

'I distinguish absolutely between the character of Jesus and the character of Christianity--in other words between Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the Christ. Shorn of all supernatural pretensions, Jesus emerges from the great ma.s.s of human beings as an almost perfect type of simplicity, veracity, and natural affection. ”Love one another” was the Alpha and Omega of His teaching, and He carried out the precept through every hour of His too brief life.... But how blindly, how foolishly my critics have interpreted the inner spirit of my argument, how utterly have they failed to realise that the whole aim of the work is to justify Jesus against the folly, the cruelty, the infamy, the ignorance of the creed upbuilt upon His grave. I show in cipher, as it were, that those who crucified Him once would crucify Him again, were He to return amongst us. I imply that among the first to crucify Him would be the members of His Own Church. But nowhere surely do I imply that His soul, in its purely personal elements, in its tender and sympathising humanity was not the very divinest that ever wore earth about it.'--ROBERT BUCHANAN in Letter of January 1892 to _Daily Chronicle_ regarding his poem _The Wandering Jew_. _Robert Buchanan: His Life, Life's Work, and Life's Friends.h.i.+ps_, by Harriett Jay, pp.

274-5.

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APPENDIX XXVII

'I do not believe I have any personal immortality. I am part of an immortality perhaps, but that is different. I am not the continuing thing. I personally am experimental, incidental. I feel I have to do something, a number of things no one else could do, and then I am finished, and finished altogether. Then my substance returns to the common lot. I am a temporary enclosure for a temporary purpose: that served, and my skull and teeth, my idiosyncrasy and desire will disperse, I believe, like the timbers of the booth after a fair.'--H.

G. WELLS, _First and Last Things_, p. 80.

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APPENDIX XXVIII

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