“Do you not think it strange that in that day when Christ came, admitting that there was a Christ, such a character could have come at all—in the time of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, when all was ceremony and unbelief?”
“I remember,” he said, “the Sadducees didn't believe in hell. He brought them one.”
“Nor the resurrection. He brought them that, also.”
He did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and mission related by the Gospels.
“It is all a myth,” he said. “There have been Saviours in every age of the world. It is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of Santa Claus.”
“But,” I argued, “even the spirit of Christmas is real when it is genuine. Suppose that we admit there was no physical Saviour—that it is only an idea—a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for itself and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves, wouldn't that make it worthy?”
“But then the fairy story of the atonement dissolves, and with it crumbles the very foundations of any established church. You can create your own Testament, your own Scripture, and your own Christ, but you've got to give up your atonement.”
“As related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it; but the death of the old order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of atonement, doesn't it?”
He said:
“A conclusion like that has about as much to do with the Gospels and Christianity as Shakespeare had to do with Bacon's plays. You are preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few centuries ago. I have preached that in my own Gospel.”