II
Another morning I had told H. D. that I had been reading an article in The Nineteenth Century—and After, I think, entitled "An Agnostic's Progress," and asked if he had sensed it through me at all.
H. D.—Yes. We will begin with that this morning. I am very glad you read it, for it is curiously like my own experiences in the same line.
Since coming over here, and thereby coming into such direct touch with you, I have been able to grasp the key to much that puzzled me on the other side.
As my views became more spiritualised I saw there must be more truth in the Christian religion than outsiders supposed, and yet I knew it could not be absolutely true in the form in which it has been handed down.
That was for me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a cosmos of Law and Order.
It would mean God working in the highest departments of His Creation, as He is never seen to work in the lower ones. And my faith in Him prevented my entertaining such an idea! Schemes and plans of salvation belong to the comparative childhood of the race, not to the full-grown spiritual man. They are still in the fairy-tale stage, holding a truth, but acting only as the husk of the truth.
The unity of the race; the necessity for self-sacrifice in realising that unity: that by giving our life for our brothers we save our Life, which is that unity in which the brethren are included—all this I could accept in Christ's teaching or the teaching of the Apostles; but the rest: the detail, the carefully arranged scheme of the Atonement, etc., as dogmatic doctrines—all these seemed to me so obviously the desperate attempts of man at a certain stage of development to fit in spiritual facts with the most probable theories; and to say that men who wrote of these things were inspired, and therefore infallible, was absurd.
Even in my short life, I had seen the world pass through several stages of belief and assimilate them in turn.
As a child, I was told that God was angry with people for sinning and breaking His commandments, and so Jesus Christ offered to come and die on the cross to appease His just wrath.