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 mass 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 Friendships, by Harriett Jay, pp. 274-5.
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.