He spoke simply, and without the slightest affectation of reserve. Villiers was still puzzled.
"I thought, Alwyn," he ventured to say presently with some little diffidence,--"that you entirely rejected the idea of Christ's Divinity, as a mere superstition?"
"In dense ignorance of the extent of God's possibilities, I certainly did so," returned Alwyn quietly,--"But I have had good reason to see that my own inability to comprehend supernatural causes was entirely to blame for that rejection. Are we able to explain all the numerous and complex variations and manifestations of Matter? No. Then why do we dare to doubt the certainly conceivable variations and manifestations of Spirit? ... The doctrine of a purely HUMAN Christ is untenable,--a Creed founded on that idea alone would make no way with the immortal aspirations of the soul, . . what link could there be between a mere man like ourselves and heaven? None whatever,--it needs the DIVINE in Christ to overleap the darkness of the grave, . . to serve us as the Symbol of certain Resurrection, to teach us that this life is not the ALL, but only ONE loop in the chain of existence, . . only ONE of the 'many mansions' in the Father's House. Human teachers of high morals there have always been in the world,--Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, . . there is no end to them, and their teachings have been valuable so far as they went, but even Plato's majestic arguments in favor of the Immortality of the Soul fall short of anything sure and graspable. There were so many prefigurements of what WAS to come, . . just as the sign of the Cross was used in the Temple of Serapis, and was held in singular mystic veneration by various tribes of Egyptians, Arabians, and Indians, ages before Christ came. And now that these prefigurements have resolved themselves into an actual Divine Symbol, the doubting world still hesitates, and by this hesitation paralyzes both its Will and Instinct--so that it fails to cut out the core of Christianity's true solution, or to learn what Christ really meant when He said 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, --no man cometh to the Father but by Me.' Have you ever considered the particular weight of that word 'MAN' in that text? It is rightly specified that 'no MAN cometh '--for there are hosts of other beings, in other universes, who are not of our puny race, and who do not need to be taught either the way, truth, or life, as they know all three, and have never lost their knowledge from the beginning."
His voice quivered a little, and he paused,--Villiers watched him with a strange sense of ever-deepening fascination and wonder.