Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/39

is the one that wears the least well under the impact of life's experience.

Jesus himself seems at the last to have felt something like this when he uttered his famous cry "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But the Christ that the generations have created out of old Syrian stories has detached himself more than we sometimes think from the illusion of the World-Father.

What man, in fact, has done is to invent a god of his own, a god of thwarted flesh and blood, in direct opposition to the "Creator" whose cruelties Jesus condoned.

The doctrine of the Incarnation is man's sublime excuse for the unknown forces that cause him to suffer. But the idea of a "Heavenly Father," held to so obstinately in the face of the world we know, has become something that is no longer beautiful.

And the reason why one feels oneself so much more affected by the mythology of the Roman and Anglican faith than by the philosophy of the Modernists is that the former tends to lay the chief stress upon Christ himself as a beautiful and wounded deity in a hostile world; while the latter keeps offering unctuous insults to all suffering hearts by its chatter about the goodness of the All-Powerful.