His sinlessness
wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his white self unchanged.
He had no petty weaknesses.
Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses. If I am to
have that love, that sense of understanding fellowship, which is, I
conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this idea of a personal
Saviour, then I need someone quite other than this image of virtue, this
terrible and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of thorns, his
blood-stained hands and feet. I cannot love him any more than I can love
a man upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I do not think I
should feel a need for him. I had rather then a hundred times have
Botticelli's armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope I do not seem
to want to shock in writing these things, but indeed my only aim is to
lay my feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealized person can be.
It happens that in my younger days I found a character in the history of
literature who had a singular and extraordinary charm for me, of whom
the thought was tender and comforting, who indeed helped me through
shames and humiliations as though he held my hand.
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