Jesus stood for, or that is more radically, opposed to all his teaching, or that has a greater contempt for that Nazarene, than this church which pretends to worship him as a God. The church did not even adopt the name of Jesus. It was under the name of Jesus that the pillars of church and state crucified him. They did not crucify a Christ. Not at all. They put to death Jesus of Nazareth, the man whose ideas and ideals were hostile to all they were cherishing. That was the man the pietists and rulers of that first century were after.
And the church of today has as great a contempt and hatred for that man as did those who nailed him on the cross. It is a Christ that the church worships and deifies. "Why do you preach so much about Jesus?" said a woman to me somewhat over a year ago. "We do not want to hear about Jesus. We want to hear about Christ." My friends, you can make anything you like out of a Christ. Christ is only a name, a title, a fancy, a superstition. But Jesus is a historic fact. You cannot evade that fact. It belongs to all the world. No one can take it away from us. There it is—a man of flesh and blood, a man with a message, a man with an ideal, a man with an experience of persecution and failure and death—an outlaw, a criminal, a felon. That is what law and authority made him. But the Christ is a mystery. Only the initiated can know anything about it. You must
