This is quite a different conception from my former one, and the one held by most of those whom in old days we called Unitarians.
_You_ have had to _unlearn_, or rather to drop, some of the husks of old tradition which have been guarding the truth for you, whereas I have still _to come up to the truth_; but the point reached will be the same, whether the approach to it is from north or south--do you see?
In Christ Jesus, they tell me, we are _all_ new creatures, as a matter of fact; because, consciously or unconsciously, we are working together with Him to realise and manifest ourselves, as made after the Image of God.
He is the example and the pledge for us. St Paul saw this, of course, and your present position illuminates his teaching for me enormously. So I have much to thank you for, Kate. It is easier to learn from those we know and trust, than from strangers.
And, moreover, when we can learn from the loved ones on earth _as well as through the loved ones here_, it makes the links in the golden chain complete, and helps us to realise the unity and solidarity of our common existence, _in the Father--with the Son_. H. D.
Another morning I had told H. D. that I had been reading an article in _The Nineteenth Century--and After_, I think, entitled "An Agnostic's Progress," and asked if he had sensed it through me at all.
H. D.--Yes. We will begin with that this morning. I am very glad you read it, for it is curiously like my own experiences in the same line.
Since coming over here, and thereby coming into such direct touch with you, I have been able to grasp the key to much that puzzled me on the other side.
As my views became more spiritualised I saw there _must_ be more truth in the Christian religion than outsiders supposed, and yet I knew it could not be absolutely true _in the form in which it has been handed down_.
_That_ was for me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a cosmos of Law and Order.
It would mean God working in the highest departments of His Creation, as He is never seen to work in the lower ones. And my faith in Him prevented my entertaining such an idea! Schemes and plans of salvation belong to the comparative childhood of the race, not to the full-grown spiritual man. They are still in the fairy-tale stage, holding a truth, but acting only as the husk of the truth.