Papini. Her book deserves wide reading. I suspect there are many people whom it, together with a thoughtful reading of the Gospel of John, would persuade that they are not altogether "faithless." Certainly her "psychological" approach brings us infinitely nearer to the magic of Jesus—to the source which inspired St. Francis, Thomas à Kempis, and the haunting negro "spirituals" than either the "esthetic" approach of the "decadents" or the cold ethical approach of rationalizing churches. She has as good a right to her Jesus as St. Augustine had to his, or as the Rev. Dr. Haldeman has to his.
What Mrs. Austin possesses above any recent commentator that I have seen is a sense for the "mystical moments" in the experience of Jesus, without which he is inexplicable—moments when he followed "the inward voice, followed it instinctively with the freedom of a river in its natural channel, with no fretting of the flesh. But where the voice left him uninformed he was simply a man from Nazareth: his social outlook was the outlook of a villager." Only a person who has known some of these moments when the mind with light on its wings goes straight to the mark "like a homing pigeon through the pathless"—only a person, I think, with such experience can make Jesus come alive for us in his most exalted moods, as thus:
