gospel of Christ', which he interpreted as the spirit of "love, liberty, gaiety, forgiveness, joy and acceptance." Reception Weatherhead was a highly controversial figure on account of his questioning of some of the central tenets of the Christian faith—he once said he regarded "creeds and confessions of faith" as "museum specimens"—and his incorporation into Christianity of elements from other religions and from spiritualism. In the view of Professor David D. Larsen, of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, "Weatherhead jettisoned historical Christianity". He denied the Atonement and the efficacy of the Blood of Christ in A Plain Man Looks at the Cross, and the bodily Resurrection of Christ in The Manner of the Resurrection in the Light of Modern Science and Psychical Research. He dismissed the virgin birth, was inclined to believe that Zechariah was the father of Jesus, thought that the "legion" of demons probably meant that the man had been molested as a child by Roman legionnaires, and regarded the Apostle Paul as hopelessly neurotic. Weatherhead regularly attended spiritist séances, at one of which John Wesley appeared to him. In 1957 he gave a lecture to the City Temple Literary Society on "The Case for Reincarnation". He continued to advocate reincarnation for the rest of his life in books like The Christian Agnostic and Life Begins at Death. For Professor Horton Davies, Weatherhead was "unrivalled as a twentieth-century physician of souls and preacher of the integration of personality through Christ". Professor Larsen, while agreeing that Weatherhead was "a brilliant preacher", judges his sermons, however, to be theologically "vacuous and empty". Weatherhead, he writes, was perhaps the most striking example in the British Isles of "the increasing horizontalization and psychologization of the sermon", a tendency wittily characterised by E. Brooks Holifield as "From Salvation to Self-Realization". Weatherhead's scorn for theology—he claimed that poets had more insight than theologians—and penchant for "preaching as psychotherapy" made him, in Larsen's view, "a tragic instance in which psychical research replaced 'sound doctrine'". Even his psychology, which drew on fringe thinkers as well as more mainstream figures like Freud, is now "severely dated. No one today talks about Odic force and the leakage of psychic energy. His 55 books are virtually unread today." John Taylor, reviewing Doctor of Souls states that "[Weatherhead's] writings still have an impact on Churches today, and Christians read and re-read his works". Nevertheless, though Weatherhead was a "great man", he "remains