with an article in the same Hibbert Journal. He attached this response as appendix II to The Creation of Christ. He summarized the confrontation: "The historicity of Jesus is an article of faith." (Appendix II, p. 447). However, Couchoud reiterated his affirmation of the power of the spiritual figure of the Heavenly Christ. "[It] has no relation to the conception of a man elevated to divinity nor to that of the anthropomorphic God, both of which were familiar to the religion of antiquity. It is an intimate and unique synthesis in which God retains his glory in its fullness and man his mortal destiny in its bitterness, without change of God into man or of man into God. It was a new idea, and it was by this new idea that the world was conquered." "Myth" versus "religious conception" Couchoud explained his own use of the word myth. A "myth" is a narrative aiming at shaping beliefs. A religious conception animates rites, rituals and behaviors: "I am concerned [with] the history of a religious conception." Myth is easily derogatory; it explains a natural fact, a rite, or an idea as a "narrative", to help the mind grasp, and remember rules or beliefs. A "religious conception", is "simpler and deeper, far more unsophisticated and fertile. Its relation to rites and myths is primordial. Zeus is a religious conception. The punishment of the Danaids is a myth." The Heavenly Christ is such a "religious conception": "I regard it as philosophically impossible that the conception of the God-Man, the Saviour of the world, can have originated in any event of history...[I]t is a great religious creation which arose in the context of the mystery cults and was founded on earlier conceptions and vitalized by mystic illuminations. Its consequences were developed slowly and in sequence." George Santayana - Saving the "Idea of Christ" George Santayana (1863-1952) was an agnostic strongly influenced by Charles Darwin's evolution, who admired Lucretius and Spinoza. He had a soft attitude to religion, calling it the "Spiritual Life", and, as an "aesthetic Catholic", valuing the poetic and aesthetic benefits of belief to consciousness. He was sensitive to the major dilemma between accepting the skeptical findings of historical criticism (Jesus Christ was a myth), and saving the "spiritual" value of the "Idea of Christ". He thus shared some of Couchoud's dual ideas towards Christianity, and even some of Drews, who had