That he was not an irreligious man, I had reason to know. One day when we were chatting together, Wilde mentioned a little book of mine of which I will say no more here than that it made no uncertain confession of the writer’s faith in Christianity. This led Wilde--uninvited by me, for I make it a rule never to obtrude my religious views upon others--to express himself upon the subject of religion, especially of Christianity, and with such intense reverence, such manifest earnestness, that I perhaps looked something of the surprise I felt.
“You are surprised,” he said, “to hear Oscar Wilde, the _poseur_, as people call him, the man who is supposed to hold nothing too sacred, talking seriously and on serious things. _No_, I am _not_ making believe to be earnest, as I do make believe about so much else. I am speaking as I feel, and you will perhaps hardly realise what an intense relief it is to meet some one to whom one can talk about such matters without cant. It is cant and officialdom” (he spoke bitterly) “which is keeping the men and women who think out of the churches to-day. It is cant which more than anything else stands between them and Christ. Shall I tell you what is my greatest ambition--more even than an ambition--the dream of my life? Not to be remembered hereafter as an artist, poet, thinker, or playwright, but as the man who reclothed the sublimest conception which the world has ever known--the Salvation of Humanity, the Sacrifice of Himself upon the Cross by Christ--with new and burning words, with new and illuminating symbols, with new and divine vision, free from the accretions of cant which the centuries have gathered around it. I should thereby be giving the world back again the greatest gift ever given to mankind since Christ Himself gave it, peerless and pure two thousand years ago--the pure gift of Christianity as taught by Christ.
“Yes,” he went on, “I hope before I die to write the Epic of the Cross, the Iliad of Christianity, which shall live for all time.”
On another occasion Wilde unfolded to me the opening scene in a sort of religious drama which he intended one day to write--the finding to-day of the body of the Christ in the very rock-sepulchre where Joseph of Arimathea had laid it, and a great and consequent eclipse of faith in Him and in His resurrection. Thereafter, by a new revelation of the Christ, Wilde was, in his drama, newly to recreate Christianity and faith in Christianity, but of this Second Act of his World-Drama I heard no more, as our talk was at this point interrupted, and he never renewed it.