As Dunstan tells us, Boy is mightily impressed by the Reverend Leadbeater, whom he meets in the first-class compartment aboard ship. In fact, his whole world has been positively enlarged by this supposedly great prophet from a fashionable New York church. Boy is not someone known for his deep spirituality, but even he claims that Leadbeater has made sense of Christianity for him.

That’s because, as we soon discover, Leadbeater’s conception of Jesus is radically at variance with how most people understand him. Whereas most Christians see Jesus as the very epitome of meekness and asceticism, Leadbeater conceives of him as a kind of go-getting businessman, not a humble carpenter but a skilled designer, a manufacturer with an extensive range of social connections among the high and mighty.

Nor, apparently, was he just “bumming” through Palestine either; he was staying with people who knew him as a man of substance. Even Jesus’s driving of the moneylenders out of the Temple was motivated by worldly concerns; the moneylenders were ripping-off pilgrims with extortionate rates of interest.

This description of Jesus Christ as a go-getting businessman is ironic indeed as it’s the very last thing we’d expect to hear from a man of the cloth. But then Leadbeater’s surprisingly materialistic worldview probably explains why Leadbeater preaches at a fashionable church and why he’s traveling first class on a cruise ship.