ABSTRACT
Lawrence has been made to serve causes not of his own choosing, notably the moral tradition of the English novel and more recently Christianity. The impetus for the remaking of Lawrence was initially provided by T. S. Eliot's attack on Lawrence in After Strange Gods, in which Eliot found the son of a Midlands coal miner heretical and sinister, the inevitable result of a deficiency in the kind of tradition that a good education gives. A particularly interesting instance of this is a tendency in the criticism of Lawrence to stress his kinship with Christianity. Toward the end of his career Lawrence evinced an admiration for the pagan element in the Catholic church and was even hopeful about the regeneration of Christianity as an active religious force. In The Man Who Died the repudiation of Christ's mission to convert men to the God of Love is accompanied by an intense hatred of the City of Man.
