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Pike still thought of himself as a believing Christian. He questioned the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, but Jesus was still, for him, a remarkable man in whom God had "broken through"—a breakthrough, he felt, that all men should seek in their own lives. He dabbled in parapsychology, but in his confident vision of a personal afterlife, he loved to cite Psalm 84 to describe death as going "from strength to strength." Despite the strangeness of his recent activities, friends say that he seemed happy, rested and, as usual, eagerly involved in his latest project. In a sense, it was part of an old pattern that the Right Reverend James A. Pike, once again on the brink of something new, should perish in the wilderness of the Judean desert, looking for Jesus.