'^mM si*\^>^ 
 
 BV 4501 .M248 1907 
 McGee, James Ellington. 
 Jesus, the world teacher 
 
JESUS: THE WORLD TEACHER 
 
Jesus: The World Teacher 
 
 By 
 
 JAMES ELLINGTON McGEE 
 
 CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
 NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. Practical Idealism, - - - 9 
 
 II. Progressiveness, . - - 41 
 
 III. Symbolism, 77 
 
 IV. Religion, 105 
 
 V. Strategy, 135 
 
 VI. Conservatism, - - - - 165 
 
 VII. Ethics, - - - - - - 189 
 
 VIII. Innovation, 225 
 
 IX. MODERNNESS, 257 
 
 X. epilogue, 287 
 
Chapter I. 
 PRACTICAL IDEALISM. 
 
To the religious mind, this universe is not merely a sys- 
 tem of laws and an infinite force acting in accordance with 
 them; nor is it an impersonal idea evolving its hidden rich- 
 ness into the explicitness of concrete existence : it is the 
 personal life of God our Father in progressive expression 
 and realization. 
 
 Ideas are mighty, because they are aspects of the living 
 truth; because they serve, in their v/ay, to conduct the mind 
 to the recognition of the vital fact. Ideas would be sufficient 
 if the universe were founded upon ideas and not upon the 
 living God ; or, if man were a being of merely intellectual 
 or contemplative powers, and not a nature endued with pro- 
 found sympathies and one that can neither rest in thought 
 nor in feeling, but in the perfection that comes through 
 
 achievement. 
 
 —GEORGE A. GORDON. 
 
 I believe in God, I believe in God with all my soul, be- 
 cause this world is inexplicable without Him and explicable 
 with Him; and it was Jesus Christ that showed me that this 
 world demanded God and was inexplicable without Him. 
 
 —PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 10 
 
PRACTICAL IDEALISM. 
 
 Idealism is mental salvation. Thought 
 utterly perishes if we repudiate the ideal. 
 It is the ideal which saves the mind from 
 putrefaction, as the soul saves the body from 
 putrefaction. 
 
 The unthinking world has had its frolic 
 at the expense of the ideal; nevertheless the 
 only saving grace that has been manifest in 
 the thoughts of men, from the beginning of 
 time to the present, has issued from the ideal. 
 Pitiable, indeed, would be the condition of 
 humankind if idealism was not regnant. 
 
 Idealism declares the primacy of spirit. 
 It affirms the subordination of matter. It at- 
 taches itself to the unseen. It is a pro- 
 nounced believer in the immanence of God. 
 It does not declare the universe to be a blind 
 
 11 
 
12 Jesus: The ^VoRLD Teacher. 
 
 mechanism. It does not apotheosize matter, 
 force, and motion. It sees no causality in 
 things. It discerns no form nor content in 
 the universe outside of free intelligence. 
 
 The idealist makes consciousness and its 
 data fundamental. He builds no conclusion 
 on the finality of sense data. His eyes, his 
 ears, his hand, his tongue, his sense of smell, 
 are not for him the source of authority. In 
 his contact with the sensible world he gives 
 to mind the place of leadership. The idealist 
 does not deny sensuous facts; but he makes 
 the sensuous fact depend upon the spiritual 
 fact. The table, the chair, the house, the sea, 
 the mountain, hunger, thirst, gravity, have a 
 validity in the sense-world ; but their validity, 
 declares the idealist, is rooted and grounded 
 in spirit. 
 
 The materialist issues on occasion a pro- 
 nunciamento of independence, and declares 
 the finality of the sense- world ; but legitimate 
 thought and experience effectually contradict 
 him. The materialist laughs at the gossamer- 
 thread theories, at the day-dreaming, at the 
 
Practical Idealism. 13 
 
 star-gazing of tlie idealist, ostensibly obliv- 
 ious of the fact that the earth on which he 
 stands is reclining in the arms of soft air, 
 and spinning through space at a thousand 
 miles an hour, dragging him with it— he 
 knows not how, nor where. Materialism for- 
 gets that the locomotive, the steamship, the 
 modern skyscraper building, are the projec- 
 tion in steel, in iron, in brass, in stone, of 
 angles acute, right, reflex, straight; of cir- 
 cles, of quadrants, of semi-circles, of parallel- 
 ograms; in fact, of the science of geometry, 
 of mechanics, and every other sphere of pure 
 thought. And what is true of the locomotive, 
 of the steamship, of the modern building, is 
 true of all material construction, whether 
 plow-points, pyramids, mountain ranges, 
 watery plains, spheres, or hemispheres. 
 
 The idealist reckons the world as phenom- 
 enal, not ontological reality; as appearance, 
 not substance. Every material force he ac- 
 cepts inductively, not metaphysically. He 
 trusts the world as a sense display. He does 
 not trust it as an ultimate. ^^In the divine 
 
14 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 order,'' says ca great modern votarist of 
 idealism, ''intellect is primary, nature sec- 
 ondary. That which once existed in intellect 
 as pure law has now taken body as nature. 
 It existed already in the mind in solution; 
 now it has been precipitated, and the bright 
 sediment is the world." 
 
 The idealist does not respect labor or its 
 products otherwise than as a faithful repre- 
 sentation of the laws of being. Government 
 he does not respect, only to the extent of its 
 assertion of the laws of conscience. No 
 thing, whether Church, school, reform, or 
 home, commands his consideration save as it 
 voices the mind of the ever-present, ever- 
 working God. The only salvation of the 
 world mentally is the headship of the ideal. 
 What there is of permanent beneficence and 
 beauty in the world of thought and achieve- 
 ment finds in idealism its parentage. 
 
 II. 
 
 Idealism, however, of the abstract quality 
 is subject to drastic stricture. It has cast a 
 
Practical Idealism. 15 
 
 shadow of density upon the idealism that is 
 of abiding and indispensable worth. Ab- 
 stract idealism renders itself impotent 
 through its devotion to theory instead of life. 
 It is of the rigor and vigor type. It is words 
 without work. 
 
 Practical idealism alone is legitimate. It 
 is thought plus will. It does not rest in con- 
 ception, but completes itself in causality. 
 
 Abstract idealism, dealing with theory 
 rather than life, converts flesh-and-blood men 
 and women into hypothetical creatures, and 
 hence is of no abiding value in the solution 
 of life's problems. The cloistered saint is a 
 dumb significant for the suffering and sin- 
 ning souls that press the highway. 
 
 Of similar non-value is the thinker who, 
 in anchoretic solitude, expends himself, and 
 submerges in Lethean waters his practical 
 relatedness to his brother man. Personal 
 aloofness is of no worth to humankind, 
 whether in scholar, saint, or sage. Points of 
 tangency with all men must be discovered 
 and utilized if our life is to be a benefaction 
 
16 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 rather than a malefaction. The democracy 
 of culture is as essential for the common 
 weal as political or religious democracy. 
 The idealist who does not see that will alone 
 gives effectiveness to thought is blind to the 
 overtowering fact in individual and racial 
 experience. The thinker minus causal effi- 
 ciency deceives himself. His otherness is 
 found in him who hears the good word and 
 does it not. 
 
 The abstract idealist insists upon a dis- 
 proportion between his faculties and the mo- 
 mentary aspects of daily life. Because of 
 this imaginary disproportion he gives him- 
 self to the creation of vagaries which inevi- 
 tably terminate in intellectual and moral 
 ennui. The Brook Farm Community in New 
 England during the past century was a strik- 
 ing illustration of abstractionism and its 
 myopic outlook on practical life. To these 
 Johns-a-Dreams the differentiations of social 
 effort were unspeakable drudgeries. The 
 hymeneal bonds between perception and ar- 
 ticulation they did not celebrate. The epi- 
 
PRACTICAL Idealism. 17 
 
 thalammm of doctrine and deed they did not 
 chant. Life for them was without an objec- 
 tive. They could see nothing in Boston, New 
 York, or elsewhere, that was worthy of their 
 hand, head, or heart. The labor of shop, of 
 store, of farm; the competitions of the mar- 
 ket, the threatening crises of government, the 
 possible transformation of natural and moral 
 crudities into the full-blown beauty of a 
 Christian civilization, had for them no word 
 of argument. They clamored for something, 
 they knew not what, proportionate to their 
 imagined powers. The opportunities and 
 achievements of statecraft, of commerce, of 
 art, of invention, of education, of religion, ad- 
 dressed them with momentary frequency, but 
 the ceaseless detonations of their colossean 
 conceit made impossible the hearing of any 
 practical voice. 
 
 III. 
 
 But the Brook Farmers had, in their day, 
 colleagues who were not nominally in their 
 community. These colleagues were in the 
 
 2 
 
18 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 schools, in the churches, in business, in the 
 home, on the farm, and elsewhere. And from 
 their loins has sprung a numerous progeny, 
 who are in evidence to-day. Educationally, a 
 few decades since, the day was when the ab- 
 stractionist succeeded in making mind-culture 
 synonymous with what Carlyle calls Do-Noth- 
 ingism. The collegian was a man of leisure, 
 not a man of work. If any eifort marked 
 his career, it was confined exclusively to a 
 profession. He looked upon himself as the 
 favorite of gods and demi-gods. But, happily 
 for the social body, a better day is at hand. 
 The educated man is now appraised on the 
 basis of his productive capacity. If he is not 
 a producer, the judgment of society is: If a 
 man work not, neither shall he eat. 
 
 The prejudice against the labor of the 
 farm, the shop, the store, the home, is in the 
 throes of dissolution, and in this year of 
 Christendom the trained mind is finding a 
 field for its highest capacity in what the ab- 
 stract idealist denominates menial pursuit. 
 The abstract idealist is not yet a negligible 
 
Practical Idealism. 19 
 
 factor, however, in the educational world, 
 relative to the making of mental opportu- 
 nity the property of all the peoples of the 
 earth. 
 
 The actually inferior members of the so- 
 cial unit have felt, and are feeling to-day, 
 burdensomely, the absence of this opportu- 
 nity. The Mongolian, the Malayan, the Afri- 
 can, and multitudes of European peasants, 
 have not yet received from their more fortu- 
 nate brothers their inalienable mental rights. 
 As abstractionists we palliate our delin- 
 quency on the ground that their insufferable 
 mental obtuseness and the gigantic propor- 
 tions of their brute force practically nullify 
 our duty. This position, however, is argii- 
 mentum ad invidiam. God made these appar- 
 ently inferior peoples, men and women. We 
 can not, without impugning the Infinite Mind, 
 make them less. 
 
 ^'Ignorance is the curse of God; knowl- 
 edge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven," 
 is the word of truth and soberness spoken by 
 the myriad-minded Saxon poet. If the igno- 
 
20 Jesus : The \A^orld Teacher. 
 
 ranee of any man is mastodonic in its outline, 
 our duty to him is not lessened, but increased. 
 The formidableness of another's brute force 
 need excite no fears. The philosophy of his- 
 tory ceaselessly afl&rms that the wielding of 
 the brute force of any man or body of men 
 is in inverse ratio to the cultivation of mind 
 and heart. The man of mental and moral 
 refinement possessing great muscular vigor, 
 invariably adopts the words of Shakespeare's 
 Isabella, '^0, it is excellent to have a giant's 
 strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a 
 giant!" 
 
 The negro problem in our own country, 
 the ghost that will not down, will find many 
 of its repulsive and stubborn elements elimi- 
 nated when, as a national body politic, we 
 diffuse mental and ethical light. It is almost 
 invariably the densely ignorant, sullen son 
 of Ham that inflames the deadly passion of a 
 community. With his limited outlook, he 
 does not esteem the upper ranges of life nor 
 foresee the inevitable ultimate of his crime. 
 Mind and heart consummately cultivated are 
 
Practical Idealism. 21 
 
 the only stay of the social body. If they 
 can not prevent and remedy every conceiv- 
 able ill among men, the issue is hopeless. 
 The abstract idealist gives ns no help in the 
 solution of racial problems. His dwelling- 
 place is in the clouds. The theater of human 
 passion and progress is to him terram incog- 
 nit a^n. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Brook Farmers have their descend- 
 ants in political life. They are chronic ani- 
 madverters. They see nothing of good in af- 
 fairs political. They ignore their registra- 
 tion and suffrage duties. They are in ab- 
 sentia in ward, municipal, county, and other 
 political gatherings. And yet they protest 
 loud and long against governmental evils. 
 Their political maxim is : The best or nothing. 
 The less of two evils they look upon as the 
 output of the pit. With Pharisaic demeanor 
 they exclaim, ^'What fellowship has right- 
 eousness with unrighteousness? What com- 
 
22 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 miinion has light with darkness?'' Only as 
 their gossamer-thread doctrines find adoption 
 are they active for the common weal. 
 
 The Church of Jesus Christ, as a body, is 
 only recently disengaging itself from this 
 hypocritical position. The direction of the 
 ward, the city, the State, has for time imme- 
 morial been criminally delegated to the sons 
 of Belial. As a resultant a burdensome po- 
 litical curse has rested upon the shoulders of 
 the civilized world. But with the Church of 
 Jesus Christ as a body in array against po- 
 litical infamies, becoming an offensive in- 
 stead of a defensive force, practical instead 
 of theoretical, governmental rightness is im- 
 minent. 
 
 A workable maxim that commends itself 
 to us as a causal unit rather than an abstract 
 idealism is: The partially good, if not the 
 wholly good ; the better rather than the good ; 
 the best rather than the better. 
 
 Idealism minus will has wrought and is 
 working detrimentally in the sphere of reli- 
 gion. This abstraction is evident in the 
 
Practical Idealism. 23 
 
 limited interpretation which we give to the 
 character of God and His kingdom. 
 
 The Deism which cast a shadow like the 
 Egyptian night upon the sixteenth, seven- 
 teenth, and eighteenth centuries of European 
 life is still existent to a lamentable degree in 
 the thought of the Church of God. God with 
 us, God in us, God working through us, is 
 still a doctrine of nebulous outline. We be- 
 lieve the Infinite Presence and Power to be 
 existent in the organic life of the visible 
 Church. But we often express our doubt as 
 to the ever-presence of the Infinite Mind and 
 Will in the American Congress, the British 
 Parliament, the Japanese Diet, despite the 
 ethical quality of the enacted legislation. We 
 make merry with the notion that in the legiti- 
 mate transactions of the New York Stock 
 Exchange, of the Philadelphia Bourse, of the 
 Bank of England, of the Hong Kong Custom 
 House, God is the besetting and inspiring 
 reality. 
 
 In the playfulness of school children; in 
 the gentle whisperings of the south wind ; in 
 
24 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 the soft embraces of the atmosphere; in the 
 inspiration and expiration of plants and ani- 
 mals ; in the diastole and systole of the human 
 heart; in the metamorphosis of sun, rain, 
 sleet, snow, dull earth, and furious storm 
 into the perfume and beauty of the carnation 
 pink ; in the continuous emergence of savage 
 peoples into civilized life; in fact, of every 
 conceivable phenomenon that momentarily 
 and diurnally presents itself to our mind's 
 eye, we are laggards in avowing the ever- 
 present efficiency of God our Father. His 
 kingdom we often invest with a limitation 
 identical with that of the first-century Jew. 
 We make it pre-eminently traditional, cere- 
 monial, temporal, spatial. What our fathers 
 thought becomes for us a mental Ultima 
 Thule. As abstract idealists we convert the 
 kingdom of God into a thought conformity 
 which impedes all intellectual progress and 
 militates greatly against moral progress. 
 The Pegasean wing we would clip, the assidu- 
 ous experimenter we would eye askant, 
 and the profound speculator we would assign 
 
Practical Idealism. 25 
 
 to Milton ^s '^ limbo large and broad, xlie para- 
 dise of fools.'' 
 
 We insist upon Augustine, upon Calvin, 
 upon Wesley, upon Edwards, becoming the 
 mouthpieces for the day that now is. In so 
 doing we transform ourselves from free and 
 active mental agents into senseless automata. 
 In so doing we subscribe to the Deistic doc- 
 trine that God spoke in their day to them, 
 but does not speak in our day to us. Such a 
 doctrine is intolerably fatuous. What there 
 is of universal quality in the words and deeds 
 of Augustine, of Calvin, of Wesley, of Ed- 
 wards, and other master spirits of the past, 
 we should accept with devout thanksgiving; 
 but that which they said and did admitting of 
 circumscription, we should, as present-day 
 children of the Most High, repudiate. Intel- 
 lectual strait-jackets are fitting apparel for 
 myopic thinkers, who make of God and His 
 world a blind and purposeless mechanism, 
 but they assuredly are not suitable for men 
 and women who believe in the immanent, 
 ever-working God. Love, truth, righteous- 
 
26 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 ness, the basilar principles of the kingdom of 
 heaven, have nothing to fear from any legiti- 
 mate activity of the finite mind. 
 
 Abstract idealism is a disavowal of the 
 present-day causal efficiency of the Infinite 
 Spirit. The abstractionist gives to ceremony 
 a value that is fictitious. He forgets that a 
 whole popedom of forms may be uplifted and 
 vivified by a single pulsation of virtue, but 
 by nothing else. He forgets that regenerate 
 and serviceable personality is of primal 
 worth in the kingdom of God. The abstract 
 idealist assigns a temporal primacy to the 
 kingdom of righteousness on the Sabbath- 
 day, to Good Friday, to Easter-day, to Whit- 
 suntide, to the Passover and Pentecostal 
 feasts, to days of fasting and prayer; but 
 he withdraws this primacy on other days. 
 
 Spatially he is a vociferous home-mission 
 votarist. In his army of good words he has 
 not marshaled these: '^He shall have domin- 
 ion from sea to sea, and from the river unto 
 the ends of the earth;'' ^^Go ye into all the 
 world, and preach the gospel to every erea- 
 
Practical Idealism. 27 
 
 ture;'' ^^Ye shall be witnesses unto Me unto 
 the uttermost part of the earth. ' ' 
 
 V. 
 
 Practical idealism is thought made effect- 
 ual. It is word and work in happy and bene- 
 ficial consonance. It is the indisputable 
 demonstration of the proposition : Experience 
 does not contravene thought, but gives to it 
 an abiding value. Practical idealism is 
 ethical and spiritual salvation. The Incarna- 
 tion of the Son of God is the perpetual af- 
 firmation of this thesis. 
 
 Jesus gave no countenance to abstract 
 idealism. He dwelt primarily in the realm 
 of the spirit, but from this realm He issued 
 continuously for the expenditure of Himself. 
 To things material He assigned no sover- 
 eignty. He used them as servants subject 
 to His beck and call. He did not give to 
 things an existence in themselves, but posited 
 their existence in and for intelligence. The 
 finite spirit, founded in and transcended only 
 by the Infinite Spirit, is the lawful master of 
 
28 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 the universe, is Jesus' virtual word. The phe- 
 nomenal reality of the sensuous life Jesus 
 did nofc deny. He did deny its metaphysical 
 reality. Materialism with its unutterable 
 crassness found no lodgment in His thought. 
 He saw the world as the perpetual forth- 
 going of Divine causality. Free and purpo- 
 sive intelligence He discerned everywhere. 
 The causal efficiency which He beheld in 
 heaven, in earth, in sea, He denominated 
 God. 
 
 Jesus is the greatest of the world's think- 
 ers. He is the Teacher of teachers. The suc- 
 ceeding centuries have exclaimed, ^^ Never 
 man spake like this man;'' ^VHe speaks as 
 one having authority, and not as the scribes." 
 He infinitely transcends ancient and modern 
 humanists. The educational voice of the civ- 
 ilized world hastens to bear this witness: 
 ** Whosoever heareth the sayings of Jesus, 
 and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise 
 man who builded his house upon a rock; and 
 the rain descended, and the floods came, and 
 the winds blew and beat upon that house; 
 
Practical Idealism. 29 
 
 and it fell not; for it was founded upon a 
 rock." In like manner speaks the commer- 
 cial voice, the governmental voice, the lit- 
 erary voice, the voice of religion. 
 
 Jesus was not only a thinker, but also a 
 doer. In Him there was a correspondence of 
 doctrine and deed which no personality of 
 any generation can parallel. This incompar- 
 able harmony of thought and action gives to 
 Him, without the possibility of a stricture, 
 the appellation, Practical Idealist. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The intent of personality as expressed 
 through the word and work of Jesus is not 
 abstract goodness, but the realization of the 
 normal good; not the formulation of theory, 
 but the enrichment of all life. 
 
 The Incarnation is the graphic portrayal 
 of the mutual inclusiveness of thought and 
 experience, of the good will and the common 
 weal. In this complete investment of life 
 Jesus inaugurated a unique significance to 
 personality. He did not insulate Himself 
 
30 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 from men. Possessing powers of mind and 
 heart infinitely beyond all other men of His 
 day, He saw in all life a call for service. He 
 entered sympathetically into the life of Gali- 
 lean fishermen, of rulers of synagogues, of 
 Eoman centurions, of innocent children, of 
 Pharisees, publicans, sinners, and every other 
 class of Jews and Gentiles. He embraced the 
 common. He explored the familiar. In the 
 servile extremities of individual and social 
 life He was conscious of the presence of the 
 highest spiritual cause. In His Nazareth 
 years He pursued the work of a carpenter. 
 He made Himself at one with the obscure 
 son of toil. In His thought He took cogni- 
 zance of the lowly shepherd, of the unnoticed 
 tiller of the soil, of the fisherman, of the culi- 
 nary work of the housewife. 
 
 At the supper preceding the feast of the 
 Passover no slave was at hand for the menial 
 service of washing the feet of the partici- 
 pants. The disciples, as free men, evidently 
 declined to assume this degraded office. In 
 the midst of their expressed or unexpressed 
 
Practical Idealism. 31 
 
 decimations, Jesus arose from supper, laid 
 aside His garments, girded Himself with a 
 towel, poured water into a basin, and began 
 to wash the disciples' feet and wipe them 
 with the towel wherewith He was girded. 
 This supreme act of condescension by God 
 manifest in the flesh, forever and for aye 
 m.akes radiant the most abject drudgery, if 
 performed in the spirit of love. Henceforth 
 it is not the work, but the spirit which under- 
 lies and pervades it, which gives it abiding 
 worth. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The practical idealism of Jesus finds itself 
 vocalized in His appreciation of man. The 
 pessimism of the poet, *^ There 's no trust, no 
 faith, no honesty in men; all perjured, all 
 forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers, ' ' has 
 no genetic relatedness to the spirit of the 
 Son of God. He is the greatest believer in 
 man that ever trod the altitudes and depres- 
 sions of earth. If love, truth, and righteous- 
 ness do not eventually make themselves uni- 
 
32 Jesus : The ^A^ORLD Teacher. 
 
 versally potent, the failure will be in astound- 
 ing contrariety to the confidence of Jesus in 
 the human race. 
 
 The title which He appropriated to Him- 
 self, Son of Man, is His appreciation of the 
 possibilities of the finite spirit. Himself as 
 the efflorescence of whatsoever things are 
 true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good 
 report. He saw potentially in the voracious 
 publican who marted his manhood for gold; 
 in the Pharisee who made of sweet religion a 
 rhapsody of words; in the libertine and 
 harlot who blurred the grace and blush of 
 modesty, called virtue hyiDocite, plucked the 
 rose from the fair forehead of an innocent 
 love, and in lieu set a blister there. The vices 
 of the race which have made other men 
 thought-sick seemed to inspire in Him a cre- 
 dulity that almost approached a phantasm. 
 
 In the possible man Jesus had an infalli- 
 ble trust, despite the crassitudes of the actual 
 man. The ceaseless enlargement, the infinite 
 growth of our moral nature He never failed 
 to aver. He was a believer in the supremacy 
 
Practical Idealism. 33 
 
 of the best, and with this conviction He dis- 
 missed all particular uncertainties and fears. 
 To the sure revelation of individual and ra- 
 cial development He adjourned the solution 
 of present-day riddles. Men of lesser faith 
 have suffered themselves to be baffled by the 
 enigmas of the actual. The paradox of latent 
 belief coexisting with patent unbelief, of 
 latent virtue coexisting with patent vice, of 
 possible light coexisting with actual darkness, 
 has always been the discomfiture of those 
 who see in man a fulfillment rather than a 
 prophecy. 
 
 A profound and pungent philosophy de- 
 clares itself in the estimate which Jesus gives 
 of the potential man. The ethical thought of 
 Plato repeatedly depreciates the latent 
 capacity of Demos, the common people. The 
 Greek ethicist only saw in social evolution 
 the efficiency of the aristocracy. In his 
 mind's eye the subserviency of the many to 
 the few was the only social possibility. He 
 was painfully conscious of fixtures in the 
 moral development of the race. 
 
 3 
 
34 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 Epietetus the slave becoming an ethical 
 inspirer of humankind; Peter the Galilean 
 fisherman becoming the inaugurator in word 
 of an ethical and spiritual dispensation which 
 is mighty through God to the pulling down 
 of strongholds, casting down imaginations 
 and every high thing that exalts itself against 
 the knowledge of the good, could not by any 
 logical legerdemain be assigned a place of 
 power in Plato's Eepublic. To Plato and 
 to every other abstract idealist the individual 
 man is not a great hope, the moral universe 
 in miniature. But in Jesus' thought, Jew 
 and Gentile, bond and free, were the kingdom 
 of love, truth, and righteousness in embryo, 
 and, under the guidance and reinforcement 
 of the ever-living, ever-working God, the 
 kingdom in embryo would inevitably become 
 love, truth, and righteousness, perfect in or- 
 ganization and powerful in execution. 
 
 It bodes well for the race that Jesus' ap- 
 praisement of man has rooted and grounded 
 itself in all legitimate thought and experi- 
 ence. The thought system that has ethical 
 
Practical Idealism. 35 
 
 content, and the practical life that has ethical 
 form, do not abstract the actual man from 
 the possible man. The Borneo head-hunter 
 in actuality is not abstracted by legitimate 
 thought from the Borneo Christian gentle- 
 man in possibility. The lecherous and 
 thievish habitue of a New York Tenderloin 
 saloon in reality is not abstracted by legiti- 
 mate thought from soul-winning Jerry Mc- 
 Auley in possibility. 
 
 The social commonwealth finds its con- 
 sistency is quickened in conscience, and pur- 
 sues the path of progress through its appre- 
 ciation and utilization of the thought and 
 practice of Jesus. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 In His interpretation of God and His 
 kingdom Jesus did not align Himself with 
 Deistic or materialistic votaries. 
 
 Self-running nature is an idol, as Plato 
 termed it, of the sense-den. And the imper- 
 sonal persistence Force of Mr. Herbert Spen- 
 
36 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 cer can not be classified otherwise than 
 among philosophic aberrations. Such pro- 
 ducts of unclear thought find no vantage 
 ground in the Incarnation. The absentee 
 God is the invention of incomplete thought. 
 The cosmic order is not a rival of the ever- 
 living, ever-efficient God. It is the form in 
 which God expresses and realizes Himself. 
 Jesus recognized the world as God's world, 
 and the answer to any and all queries as 
 to why anything is, or changes, or comes to 
 pass, must be sought. He affirmed, in essence, 
 not in any mechanical necessity, nor in any 
 natural antecedents, nor in any impersonal 
 agency of any kind, but in the will and pur- 
 pose of that God in whom all things live, and 
 move, and have their being. 
 
 The conflict of science and religion, of 
 which the latter days have had a nauseating 
 plethora, is an illusion of sense-thinking. 
 There is no science in the sense of ultimate 
 reality to conflict with religion. Nature is 
 not a self-sufficiency, but a mere tracing of 
 the order in which the Divine causality pro- 
 
Practical Idealism. 37 
 
 ceeds. It is no approach to explanation, but 
 begins and ends as description. 
 
 The words of Jesus descriptive of the In- 
 finite Presence and Power embody a specula- 
 tive and practical insight which is basic in 
 all incontrovertible theories of being and ac- 
 tivity : ^ ^ God is a Spirit ; and they that wor- 
 ship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in 
 truth;" ^'The Father hath life in Himself;" 
 ''The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth 
 the works ; " ' ' Herein is My Father glorified, 
 that ye bear much fruit;" "My Father 
 worketh hitherto, and I work. ' ' 
 
 The materialistic and Deistic banishment 
 of God from the world of thoughthood and 
 thinghood has no reputable speculative or 
 practical standing. And for the stigma which 
 attaches itself to this bald naturalism and 
 false supernaturalism, the word and work of 
 Jesus are in a peculiar sense directly account- 
 able. Jesus did not root the kingdom in the 
 ''they say" of any man or body of men as 
 such. He respected the integration of God's 
 spiritual universe. For the prophets, priests, 
 
38 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 and believers of all ages who spoke the words 
 of truth and soberness, and who wrought 
 righteousness in the earth, He had only 
 words of commendation, but he did not exhort 
 any man to absolve or to project himself in 
 the name of any other soul of any other day. 
 For the man that now is, Jesus had original 
 regard. This regard is the only possible 
 guaranty of the perpetuation of the kingdom 
 upon the face of the earth. If there is not 
 an inviolable sacredness in every man, of 
 every clime, of every age ; if every man is not 
 a possible champion of God's thought and 
 purpose, then the perpetuity and efficiency 
 of the kingdom is an impossible consumma- 
 tion. 
 
 The word of Moses as such, of Isaiah as 
 such, of Haggai as such, is devoid of spiritual 
 effectiveness. The word of Moses, of Isaiah, 
 of Haggai, as the word of the omnipresent, 
 ever- thoughtful, ever-loving God, is the uni- 
 versal word, and hence is iterated and re- 
 iterated in the thought and service of devoted 
 souls in all periods and under all suns. God 
 
Practical Idealism. 39 
 
 calls upon no man to surrender the original 
 endowment of his being in favor of any other 
 man. The life of truth, of righteousness, of 
 love, of immediate fellowship and coincidence 
 with God, is the fundamental and essential 
 privilege of every individual soul. 
 
 Jesus 23ut no emphasis on ceremony, the 
 mechanism of the kingdom. He did not dis- 
 miss it. He made it incidental. The disciples 
 found themselves effectually rebuked when 
 they contended as to whom of their number 
 should be invested with the supreme digni- 
 ties of office. Tlieir spiritual obtuseness saw 
 in officialism a primacy. Jesus saw primacy 
 in humility of spirit, in helpful service, in the 
 actualizing of our spiritual ideals. Person- 
 ality renewed and serviceable, and that only, 
 is His ideal. The supremacy of the time- 
 spirit He renounced. With Him all days were 
 sacred. The doing of our Father's will, the 
 finishing of His work, was not in Jesus' 
 thought a series of temporal detachments, 
 but a living unity. 
 
 To the kingdom He assigned no spatial 
 
40 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 limits. He saw it in intent and extent to be 
 at one with the thought and purpose of God 
 and with the consciousness of humankind. 
 
 From whatever angle we consider Jesus, 
 His practical idealism is in evidence. He was 
 not an abstractionist in theory nor in prac- 
 tice. He integrated Himself in every utter- 
 ance and in every circumstance. Individual 
 and racial life find their wholeness in Him. 
 The Pauline word, '^Ye are complete in 
 Him, ' ' is one of certitude. 
 
Chapter II. 
 PROGRESSIVENESS, 
 
About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of 
 personal originality, combined with profundity of insight, 
 which must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the esti- 
 mation of those who have no belief in His inspiration, in the 
 very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our 
 species can boast. _^^^^ STUART MILL. 
 
 In order to render communion with Him possible, the 
 Deity has stooped from His throne, and has not only, in the 
 person of the Son, taken upon Him the veil of our human 
 flesh, but, in the person of the Father, taken upon Him the 
 veil of our human thoughts, and permitted us, by His own 
 spoken authority, to conceive Him simply and clearly as a 
 loving Father and Friend. _^^^^ ^^^^^^^ 
 
 Thou seemest human and divine, 
 
 The highest, holiest manhood, Thou; 
 Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
 
 Our wills are ours, to make them Thine. 
 
 —TENNYSON. 
 42 
 
PROGEESSIVENESS. 
 
 The most casual study of the life of 
 Jesus reveals the fact that His nature was 
 pre-eminently progressive. In no sense was 
 He an obstructionist. In His soul there were 
 no fixed bounds. There was no attempt to 
 arrest the flow of nature. He was the em- 
 bodiment of perfect sanity. The shadow 
 upon the dial-plate of the days was not ob- 
 scured by His interposition, nor did His 
 sanely conservative hand seek to turn it back. 
 
 For prophet and priest Jesus had the 
 utmost regard, but He did not suffer them to 
 be His mouthpiece. Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, 
 David, and other worthies of Israel's pristine 
 period. He did not accept as His final dicta- 
 tors in the realm of thought or service. For 
 the past He had the utmost respect, but He 
 saw the past as He saw the present, merely 
 initial, and nothing more. 
 
 43 
 
44 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 Above all of His contemporaries and pre- 
 decessors Jesus was a diviner of tendencies. 
 In the midst of the most degraded condition 
 of thought and action He saw a possible up- 
 wardness. The capacity of all men to love 
 and aspire was graphic to His mind's eye. 
 
 It is an evidence of wisdom when men can 
 discern, through the chaos and confusion of 
 an hour, an orderly tendency that is undevi- 
 ating. It is an evidence of excessive micro- 
 scopy when our conclusions are founded upon 
 the happenings of the moment. 
 
 The vessel of stanchest beam that sails 
 the sea describes a zigzag course between 
 ports when the view-point is circumscribed 
 by the immediate present. But with the eye 
 fixed upon the mile traversed it is easy to see 
 that the ship holds her true course, and in 
 the appointed time will reach her destined 
 harbor. All criticism of moral development 
 that is marked by a visible boundary-line is 
 of necessity pessimistic and plaintive. But 
 when the centuries and the millenniums com- 
 prise the perspective, our conclusions are full 
 
Progressiveness. 45 
 
 of good cheer for the present and abounding 
 hopefulness for the future. 
 
 Jesus lived at a period of the world's his- 
 tory when the blackness of a Cimmerian 
 night engrossed the thoughts of men. The 
 people of His own blood were in bondage to 
 the Gentile world. The heel of the oppressor 
 bore heavily on their necks. They felt the 
 weight of the rod of iron. The Jerusalem of 
 their fathers was divested of its greatness. 
 A pathos surcharged the hearts of Abra- 
 ham's seed. Had an ultra-conservatism dom- 
 inated the thought of Jesus, He would have 
 filled the ears of men with jeremiads and 
 rank iconoclasms. Infinitely blest, indeed, is 
 humankind that out of the darkness of such 
 a night a day-star sprung; that out of the 
 degraded loins of a fallen people was possi- 
 ble the efflorescence of humankind. 
 
 I. 
 
 The generation that was made notable 
 by the Incarnation of the Son of God was 
 transcendently centripetal in its tendency. 
 
46 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 Men thought of themselves first and last. 
 The age was one of extreme individualism. 
 The conception of greatness was to be min- 
 istered unto. The realities of life were the 
 things of sense. To have barns filled with 
 plenty, to be clothed in purple and fine linen, 
 to fare sumptuously every day, was to be 
 rich. To exercise authority over inferior 
 peoples, to wield the scepter of political po- 
 tency, to have the chief place in the syna- 
 gogue, to be feted and flattered by fawning 
 sycophants, was the ideal of power. Jesus op- 
 posed this regnant trend of thought and ac- 
 tion. He saw finis written in letters of livid 
 hue npon the things of time and sense. He 
 knew that carnal-mindedness was death ; that 
 the letter killeth; that the flesh profiteth 
 nothing. All that men of low ideals called 
 ends He called means. What stirred the en- 
 thusiasm of the mercenary Jew, Greek, or 
 Eoman, provoked His disdain. 
 
 The rich fool was termed by the age in 
 which Jesus lived the man of wisdom. Accord- 
 ing to the notions of the first Christian cen- 
 
Progressiveness. 47 
 
 tnry, the tetrarch, the procurator, the centu- 
 rion, the emperor, were the acme of individ- 
 ual sovereignty. This outlook upon life, from 
 the view-point of Jesus, was an ultra-conserv- 
 atism, whose end could not be other than the 
 reign of Chaos and Old Night. In His pro- 
 gressive conception of life Jesus utilized the 
 past. But He did not suffer it for the briefest 
 period to assert a mastery over the present. 
 He stood for the highest initiation of the in- 
 dividual life; the initiative of the abiding, 
 unitary, efficient, and synthetic self. In other 
 speech. He stood for the life of the spirit. 
 And the spirit refuses to be cabined, cribbed, 
 confined, bound in by saucy doubts and fears. 
 Its watchword is ^ ' Onward ! ^ ' 
 
 The Incarnation would have had no per- 
 manent significance for the world if it had 
 been marked in slightest measure by a per- 
 ennial apotheosis of the past. It would have 
 been the paralysis of the mental and moral 
 activities of the race. It would have been the 
 Ultima Thule of all progress. The wheels 
 
48 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 of civilized life would have been blocked for 
 all time to come. 
 
 Devout should be our thanksgiving that 
 Jesus did not participate in any measure in 
 the stagnant thought of His day. The sec- 
 taries of His day— the scribes, the elders, the 
 Pharisees, the Sadducees— gave continual 
 emphasis to the past, but depreciated the 
 present with its manifold duties and oppor- 
 tunities. For them the sun was standing still 
 in the heavens. ^'Our father Abraham" was 
 a frequent phrase upon their lips, but his 
 spirit they had lost. They builded the tombs 
 of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchers 
 of the righteous, but they hesitated not to fill 
 up the sanguinary measure of their fathers 
 who killed the prophets. 
 
 They sat in Moses' seat, and expounded 
 his word, but they failed to incarnate the 
 teaching of the great lawgiver. They were 
 outside men. They were studious in making 
 clear the exterior of the cup and platter, but 
 oblivious of the gross crimes of extortion and 
 excess. And the scribes, elders, Pharisees, 
 
Progressiveness. 49 
 
 Sadducees, were the ecclesiastical representa- 
 tives of Israel. Priest and people were bound 
 together, not only by consanguinity, but by 
 a moral affinity. But not in slightest degree 
 did Jesus participate in the sensuous concep- 
 tions of His own people. They were of the 
 earth and spoke of the earth. He was from 
 heaven and above all men. 
 
 Every contemplation of the character of 
 Jesus increases our appreciation of Him as 
 the world's moral phenomenon. Absolutely 
 unaccounted for He is in ancestry and in 
 environment. He is the world's miracle. In 
 the light of the Incarnation, all miracles— the 
 parting of the Ked Sea, the falling of the 
 manna, the swimming of the ax-head, the 
 translation of Elijah, the Hebrew children in 
 the fiery furnace, the multiplication of the 
 loaves and fishes, the opening of the blind 
 eyes, the raising of the dead— are utterly 
 subordinate. 
 
 We are like unto incredulous children 
 when we stand aghast at any extraordinary 
 event in the light of Jesus, the Divine Reason 
 4 
 
50 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 made flesh. He explains all apparent leaps 
 in nature. He is the mental and moral salta- 
 tion of Deific imfolding. To the conservative 
 word which said, ^^AU that is was made by 
 God,'* Jesus added, God is leaving that, and 
 entering this other. Moses did not say the 
 final word for Israel's weal, neither did Joel, 
 Ezekiel, or Isaiah. The Infinite Mind, says 
 Jesus, is ever declaring itself. The Father 
 heart is ever throbbing for the well-being and 
 felicity of its children. Whatever took form 
 in the past that did not increase the sum of 
 human happiness in the present Jesus repu- 
 diated. He was the champion of progress, 
 both in thought and action. 
 
 II. 
 
 What the philosophies of the pre-Chris- 
 tian periods failed to bring forth to the birth, 
 Jesus brought forth. The search for the 
 primal fact of life was not successfully 
 prosecuted by Thales, Heraclitus, iVnax- 
 imenes, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, or any 
 of the speculative Greeks. A radical defect 
 
Progressiveness. 51 
 
 is characteristic of all purely human essays 
 to find out God. The affirmations that water, 
 or fire, or earth, or atoms, or ideas, or con- 
 templation is the primal element of all life, 
 are negational and void of content. No sane 
 thinker to-day is willing to cease his inquiries 
 with the postulates of the greatest of heathen 
 philosophers. 
 
 Thought is lost in an infinite regress when 
 we attach ourselves to any material fact or 
 to any purely mental fact. Democritus, with 
 his gross atoms creating stone walls, and then 
 by a process of refinement giving to the 
 world Homer's Iliad, did not satisfy the in- 
 quisitive minds of his fellow-men. Neither 
 was this work accomplished by Plato in his 
 refined idealism. This great Greek deified 
 reason. He degraded will and emotion. He 
 made of God a pure abstraction, utterly re- 
 moved from the world which He had made, 
 and from the suffering and aspiring children 
 who are the offspring of His mind and heart. 
 
 The inability of the pre-Christian Greeks 
 to interpret the Divine nature was not 
 
52 Jesus: The world Teacher. 
 
 isolated. The Hebrew in some measure 
 shared the GreeJ^ point of view. David in 
 the imprecatory Psalms did not correctly 
 express the Infinite heart. God could not 
 possibly be happy when the children of idola- 
 trous Babylon were dashed against stones; 
 neither could He hate any man with a perfect 
 hatred. And the spirit of David was partici- 
 pated in by the greatest of the prophets. 
 These men spoke out of the limitations of 
 their own hearts when they thus spoke. God 
 is not immoral. But many of the utterances 
 of the prophets would make Him so. How 
 transcendent is the utterance of Jesus rela- 
 tive to the primal fact of all life! He did 
 not for a moment give primacy to water, or 
 earth, or fire, or atoms, or reason, or con- 
 templation as the soul of the universe. All 
 nature, with its ramification. He saw as the 
 method by which the Infinite mind, will, and 
 heart are made visible, tangible, audible to 
 the finite mind, will, and heart. 
 
 What we are pleased, in our limited 
 speech, to call the uniformity of nature, is 
 
Progressiveness. 53 
 
 but tlie ordinary channel for the forthputting 
 of God's will. It is an order of procedure, 
 nothing more. It may be suspended at any 
 moment. As opposed to ethical and spiritual 
 completeness it is nil. As Professor Bowne, 
 in his ^^ Immanence of God,'* expresses it, 
 *'God, as the absolute source of all finite ex- 
 istence, is bound by nothing but His own wis- 
 dom and goodness. What they dictate, that 
 He does. If they call for uniformity, there 
 is uniformity. If they call for change, there 
 is change. God never acts against nature, 
 because for Him there is no nature to act 
 against. Nature conceived as a barrier to 
 God, or as something with which God must 
 reckon, is a pure fiction, a product of unclear 
 thought which has lost itself in abstractions. 
 If for us God is a personal and moral being, 
 and if His supreme aim in human creation is 
 a moral one, we shall have no a priori hos- 
 tility to miracles. If we believe in a God in 
 whom we live and move and have our being, 
 and if we believe that we may and do enter 
 into fellowship and communion with Him in 
 
54 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 prayer and lioly livin*?, it will seem to us 
 the most natural thing in the world that there 
 should be tokens of His presence. '' **What 
 in our limitation of speech we call miracu- 
 lous is nothing more,'* says Dr. Lyman Ab- 
 bott, *^tlian the Infinite Presence and Power 
 in unexpected actions demonstrating the ex- 
 istence of an intelligent Will and Power su- 
 perior to that of man. ' ' 
 
 And not only did Jesus teach and embody 
 the priority of Infinite Mind and Will, but He 
 also taught and exemplified the priority of 
 Infinite Love. God is present always in 
 causal efficiency in every experience of life. 
 While He makes the outgoings of the morn- 
 ing and the evening to rejoice, brings the 
 wind out of His treasuries, and girds the 
 mountains with power. He also inclines His 
 ear to the voice of His children, seeks them in 
 the midst of their wanderings, loves them 
 with an everlasting love, gives unto them His 
 j)eace and joy, and preserves them unto life 
 everlasting. He is not only the Infinite Mind 
 and Will, He is also the Infinite Heart. 
 
Progressiveness. 55 
 
 Aristotle declared that the final word of 
 Ethics was that the world loves and longs for 
 God, but God, as a being of pure contempla- 
 tion, did not love the world. 
 
 Of far remove from the postulate of per- 
 haps the greatest Greek thinker is the postu- 
 late of Jesus. It was the Son of God who 
 taught men to say, Our Father, my God and 
 your God. God, declared Jesus, is ever pres- 
 ent working with men, making of Himself 
 the prime factor in their abiding attainments, 
 and their helpful Friend, Brother, and 
 Father in their hours of direst need. Jesus' 
 unfolding of the Divine nature has found ac- 
 ceptance with every system of thought that 
 has sought for completeness, every system 
 that makes of man something more than the 
 evolution of a cloud-bank or the mere puppet 
 of blind chance. 
 
 If a man is greater than the locomotive 
 which is fashioned by his hand, and if any 
 moral quality whatsoever inheres in the 
 deeds of the human family, then we are able 
 to say, with no fear of contradiction, that 
 
56 Jesus : The Wopld Teacher. 
 
 Jesus has given to the world a complete body 
 of thought, both as regards God and man, 
 that is unapproachable in its fonn and con- 
 tent. 
 
 Plato, Aristotle, David, Moses, in the light 
 of the Incarnation, appear notably defective 
 in their interpretation of the ethical nature 
 of God. They made Him a stranger to the 
 deeps of the human heart. From their angle 
 of vision God was mindful of the philosopher, 
 the poet, the aristocrat, the prophet, the 
 priest, the king, the sons and daughters of 
 Israel; but He gave no thought to the war- 
 rior, the tradesman, the hoi polloi, the sons 
 and daughters of the heathen. But Jesus pro- 
 tested, God so loved the world that He gave 
 Himself in the person of His Son for its re- 
 demption. 
 
 The graphic delineation of that love is 
 seen in the return of the prodigal son. Ee- 
 gardless, says Jesus, of the obloquy brought 
 upon the paternal name by the riotous son, 
 he is received with open arms and lavish 
 kisses upon his return to the family roof-tree. 
 
Progressiveness. 57 
 
 From the view-point of Jesus, God^s nature 
 is not primarily judicial in its attitude to- 
 ward men, but fatherly. Our theology has 
 been prone to put the emphasis on the meta- 
 physical rather than the ethical nature of 
 God. In so doing we have alienated ourselves 
 from the mind that was in Christ Jesus. The 
 Pauline word is worthy of all acceptation: 
 love is greater than knowledge, mystery, 
 tongues of angels, gifts of prophecy, govern- 
 ments, working of miracles. 
 
 Not only has Jesus ' interpretation of God 
 provoked agreement in the speculative 
 sphere, but it has rooted and grounded itself 
 in the popular mind. Our entire educational 
 system is a tribute to the progressive 
 thought of the Son of God. The philosophies 
 of the pre-Christian ages are not the founda- 
 tion-stones of modern ethical thought. But 
 Jesus' thought, personalized in Himself, is 
 the elect, tried, and precious corner-stone 
 upon which the superstructure of civilized life 
 is builded. The great European and Ameri- 
 
58 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 can educational institutions are founded on 
 what Jesus thought and did. 
 
 When we say Christian Education we af- 
 firm the acme of mental development. Be- 
 yond that, human thought does not reach. 
 It is our mental zenith. All present-day civil- 
 ization in its best estate is merely an approxi- 
 mation to the verbal and incarnate wisdom 
 of Jesus. 
 
 And the civilization that shall issue from 
 the matrix of the future shall be an approxi- 
 mation to His exceeding wisdom, but nothing 
 more. For amid the endless identities which 
 Jesus as the Son of Man sustains with the 
 sons of men, exist the endless differences be- 
 tween Himself as the Eternal Word and hu- 
 mankind. He is bone of our bone, flesh of 
 our flesh, and is touched with a feeling of our 
 infirmities; but in the myster}^ of His God- 
 head He is inapproachable now and forever. 
 
 III. 
 
 Jesus was progressive in His interpreta- 
 tion of man. He declined to look upon man 
 
PROGRESSIVENESS. 59 
 
 as a fraction, but insisted upon Ms integra- 
 tion. Man must make himself whole, else run 
 counter to the will of God. The sinner is he 
 who determines to metamorphose himself into 
 a thing; to take himself out of the category 
 of sentient, conceiving, acting, divinely cre- 
 ated, eternally destined creatures, and make 
 of himself a mere machine, a flesh-and-blood 
 automaton. Jesus protested against such a 
 degradation of the man. The certain man 
 whose finality of life was comprehended in 
 well-filled barns and bodily indulgence may 
 have had high registration in the esteem of 
 his worldly-minded neighbors, but in Jesus' 
 thought he was a fool. 
 
 The political potentate who wielded his 
 scepter of power as did Herod, the Jewish 
 governor, may have won the encomiums of 
 his henchmen, but in Jesus' thought Herod 
 was a fox. The image of manhood he had 
 forfeited and sunken to the level of a shrewd, 
 keen-eyed, treacherous beast. The Prophet 
 of Nazareth stood for completeness of life. 
 He did not inveigh against the most exten- 
 
60 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 sive differentiation in the individual or com- 
 munity life. Indeed, lie Himself gives genesis 
 to the world's highest differentiation men- 
 tally and morally; but in the midst of this 
 endless permutation and combination of hu- 
 man activity, Jesus insisted upon a whole- 
 ness of life. 
 
 No man ever gave such a varied exhi- 
 bition of thought, will, and emotion as the 
 Son of God, and yet He said of Himself rela- 
 tive to God, ''I and My Father are one.'' 
 How it is possible for a man with his ills, 
 his needs, his weaknesses, his limited activ- 
 ities, to be one with God is answered by the 
 philosophical dictum that the highest organ- 
 ization is based upon an impregnable unity; 
 that differentiation in its complete sense is 
 only possible through an unqualified integra- 
 tion. 
 
 Jesus in His appreciation of man was un- 
 willing for man to develop abnormally. He 
 esteemed sjnumetry in every form. If a man 
 would make of himself a farmer, Jesus said. 
 Be a man while sowing the seed, tilling the 
 
Progressiveness. 61 
 
 soil, reaping the harvest. Do not let the soil 
 or the seed or the harvest gain the ascend- 
 ency over the man. The mere farmer is a 
 fool, not a man. If a man would be a me- 
 chanic or merchant, Jesus says, Be a man 
 before all things else. Handle your tools; 
 do not let your tools handle you. Sell your 
 goods ; do not let your goods sell you. 
 
 Be a man. As Hegel the philosopher 
 would put it, Be a person ; that is, a person- 
 ality with aspirations of nature that can not 
 be satisfied with houses, lands, machines, 
 money. This evidently was one of the mean- 
 ings of Jesus when He termed Himself the 
 Son of Man. He was man in His complete- 
 ness. He was a man of thought, and there- 
 fore in sympathy with every thinker. He was 
 a man of manual work, and therefore in sym- 
 pathy with every callous-handed son of toil. 
 He was a man of poverty; He was subjected 
 to indignity, to treachery, to desertion, to 
 false accusation, to an ignominious death; 
 but in every phase of experience He main- 
 tained the integrity of manhood. Diverse 
 
62 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 was His activity, and diverse was His experi- 
 ence, but at no time did He fractionalize 
 Himself. He made full proof of His man- 
 hood everywhere and at all times. Above all 
 other men. He is the world's ethical and spir- 
 itual integer. 
 
 In the light of the integrated manhood of 
 Jesus Christ we are justified in saying that 
 the sin of the race consists, in large measure, 
 in a distribution of moral functions. Too 
 often is it true that a man is spiritually- 
 minded on the Sabbath-day, but carnally- 
 minded in the mid-week. 
 
 All of us loiow men who, while leaders in 
 Church movements, do not, as lawyers, doc- 
 tors, farmers, artisans, merchants, morally 
 functionalize themselves at every opportu- 
 nity in the business and political worlds. 
 They make of themselves, not whole men, but 
 fractional men. And the same stricture may 
 be made practically of every man despite his 
 identification with the Church of Jesus 
 Christ. The Gospel instance of the rich 
 young man coming to Jesus with the inquiry 
 
PROGRESSIVENESS. 63 
 
 as to how to have eternal life, strikingly illus- 
 trates the distribution of moral functions. 
 This young man had not plucked the rose 
 from the fair forehead of an innocent love; 
 he had not incarnadined his hand in the ruddy 
 life currents of his fellow-man; he had not 
 sold and marketed his manhood for gold ; he 
 had not dallied with the good name of his 
 friend or neighbor; he had not sullied the 
 escutcheon of his parentage; but when 
 brought to the crux of his desire for eternal 
 life, ^'Sell what thou hast and give to the 
 poor, and come follow Me," he declined to 
 thus functionalize himself, and in that decli- 
 nation the fractional rather than the integral 
 man was in the ascendant. 
 
 Jesus makes no demand upon any man 
 that is not in perfect consonance with the in- 
 dividual's highest realization. The rich 
 young man saw the forfeiture of his material 
 wealth as an irreparable loss. He was indif- 
 ferent to the ethical and spiritual wealth that 
 becomes the property of every man whose di- 
 versity of thought and service has its genesis 
 
64 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 through a mental and moral oneness with 
 Jesus Christ. The fraction of life, his money, 
 the young man saw and insisted upon retain- 
 ing. The wholeness of life that lay in a dis- 
 cipleship of Jesus he refused to see. He 
 made himself subject to shekels. Jesus de- 
 manded, Make the shekels subject to your 
 manhood. The craftsman must not be ridden 
 by the routine of his craft. The attorney 
 must be greater than the statute-book; tEe 
 preacher must transcend the forms of wor- 
 ship. In other words, the man must be in 
 the ascendant. 
 
 The Sybarite in the indulgence of his ap- 
 petites was a good stomach, but not a man. 
 Caligula, Nero, Napoleon, were powerful 
 hands, but they were not men. Achilles and 
 Ajax were strong arms and muscular legs, 
 but they were not men. In His entire min- 
 istry Jesus inveighed against monstrosities. 
 Eeflect the Divine nature; walk and work as 
 sons and daughters of God; reproduce the 
 thoughts of God by converting nature into 
 art; be master of the world in which your 
 
PROGRESSIVENESS. 65 
 
 Father has been pleased to place yon; make 
 of yonr life an integrated righteousness, in- 
 dividually and collectively,— are the words of 
 exhortation perennially sounded by Jesus, 
 the Incarnate Son of the Ever-blessed God. 
 Does it inhere in us to put any other con- 
 struction on life? 
 
 IV. 
 
 As a progressive, Jesus did not rest in 
 particulars, either as regards men or things. 
 The fish in the net, the treasure hid in a 
 field, the sower of seed, the leaven in the 
 measures of meal, the pearl of great price, 
 did not engross His thought as such. He 
 saw them as symbols of the worth and devel- 
 opment of the kingdom of God. The spar- 
 rows that sowed not nor reaped nor gathered 
 into barns, the lilies that toiled not nor spun, 
 He did not appreciate primarily as such, but 
 as symbols of God's care and solicitude for 
 every son and daughter of man. The world, 
 to His mind, was a house of glass, perfectly 
 transparent, through which He discerned 
 5 
 
66 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 God's will, and saw the throbbings of the In- 
 finite Heart in behalf of every child of the 
 race. The publican proscribed by his brother 
 Jew, and the harlot anathematized by all 
 men, are not alien, said Jesus, to God's love 
 and thought. The parables of Jesus are the 
 discovery of moral proportions between the 
 human and the Divine ; between man the sin- 
 ner and God the Savior. 
 
 Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the most re- 
 nowned and progressive of the Greeks, did 
 not find any moral proportion between God 
 and man. They did not affirm any identity 
 between a suffering and sinful world and the 
 Deific power that spoke that world into being. 
 In the true sense of science, which is the dis- 
 covery of analogy, of identity in the most re- 
 mote elements, these great Greeks were not 
 scientific. They were mere children crying 
 for a light, and with no language but a cry. 
 
 But Jesus as a thinker was eminently sci- 
 entific. He discovered analogy between so re- 
 mote a thing as a mustard-seed and the king- 
 dom of heaven. He discovered an identity 
 
Progressiveness. 67 
 
 between Zaccheus, the chief of public plun- 
 derers, and God, who is of purer eyes than 
 to behold evil, and can not look upon iniquity. 
 Before the refractory facts of human experi- 
 ence Jesus was not confounded. He had the 
 scientific mind. The rigid constitution of the 
 provincial Jew, the expanding powers of the 
 thoughtful and artistic Greek, the tremen- 
 dous energy and stubborn nature of the im- 
 perial Roman, He was able to bring under 
 the law of the kingdom of God, and thus re- 
 duce to a unity what was apparently a hope- 
 less antagonism. What men termed classes 
 Jesus did not admit. He did not give a pre- 
 eminence to Jew or Samaritan, to Greek aris- 
 tocrat or democrat, to Roman patrician or 
 plebeian. For the Pharisee He did not have 
 a standard of moral judgment separate and 
 distinct from that which acquitted or con- 
 demned the publican. He saw men as men, 
 and He dealt with them accordingly. And 
 thus interpreting their nature and condition 
 He was able to effect a unity where other 
 thinkers and doers had failed. His point of 
 
68 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 view was the scientific point of view. His 
 was the angle of vision, the way of approach 
 which animates the last fiber of all organized 
 life, trees, flowers, birds, fishes, no less than 
 men, women, and children. He saw the world 
 issuing from a moral center, and with this 
 vision He was able to give the proper value 
 to every radius of human thought and action. 
 He was not misled by the pretentious piety 
 of the Pharisee, nor was He inveigled by the 
 partisan zeal of the Herodians. The baseless 
 rationalism of the Sadducees was understood 
 in its every detail by His discriminating 
 mind. As the evangelist John puts it. He 
 needed not that any man should testify of 
 man, for He knew what was in man. This 
 central point of view enabled Jesus to inter- 
 pret all life in universal terms. The Jew as 
 a Jew, the Greek as a Greek, He did not con- 
 sider. He waved aside every physical limi- 
 tation, and saw men in their identity of in- 
 terest, aspiration, volition. He was the 
 world's first democrat, says James Eussell 
 Lowell. He welded together the most diverse 
 
Progressiveness. 69 
 
 peoples, and made of His kingdom infinitely 
 more than the kingdom of Israel. The indi- 
 vidual man separate from his fellows is re- 
 pulsive and insignificant, like the individual 
 pigment separate from the picture; but at- 
 tached to all men He takes on beauty and sig- 
 nificance, like the pigment in the finished 
 work of the artist. 
 
 V. 
 
 The progressiveness of Jesus is nowhere 
 more patent than in His interpretation of 
 man's relationship to God. He did not in 
 His teachings give any aid or comfort to the 
 doctrine which we term total depravity. He 
 knew and taught that men would wander far 
 afield if they denied themselves the guidance 
 of the Divine Spirit. But that men, in the 
 entirety of their thought, will, emotion, were 
 alienated from God, He did not teach for one 
 moment. He constantly recognized the latent 
 moral energies of the race. In the light of 
 Jesus' thought we may propound the query 
 with no fear of confusion, if men and women 
 
70 Jesus : The World Teacher, 
 
 are not born into the world with natures ca- 
 l)able for fellowship and co-operation with 
 God, whence then the source of their cre- 
 ation? 
 
 Not for an instant do we attribute in our 
 theology the work of creation to Satan, the 
 prince of darkness; but if the doctrine of 
 total depravity is a fact, then perforce we 
 must conclude that God is not the Maker of 
 men. 
 
 Jesus was luminous in His doctrine of 
 man. He made of the child a type of mem- 
 bership in the kingdom of heaven. His 
 words, ^SSuffer the little children to come 
 unto Me, and forbid them not ; for of such is 
 the kingdom of God;" ^'Except ye be con- 
 verted, and become as little children, ye shall 
 not enter into the kingdom of heaven ;'' 
 '' Whosoever therefore shall humble himself 
 as this little child, the same is the greatest in 
 the kingdom of heaven,'' are worthy of all 
 acceptation. And if accepted, logical con- 
 sistency demands that we repudiate the harsh 
 and forbidding doctrine known to the fathers 
 
PROGRESSIVENESS. 71 
 
 of a few decades since as total depravity. 
 No child is the child of the devil. The devil 
 is not the creator of men. If this power was 
 Satanic, we can not imagine Jesus saying, 
 ^'Of such is the kingdom of God;" ^^ Except 
 ye be converted and become as little children, 
 ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven." Our theology must quadrate with 
 the Christ Spirit, else it must be relegated 
 to Lethean waters. Theories are reeds, 
 which, if a man lean upon, pierce the hand, 
 if they do not equate with facts. ^ ^ Cost what 
 it will," says Thomas Carlyle, ^4t behooves 
 all men to quit simulacra and return to sub- 
 stance. You can not build any enduring in- 
 stitution out of quackery; you can not con- 
 struct an edifice, except by plummet and 
 level, at right angles to one another." 
 
 And practical life declares that no nature 
 responds to kindliness of spirit so much as 
 the child nature. Hence it is that tens of 
 millions of merry-hearted children throng the 
 Sunday-schools of Christendom. He who 
 took the little children into His arms, put His 
 
72 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 bands upon them, and blessed tbem, bas 
 never yet failed to evoke the loving and loyal 
 yes of tbe cbild beart. If our nature is cre- 
 atively perverse, sucb a disposition would be 
 untbinkable. Theological syllogisms are pu- 
 erile and fatuous if contradicted by life itself. 
 
 In the parable of the Prodigal Son, rightly 
 designated ''the heart of the Gospel,'' "the 
 Bible in quintessence," ''the pearl of par- 
 ables,'' Jesus makes of Himself a limner 
 whose lines and colors transfix the mind and 
 heart of the world. The picture is a home: 
 father and two sons living in happiest ac- 
 cord. The younger son, without warrant, 
 misdirects the executive faculty of his na- 
 ture, his will, and determines to take up his 
 abode elsewhere. The father, respecting his 
 son as a creature, not of automatism, but 
 of freedom, does not interiDOse. With his liv- 
 ing, the wholeness of his nature, committed 
 to his immature knowledge, the young man 
 betakes himself into a far country, and there 
 yields himself to a lawless manner of life. 
 
 His descent is rapid. The misuse of the 
 
Progressiveness. 73 
 
 freedom which God has given to every man 
 is invariably lamentable in its consequent. 
 Degeneracy in nature, degradation of pur- 
 suit, desertion by friends, proscription by all 
 men, followed in rapid succession. Isolated 
 from his fellows, in tendance on a herd of 
 swine, the young man bethinks himself of his 
 father's house, where love is regnant, where 
 wisdom utters its voice, where plenty 
 abounds. His thought is reinforced by his 
 will, the same faculty which was fundamental 
 and assertive in his departure from the pa- 
 rental roof-tree, and he at once wends his 
 way homeward. His home-going would have 
 meant nothing if the spirit of his father had 
 undergone a change. If paternal love embit- 
 tered had become malevolence, the approach 
 of the wayward boy would have been signal- 
 ized by a tempestuous rejection of every pen- 
 itential and plaintive overture. But, said 
 Jesus, while the son was yet a great way off 
 the father saw him, had compassion on him, 
 ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. At 
 once, without a preliminary, the repentant son 
 
74 Jesus : The Wokld Teacher. 
 
 was reinstated in his father's household. 
 This, says Jesus, is God's love toward the 
 children of His liand and heart. 
 
 The theolog)^ of the parable is evident: 
 Actual members of the Divine household are 
 all men by virtue of their creation. This 
 actual membership is never forfeited until 
 the individual soul by voluntary action deter- 
 mines to pursue its own way regardless of 
 God's will. But the surrender of actual son- 
 ship, according to the parable, does not in- 
 validate man's potential sonship. In the 
 midst of his degradation the young man ex- 
 claimed, ^^I will arise and go to my father." 
 His return was potential sonship becoming 
 actual. If our theology is to convince the 
 mind and influence the hearts of men, it must 
 be an elaboration of the mind of Jesus, hav- 
 ing pre-eminently as its point of departure 
 the parable of the Prodigal Son. The love of 
 God must always be co-ordinate with His 
 mind and will. 
 
 To recapitulate: Jesus as a diviner of 
 tendencies, a seer of all thought and action 
 
Progressiveness. 75 
 
 as initiation not finality, an appreciator of 
 the past, a utilizer of the present, a fore- 
 looker into the future, the world's brother 
 man, the interpreter of the Divine mind and 
 heart, was pre-eminently progressive. He 
 saturated the thought of His day and suc- 
 ceeding days with the utmost sanity. For 
 this reason He lives more potently to-day 
 than when He trod the heights and depres- 
 sions of the hills and valleys of Palestine. 
 And He shall live in ever-increasing ratio 
 in the centuries that are yet unborn. And 
 whence this limitless progress of His thought 
 and character? We answer in the evangelic 
 word, ^'In the beginning was the Divine 
 Eeason— and the Divine Reason was made 
 fiesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His 
 glory.'' 
 
Chapter III. 
 SYMBOLISM 
 
" Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey 
 God rather than you, and, while I have life and strength, I 
 shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philoso- 
 phy exhorting every one whom I meet after my manner, 
 and convincing him, saying : * O, my friend, why do you, 
 who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of 
 Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount 
 of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wis- 
 dom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, 
 which you never regard or heed at all ?' " 
 
 —SOCRATES. 
 
 Life is too short to waste 
 
 In critic peep or cynic bark. 
 Quarrel or reprimand : 
 
 'T will soon be dark ; 
 Up ! mind thine own aim, and 
 
 God speed the mark!" 
 
 —RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 78 
 
SYMBOLISM. 
 
 I. 
 
 That Jesus is worthy of premiership 
 among the poets, ^^the hierophants of an -un- 
 apprehended revelation, ' ' legitimate criticism 
 affirms. He had the poetic instinct and in- 
 sight. Prolixity was alien to His thinking. 
 Similes, metonymies, metaphors, and synec- 
 doches dropped from His lips in richest pro- 
 fusion. His thought was tropical in its lux- 
 uriance. He was a melodist whose sym- 
 phonies and cadences are like the music of 
 deep-toned hells and the roundelays of field 
 larks. The inner sense of persons and things 
 found in Him a voice both charming and com- 
 pelling. 
 
 The symbolist is the real poet. Before 
 him the secret of the universe lies open. He 
 bows before the sacred mystery. He walks 
 the earth with unshod feet. He is conscious 
 
 79 
 
80 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 of all ground being holy ground. In stone, in 
 sea, in cloud, in fire, in bird, in beast, in man, 
 he beholds the divine idea. Appearances are 
 not for him a finality. They are symbolic of 
 finality. 
 
 The heavens, the earth, the sea, and all 
 that in them is, are the realized thought of 
 God. The prophets were symbolists, poets of 
 superior rank. In their eye the mountains, 
 the rivers, the shepherds, the men-of-war, the 
 great deep, the stars, the sun, the sheep, the 
 winds, the clouds, were rej^resentative of the 
 Infinite Mind and Will. The symbolic qual- 
 ity of things spatial and temporal lifts the 
 world of finitude into the realm of infinitude. 
 It is the transfiguration of the finite when it 
 vocalizes the infinite. Materialistic thought 
 is content with the lowest terms for its vocal- 
 ization. Religious thought demands the high- 
 est terms of life for its vocalization. 
 
 Mr. Emerson, in his essay on ^'Pru- 
 dence," makes this fine discrimination: 
 ''There are all degrees of proficiency in 
 knowledge of the world. It is sufficient to i^- 
 
Symbolism. 81 
 
 dicate three. One class live to the utility 
 of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth 
 a final good. Another class live above this 
 work to the beauty of the symbol, as the poet, 
 the artist, the naturalist, the man of science. 
 A third class live above the beauty of the 
 symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; 
 these are the wise men. The first class have 
 common sense; the second, taste; the third, 
 spiritual perception." 
 
 Jesus was not willing to rest for the frac- 
 tion of a moment in the utility of the symbol, 
 nor the beauty of the symbol. It was the 
 beauty of the thing signified which com- 
 manded His thought. Utility and taste He 
 did not decry, but spiritual perception He 
 magnified. Through every chink and cranny 
 of the universe He saw the bursting forth of 
 the splendor and goodness of God. In every 
 crude and barbaric son of man He saw the 
 latency of the kingdom of heaven. Bread He 
 did not esteem as bread, nor water as water, 
 nor seed as seed. The lily He did not esteem 
 for its beauty, nor was He caught up in ec- 
 
 6 
 
82 Jesus : The W^orld Teacher. 
 
 stasy because of the exceeding brilliancy of 
 Sim or star. It was the bread, the lily, the 
 water, the seed, the sun, symbolically es- 
 teemed, which made Him eloquently persua- 
 sive in speech. It was the transcendent sim- 
 plicity and energy of spiritual truth which 
 inspired His utterance in synagogue, in high- 
 way, at festal board, and made His ministry 
 among men invincible. The resistlessness of 
 His thought is indicated in the evangelistic 
 record, ^^ All bore Him witness, and wondered 
 at the gracious words which proceeded out 
 of His mouth;" ''Whence hath this Man this 
 wisdom?" "Never man spake like this Man." 
 
 The final virtue of the senses Jesus repudi- 
 ated. The world of mere sight, sound, touch, 
 taste, smell. He knew to be a mere world of 
 representation. The subaltern office of the 
 sensual nature He was keenly cognizant of. 
 As an existence sufficient in itself. He gave it 
 no credence. The legitimacy of the senses 
 He accepted only as the temporal and spatial 
 unfolding of the incarnate soul. 
 
 Symbolism in its reality is thought formu- 
 
Symbolism, 83 
 
 lation by a mind that has penetrated into the 
 inmost heart of things ; that has detected the 
 mystery of all life; that has discovered an 
 abiding unity in the midst of apparent de- 
 tachment. 
 
 Pythagoras and his devotees fabled of 
 sphere harmonies. In their thinking they 
 builded better than they knew. The atheistic 
 dictum that the heaving sea, the unbridled 
 winds, the perturbations of men, comprise 
 the inner structure of nature, they renounced. 
 The primal element of thought and thing, 
 said this philosophic and poetic school, is 
 harmony ; the soul of the universe is musical. 
 Only see deep enough, said they, and you 
 see music. Worldly prudence, or the wis- 
 dom that looks to the mere utility of the sym- 
 bol, devotes itself to things material, and 
 vociferates the primacy of things as they are. 
 Stone is stone, cloud is cloud, flesh is flesh, 
 gold is gold, and nothing more nor less. A 
 discerning thinker asseverates that such a 
 prudence is a disease like the thickening of 
 the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. 
 
84 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 The fimdamenta of life are spiritual, but the 
 wisdom which is of the earth, earthy, recog- 
 nizes only the phenomena of matter. Matter, 
 force, and motion are its triune Deity. 
 
 The upper ranges of life, remarks Pro- 
 fessor Goldwin Smith in his ''In Quest of 
 Light," demand interpretation no less than 
 the lower levels of experience. The symbol- 
 ist penetrates the apparent incrustation of 
 the sensuous nature, and affirms the primacy 
 of spirit. Love, truth, righteousness, are 
 basilar in all life, and the sensuous manifes- 
 tations of life derive their value solely 
 through their relatedness to love, truth, and 
 righteousness. Thus Jesus affirmed. 
 
 11. 
 The parabolic form which Jesus gave to 
 His teaching is an evidence that He absorbed 
 into His thought-sphere all the light which 
 was anywhere radiating. No sensual good 
 was regarded by Him as substantial that was 
 unrelated to the soul. His appreciation of 
 the leaven, mustard-seed, harvest-field, hid- 
 
Symbolism. 85 
 
 den treasure, bread, water, piece of silver, 
 was based on tbeir relatedness in thongbt to 
 the experiences of life in its best estate. 
 
 The Phoenician tradesman, the Jewish 
 Tisnrer, the rapacious Eoman, saw in the 
 golden talent material value only. Jesus saw 
 in the talent the symbol of individual wealth, 
 and in the talent committed to the servant 
 He saw the symbol of individual moral re- 
 sponsibility. According to Jesus, individual 
 life multiplied is the only legitimate inter- 
 pretation to individual endowment. Self- 
 investment is the order of all being. It is 
 the perpetuity of life. Non-investment of 
 self issues in moral and spiritual decease. 
 Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground 
 and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, if it 
 invests itself, it brings forth much fruit. The 
 talent and the grain of wheat Jesus meta- 
 morphosed into efficient personality. He 
 made them live. He gave to them a vascular 
 system. He ordered them, in the form of 
 flesh and blood, to stand and go. 
 
 Life, according to this view-point, takes 
 
86 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 its value oi' noD-vulue from the use wlilch we 
 make of it. Hoarding is disallowed. The 
 wealth of the material globe would surcease 
 if hoarding were the fundamental order. Only 
 through giving do we receive. Bountiful 
 sowing has as its consequent bountiful reap- 
 ing. The perennial program physically is ex- 
 penditure prior to enrichment. The perpe- 
 tuity of art, literature, science, government, 
 industry, religion, would be pabulum for the 
 lictionist if mental and moral investment 
 came to a close. ^'This book," said Dante, 
 referring to his ^^ Divine Comedy," *'has 
 made me lean for many years." ^'Ah, yes," 
 says Thomas Carlyle, ^'it was won, all of it, 
 with pain and sore toil— not in sport, but in 
 grim earnest. His book, as indeed most good 
 books are, was written in many senses with 
 his heart's blood." 
 
 The paradox of life is : individual invest- 
 ment for the common good is, in the sum- 
 mary of life, the highest realization of self- 
 hood. Jesus, in His parables, emphasized 
 always the integration of manhood. He in- 
 
Symbolism. 87 
 
 sisted on tlae whole being greater than the 
 sum of its parts. The hand, the foot, the eye, 
 are functionless only through their member- 
 ship in the body. The individual is function- 
 less, according to Jesus' word, save through 
 His membership in the social body. Lose 
 your life for the highest ends, and you save 
 it; save your life for selfish ends, and you 
 lose it, is the word of social science no less 
 than the word of Jesus. 
 
 *' The wood and wave each other know, 
 Not unrelated, unaffied, 
 But to each thought and thing allied, 
 Is perfect Nature's every part. 
 Rooted in the mighty Heart." 
 
 III. 
 
 The fixedness and unfixedness of char- 
 acter Jesus saw in the building of the houses 
 on the rock and on the sand. In every pos- 
 sible condition and circumstance of life the 
 constructive genius of men avers itself. The 
 man of real wisdom builds not for favorable 
 winds, for gentle dews, for placid waters, but 
 
88 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 for the fury of Boreas, the peltings of Plu- 
 vius, the titanic antagonisms of Neptune. 
 
 The right angle to each other of the plum- 
 met and the surface of the earth can not be 
 maintained by the house which rests on shift- 
 ing sand. This maintenance is only possible 
 on the enduring and impregnable rock. 
 
 New York City may laugh at Triton and 
 his wreathed horn, at ^olus and his bag of 
 winds, because of the granitic quality of Man- 
 hattan Island. 
 
 Jesus saw enduring character to be the 
 desideratum of all endeavor and belief. All 
 else in life, from His angle of vision, is tinsel 
 and wrappage, simulacher, not substance. 
 The foolish man, the man of unfixedness, 
 builded on the sand. His end is always ruin. 
 The man of character is not under the domi- 
 nance of things visible. He esteems fact 
 greater than fiction, performance greater 
 than pretense, rectitude greater than relig- 
 iosity. He does not tremble before the Eu- 
 menides, nor does he shrink at the fulmina- 
 tions of a papal bull. The menacing atti- 
 
Symbolism. 89 
 
 tudes of public opinion and the fiery objur- 
 gations of an inquisitor fail to make him 
 quake. He unhorses poverty, contumely, and 
 audacious assault. His rectitude is a per- 
 petual victory, celebrated not by the blazonry 
 of trumpet nor by the brilliancy of flam- 
 beaux, but by a singular serenity which is 
 joy habitual. 
 
 The symbol of the house builded on the 
 rock gives to character a centrality. The 
 possibility of the rock being displaced or 
 overset is nil. Rock is the final expression 
 of the law of crystallization. It is at one 
 with the foundations of the earth. ^^The 
 strength of the hills, '^ ^^the mountains girded 
 with power,'' are metaphorical personifica- 
 tions by the Hebrew prophet. Jesus in the 
 employment of this symbol gives to character 
 a sense of mass. The individual stratum of 
 the Apennines or Alleghanies does not have 
 for us a clamant voice. It is the rocky mass, 
 the innumerable stratifications, which com- 
 mand our thought. Character as mass re- 
 sists successfully conventional opinions and 
 
90 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 practices. It resists successfully principal- 
 ities, powers, the wiles of the devil. Jesus in 
 Himself wrought upon the world's thought 
 and action as did no other because of the cen- 
 trality of His character. As no other of the 
 world's figures, He gives to us a sense of 
 mass. The house builded on the rock is the 
 character builded on Him who was God mani- 
 fest in the flesh. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The symbolic thought of Jesus finds a 
 vivid expression in the parable of the Sower 
 and the Seed. This parabolic utterance is a 
 suggestive study in moral attitudes. 
 
 In the wayside hearer, the hearer from 
 whose mind Satan immediately stole the 
 word, the attitude of indifference is seen. 
 Plato was not far afield when he declared 
 that all misdoing had its beginning in stu- 
 pidity. The morally indifferent man is fun- 
 damentally stupid. He is the foolish man 
 of whom the prophet wrote, '^The fool hath 
 said in his heart, There is no Q-od." Plung- 
 
Symbolism. 91 
 
 ing through life like a blind beast feasting 
 and fattening himself, he eliminates God 
 from his thought through his persistent stu- 
 pidity. 
 
 Such a hearer lacks in conviction. In 
 him a spiritual atrophy is operative. The 
 soul which should be keenly alert to spiritual 
 truth is lamentably nonchalant. In the forces 
 which make for righteousness he is a negli- 
 gible quantity. 
 
 The seed sown upon the rocky soil, unable 
 to endure the fierce beating of an Oriental 
 sun, is a study in the superficial moral atti- 
 tude. AVith joy this hearer received the 
 word, but the oncoming of tribulations and 
 X)ersecutions offended him. He gave the 
 word of the kingdom room, but allowed no 
 place for root. He was a man of superficies, 
 not centrality. He had extent, but no intent. 
 In his powers of resistance he is molluscan. 
 Such lusty opponents as tribulation and per- 
 secution are too hard for him. Primrose 
 paths of dalliance such men and women seek 
 to tread. The disciplinary quality of life 
 
92 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 they do not esteem. The pamperings of the 
 Sybarite appeal to them with siren voice. 
 Life they construe as ease rather than ef- 
 fort, apathy rather than action, helplessness 
 rather than hardihood. Superficial moral 
 character finds its genesis in the giving of 
 undue emphasis to one faculty of our three- 
 fold nature. Psychically we are creatures of 
 thought, will, and emotion. To magnify or 
 minify any one of these faculties at the ex- 
 pense of the other is to incur moral jeopardy. 
 Jesus directs our attention to the blunder 
 made by this hearer. With joy he received 
 the word of the kingdom. Evidently he gave 
 the place of primacy to his emotional fac- 
 ulty. His relationship to God and man he 
 based upon his sensibility. Thought and will 
 he manifestly abjured. Had he given to 
 them their legitimate office, tribulation and 
 persecution would have been deprived of 
 their offensive efficiency. Neither emotion- 
 alism, nor will capacity, nor intellectual- 
 ism, in itself, avouches spiritual integrity. 
 The integration of manhood implies thought 
 
Symbolism. 93 
 
 activity, plus will activity, plus emotional ac- 
 tivity. Jesus always insisted upon the re- 
 sponsiveness of the whole man to the word 
 of the kingdom. 
 
 The affirmation of synthetic selfhood 
 means root for the seed as well as room, in- 
 tensity of purpose as well as extent. 
 
 The seed sown upon the ground in which 
 thorns were latent is a study in spiritual non- 
 expansiveness, in moral abortiveness. This 
 hearer would give root to the word of the 
 kingdom, but not room. He is a believer in 
 spiritual dwarfism, rather than fullness of 
 spiritual stature. The latent thorns, said 
 Jesus, by and by sprang up and choked the 
 word, and it became unfruitful. 
 
 The thorns symbolize, in the thought of 
 Jesus, worldly cares and deceitful riches. 
 Total surrender of one's self to trade, or to 
 art, or to government, or to invention, or to 
 any worldly pursuit or wealth acquisition, is 
 the sure strangulation of our higher and bet- 
 ter nature. We can not by any legerdemain 
 
94 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 produce character through worldly method. 
 The world is our scene of activity. It is in 
 itself wholly impersonal. To yield ourselves 
 to it is to surrender personality, to give pre- 
 eminence to thinghood, to materialize mind. 
 Suffering ourselves to be morally choked by 
 the cares of the world and the fraudulency 
 of riches, we renounce the spiritual quality 
 of life. Individual initiative, with its power 
 of permutation and combination, we relegate 
 to desuetude. Such a relegation is the trav- 
 esty of selfhood. 
 
 The inspired word, ^^Thou madest man 
 to have dominion over the works of Thy 
 hands; Thou hast put all things under his 
 feet,^' is disavowed when worldly worry and 
 wealth choke the divine seed sown in our 
 hearts. Personality can only come to its full- 
 ness of stature, to its divinely appointed 
 fruitfulness, by the coincidence of extent with 
 intent, of room with root. Japanese horti- 
 culturists busy themselves with some fre- 
 quency in dwarfing plants and trees whose 
 normal nature is one of largeness. The oak 
 
Symbolism. 95 
 
 they often convert into a woodland pygmy 
 by denying to it room. 
 
 Against this moral abortiveness, this spir- 
 itual non-expansiveness, Jesus admonishes us 
 in symbolic speech. The seed sown in the 
 good ground, and multiplying itself beyond 
 geometrical ratio, is representative of the 
 good and honest heart in a receiving and re- 
 sponsive attitude. It is the finite mind 
 clothed in humility in the presence of the 
 Infinite Mind. It is man, the child, giving 
 glad acceptance to the will of God, the 
 Father. According to Jesus, this should be 
 the true and abiding attitude of all men. 
 
 Such a mental and moral disposition 
 makes effective God's purpose concerning 
 our translation from darkness to light, from 
 sin unto righteousness. The good and honest 
 heart receiving the word of the kingdom, and 
 bringing forth fruit with patience, is morally 
 alert. It is profound in its acceptance of the 
 Divine Will. It is extensive while intensive. 
 It gives root and room to the thought of God. 
 Thought, will, and emotion are in continual 
 
96 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 co-operation, and soul expansiveness is cher- 
 ished as an ever-present ideal. Fruitfulness 
 is the legitimate and inevitable outcome of 
 such a moral attitude. 
 
 V. 
 
 A study in spiritual affinity is given to 
 us by Jesus in the simile of the leaven and 
 the meal. *^The kingdom of heaven is like 
 unto leaven which a woman took and hid in 
 three measures of meal, till the whole was 
 leavened. ' ' 
 
 Between the leaven and the meal there 
 was a bond of union which derided every con- 
 ceivable antagonism. Their natures were in 
 correspondence. No genius of man could set 
 aside their affinity for each other without 
 totally destroying their respective natures. 
 As long as leaven is leaven and meal is meal, 
 their contact means unity, and this unity is 
 synonymous with transmutation. The meal 
 finds a higher selfhood, indeed its true self- 
 hood, through its union with the leaven, and 
 
Symbolism. 97 
 
 the leaven enters into a completeness of life 
 through its combination with the meal. This 
 figure is suggestive. The kingdom of heaven, 
 expressed in terms of incarnate love, incar- 
 nate truth, incarnate righteousness, can not 
 do other than leaven the whole of humankind 
 when contact is effected. 
 
 Between man in his lowest estate and the 
 kingdom of heaven as expressed in the above 
 terms there is a bond of union in latency 
 which holds in disdain every thinkable op- 
 position. The African Kaffir, the Sandwich 
 Islander affirm this truth as really as Jona- 
 than Edwards and Florence Nightingale. 
 
 A latent correspondence there is between 
 all men and the kingdom of heaven. Man 
 must be other than man, and love, truth, and 
 righteousness other than their nature, to de- 
 feat this agreement. Brought into contact, 
 a union ensues, and this union is synonymous 
 with transmutation. Humanity finds its 
 highest selfhood only when wholly leavened 
 with the principles of the kingdom of heaven. 
 Only then does it show that beneficence for 
 7 
 
98 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 which ^'the whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth in pain together until now." 
 
 No man with impunity can ignore the 
 chemical combinations of the physical world. 
 Life and death inhere in their affinities and 
 non-affinities. The man of sanity makes it 
 his study by day and by night to effect a 
 league offensive and defensive with every 
 physical and spiritual element in God's 
 world. It is his intent to live, move, and have 
 his being in harmony with Infinite Wisdom. 
 His spirit is co-operative. The leaven and 
 the meal symbolize the co-operative spirit. A 
 higher selfhood is the resultant of co-opera- 
 tion, whether in the material or moral world. 
 
 Jesus in this parable preaches the doc- 
 trine of co-working, of union for higher ends, 
 of obedience to the fundamental principles of 
 our Father's world. An inattentive ear to 
 this doctrine means death to the moral and 
 spiritual efficiency of personality. Leaven 
 separate and apart from the meal is fit for 
 nothing but to be cast out and trodden under 
 foot of men. Meal separate and apart from 
 
Symbolism. 99 
 
 the leaven is savorless, and therefore of no 
 value. 
 
 Humanity takes its value from its union 
 with love, truth, and righteousness, the un- 
 derlying principles of the kingdom of heaven. 
 And with strict consonance with the New 
 Testament Scriptures we may say that the 
 kingdom of heaven finds its completed work 
 in the transmutation of the sons of men into 
 the sons of God. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The function and non-function of the visi- 
 ble Church Jesus symbolized in the parable 
 of the net cast into the sea. ^^The kingdom 
 of heaven is like unto a net that was cast 
 into the sea, and gathered of every kind; 
 which, when it was full, they drew to shore, 
 and sat down and gathered the good into 
 vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it 
 be at the end of the world: the angels shall 
 come forth and sever the wicked from among 
 the just.'' 
 
 From this parable it is evident that the 
 
100 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 function of the visible Church is to cast the 
 net and gather of every kind; but the work 
 of assortment, of adjudication, is not as- 
 signed to fallible men. The preaching of the 
 gospel, the discipling of all nations, the gath- 
 ering of every kind, is our work. The pro- 
 nouncement of judgment as to the good and 
 the bad, the saved or the unsaved, is not the 
 office of the visible Church. 
 
 Romanism has made of religion a byword 
 and a hissing by arrogating to itself this work 
 of supererogation. Fallible man is not com- 
 petent to sit in final judgment on fallible man. 
 The function of the visible Church is work. 
 It is not judgment. 
 
 Protestantism is slowly but surely surren- 
 dering its negative office of judge and ruler 
 over men, and assuming the larger and posi- 
 tive office of servant unto men. In so doing 
 it is reproducing the spirit of Jesus ; for He 
 came into the world, not to condemn men, 
 but to save them ; not to be ministered unto, 
 but to minister. 
 
 Gradually we are approximating in our 
 
SYMBOi^ISM. 101 
 
 practice the good word, ^^ Whosoever will be 
 chief among you, let him be your servant." 
 
 VII. 
 
 As a symbolist, Jesus performed a work 
 of liberation. He opened the prison doors 
 for the talent, the rock, the seed, the leaven, 
 the lost sheep. From their physical incar- 
 ceration He took them, and made them uni- 
 versal in their relatedness. As representa- 
 tions they became of value in the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 Henceforth no man can look upon the 
 rugged breast of the mountain range, upon 
 the mal-odor of the leaven, the inartistic 
 fish-net, the infinitesimal mustard-seed, with 
 an unpoetic or provincial eye. Jesus brought 
 to the open the inner sense of birds, flowers, 
 stones, seed, leaven, net, and fish. The par- 
 ables of Jesus are the conversion of all life, 
 organized and unorganized, into universal 
 language. Newer and higher facts through 
 His imaginative faculty issued from the va- 
 rious economies of life. In Jesus' thought 
 
102 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 the soul was fundamental, and the highest 
 function of all things else was to speak the 
 language of the soul. 
 
 Between the wheat-fields of Palestine and 
 the nations of the earth, between the wayside 
 rock and ethical character, between the mus- 
 tard-seed and the possibilities of the kingdom 
 of heaven, Jesus established a subtle spiritual 
 connection. The representations of the Di- 
 vine idea of God's ruling purpose concerning 
 men He discerned in every aspect of life. 
 His figures of speech are of incomparably 
 greater value for us than those of Virgil, or 
 Goethe, or Wordsworth, or Milton, or 
 Shakespeare, because of the inapproachable 
 Divineness of His nature. Wielding Deific 
 power, He made free with the most imposing 
 and formidable phenomena of the physical 
 universe. The law of gravity He held in 
 abeyance when He walked upon the ciystal 
 waters of Gennesaret with the sure and firm- 
 set tread of one walking upon the solid globe. 
 He tossed in His hand the law of chemical 
 combination in the multiplication of the 
 
Symbolism. 103 
 
 loaves and the fishes with the same abandon 
 as the boy who playfully tosses his ball. The 
 repulsions of matter He rebuked as a military 
 chief would reprove a subsordinate, when He 
 commanded Lazarus, the brother of Mary 
 and Martha, after four days of interment, 
 to come forth. 
 
 In the moral universe He is the overtow- 
 ering personality of the ages. The civiliza- 
 tions that withstand political and social 
 shocks, that are in the vanguard of the 
 world's progress, that emphasize equality, 
 justice, liberty, fraternity among men, assign 
 to Him with joyous acclaim the place of 
 moral and spiritual headship. Beyond all 
 peradventure. He is the Captain of all na- 
 tional salvation. 
 
 To outline His authority and power in in- 
 dividual life reduces all speech to beggary. 
 He is the true regenerator of souls. New 
 confidences, new affections, new enthusiasms. 
 He communicates to men. He alone is the 
 discoverer of the moral potentialities of the 
 race. The individual finds his possibilities 
 
104 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 actualized when he comes into living contact 
 with Jesus Christ. 
 
 Jesus is the symphonist of the soul. He 
 extracted music from the mind and heart of 
 Zaccheus, the public plunderer; from Saul, 
 the self-sufficient Pharisee; from Augustine, 
 the lecher; from Wesley, the formalist,— sur- 
 passing in concord that extracted by Ole Bull 
 from the repulsive catgut, or by Mozart from 
 the dull metal. 
 
 Because of the worth of His personality, 
 His words become a salient energy. The sym- 
 bolisms of His thought do not at any time 
 suggest a riotous imagination. But they 
 rather suggest a profound philosophy, in the 
 adoption of which is found life abundant. 
 The idealism of Jesus is unconcealed in all 
 of His figures, but it is an idealism which His 
 ministry among men made exceedingly prac- 
 tical. 
 
Chapter IV. 
 RELIGION. 
 
'For still the new transcends the old 
 In signs and wonders manifold ; 
 We need but open eye and ear 
 To see God's mysteries always here. 
 
 '* Through the harsh noises of our day 
 A low, sweet prelude finds its way. 
 Through clouds of doubt and creeds of fear, 
 A light is breaking calm and clear. 
 
 *' Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more 
 For olden times and holier shore; 
 God's love and blessing, then and there, 
 Are now, and here, and everywhere." 
 
 —JOHN G. WHITTIER. 
 
 Perhaps the bitterest experience in the life of the Teacher 
 of Galilee was the eagerness with which the crowds looked 
 for miracles, the apathy with which they listened to truth. 
 
 —HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE. 
 
 106 
 
EELIGION. 
 
 I. 
 
 As THE interpreter of religion, Jesus did 
 not divest nature of its divine quality, nor 
 did He deprive the supernatural of its natu- 
 ral expression. He recognized continuously 
 the presence of law in God's world, and He 
 acknowledged always the presence of God in 
 the working of law. Upon no occasion did 
 He give a mechanical, self-sufficient interpre- 
 tation to the universe, and at no time did He 
 declare that haphazard and confusion 
 wielded sovereign power. We have yet to 
 learn this great lesson taught by the Son of 
 God. 
 
 We insist in our thinking with periodic 
 frequency on the reign of law minus God, and 
 then we swing to the other extreme of thought 
 and emphasize the Infinite Presence minus 
 law. At one time we are what Professor 
 
 107 
 
108 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 Bowne terms ''bald naturalists/^ and at 
 other times we are ''false snpernaturalists/* 
 Tt is of inestimable value to the world of 
 thought that Jesus on no occasion gave sanc- 
 tion to this invalid thinking. 
 
 The miracle-mongers who would disre- 
 gard the normal methods of Divine activity 
 did not win Jesus to their way of viewing 
 things. Neither did the Sadducees, the first- 
 century materialists, who would eliminate 
 all spirit from the universe, win Him to their 
 point of view. Between this false supernatu- 
 ralism and false naturalism He moved with 
 perfect poise of mind and heart. It can not 
 be gainsaid that the sign and wonder side of 
 God's working we have unduly magnified. 
 We declare His might in the thunder-cloud, 
 the volcanic outburst, the tremors of the 
 earth; but we do not rightly esteem His 
 might in the serene shining of the sun, in the 
 fruitage of the tree, in the beautiful and be- 
 nign unfolding of a human soul. 
 
 To us the familiar laws of nature are 
 often alien from the Divine causality. With 
 
Religion. 109 
 
 the perversity of the obtuse Jew we ask con- 
 tinually for a sign, oblivious of the never- 
 ceasing revelation which God is making to us 
 in the operation of all law. The wondrous 
 potency of a blind and purposeless mechan- 
 ism is our notion of the ray of light, the 
 whispering breeze, the flying bird, the blos- 
 soming flower, the mental operations of a 
 mature mind, and the far-reaching plans of 
 a modern apostle. Nature we establish as a 
 rival of God. The miraculous, the extraor- 
 dinary, God accounts for. The everyday- 
 ness of life is accounted for by ** Nature.'* 
 We see God in the prodigious mathematical 
 or musical faculty of an untutored child. Re- 
 ligiously we most clearly discern Him in the 
 emotional ebullience of a camp-meeting fre- 
 quenter. 
 
 The entire Christian world is not yet a 
 tenant in fee-simple of the sanity of the He- 
 brew prophet embodied in the words, **The 
 heavens declare the glory of God, and the 
 firmament sheweth His handiwork. Day 
 unto day uttereth speech, and night unto 
 
no Jesus: The world Teacher. 
 
 night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech 
 nor language where their voice is not heard.'* 
 ''Who coverest Thyself with light as with a 
 garment ; who stretchest out the heavens like 
 a curtain; who maketh the clouds His 
 chariot; who walketh upon the wings of the 
 wind;" ''He watereth the hills from His 
 chambers;" "The earth is satisfied with the 
 fruit of Thy works : He causeth the grass to 
 grow for the cattle, and herb for the service 
 of man, that He may bring forth food out of 
 the earth." God as an irruptionist we know, 
 but as the Creator whose creations never 
 cease, we do not always concede. 
 
 The simplicity and naturalness of Jesus' 
 life astounded the spiritual dullards of His 
 day. Of a Jewish world-empire they dreamed. 
 For an emancipation from the authority of 
 Eome they entreated. For a king who should 
 surpass in magnificence the court of Caesar 
 they looked with sensuous eye. For a mighty 
 upheaval, political and economic, they were 
 on the qui vive. Their notion of God was 
 supernaturally false. They were unwilling 
 
Religion. Ill 
 
 to utilize the endowment of mind and heart, 
 and the daily opportunity for service which 
 was theirs for the outworking of a salvation, 
 individual and national, which could not con- 
 ceivably be paralleled by any liberation 
 brought by an earthly ruler, or by an 
 economic prestidigitator. 
 
 Their ideal was spurious because an- 
 archic. And the Jewish notion of the Divine 
 Causality is still in evidence within and with- 
 out the Church of God. The passion for the 
 spectacular, for the show of the senses, is 
 very much alive to-day. The genuinely con- 
 verted man, we say, is the man converted in 
 the amazing fashion; the man who at a cer- 
 tain hour, on a certain day, of a certain 
 month, in a certain year, passed through the 
 purifying fires of an intense psychical expe- 
 rience. But the boy or girl who enters the 
 kingdom of God through the medium of the 
 Christian home and the Sunday-school we 
 often stigmatize as still-born. We are open- 
 eyed for prodigies. We are dull of eye for 
 
112 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 the normal workings of the ever-present and 
 ever-blessed Spirit. 
 
 The immanence of God in the earthquake, 
 in the volcanic explosion, in the electrical 
 discharges of the thunder-cloud, in the ex- 
 traordinary musical powers of Ole Bull at ten 
 years of age, in the instantaneous and mar- 
 velous regeneration of a soul matured in de- 
 generacy, is not to be controverted. The 
 statement of Dr. Lyman Abbott concerning 
 the miracle side of the universe commands 
 the assent of sound thinking : ^ ^ What in our 
 limitation of speech we call miraculous, is 
 nothing more than the Infinite Presence and 
 Power in unexpected actions demonstrating 
 the existence of an intelligent Will and Power 
 superior to that of man. ' ' 
 
 The contention, however fully justified in 
 the light of the Incarnate Son of God, is that 
 which emphasizes the Infinite Presence and 
 Power in the everydayness of life, in the 
 perennial operation of law. This contention 
 never fails to inspire and renew the souls of 
 men. But assigning a primacy to the prodi- 
 
Religion. 113 
 
 gious, the miraculous, the occasional, can not 
 do other than foster incredulity. The religious 
 life has a higher significance than the ob- 
 servance of times and seasons, than the seek- 
 ing for signs and wonders. Thaumaturgy is 
 not an art of exceeding value from the New 
 Testament view-point. Lovers of wonder 
 find the four Gospels and the Acts of the 
 Apostles, ''stale, flat, and unprofitable.^' 
 What there is of miracle in these writings is 
 lacking in spice and frantic coloring. And 
 every endeavor which we make to interpret 
 the New Testament in the thaumaturgic 
 fashion converts us into spectacles for angels 
 and for men. 
 
 Jesus repelled with vehemence the arch- 
 lover of the anomalous in His wilderness 
 temptation. The challenges, ''If Thou be the 
 Son of God, command that these stones be 
 made bread;" "If Thou be the Son of God, 
 cast Thyself down [from the pinnacle of the 
 temple] ; for it is written. He shall give His 
 angels charge concerning Thee, and in their 
 hand^ they shall bear Thee up lest Thou dash 
 
 8 
 
114 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 Thy foot against a stone/* met with no ac- 
 ceptance from God manifest in the flesh. 
 
 Certain of the scribes and Pharisees upon 
 one occasion said, *' Master, we would see a 
 sign from Thee." Jesus* reply was, ^*An 
 evil and adulterous generation seeketh after 
 a sign." At another time the Pharisees de- 
 manded when the kingdom of God should 
 come, and His reply was, ^^The kingdom of 
 God Cometh not with observation [with ex- 
 traordinary show]. Neither shall they say, 
 Lo here, or lo there ! for behold the kingdom 
 of God is within you." It is assuredly no 
 indication of faith, but rather non-faith, if 
 our fundamental conception of God and His 
 manifested power inheres in portents and de- 
 partures from the normal. Jesus evidently 
 meant this in the saying, ^^An evil and adul- 
 terous generation seeketh after a sign." 
 
 II. 
 
 Jesus gave to the Divine Causality oper- 
 ative through law the place of primacy in 
 our religious life. Our birth into the king- 
 
Religion. 115 
 
 dom of God He conditioned upon faith in 
 the living God. This faith involves not 
 chaos, but order. It is man's obedience to 
 every law which underlies our well-being. 
 
 These laws are as valid and as ever- 
 assertive as the laws of gravity, cohesion, 
 chemical affinity. And in these laws God is 
 ever present. Man's self-sufficiency, his in- 
 dependence of God's laws, Jesus steadfastly 
 denied. Self-righteousness never failed to 
 convert Him into a diatribist. 
 
 The burning speech of Jesus recorded in 
 chapter twenty-three of Matthew's Gospel 
 was addressed to the prototypes of Pelagian- 
 ism. 
 
 But we can not read into Jesus' antag- 
 onism of self-sufficiency the negation of law. 
 Physically we are amenable to the laws of 
 gravitation, crystallization, chemical combi- 
 nation. No man of good judgment declares 
 his independence of these laws. In our sense- 
 life they are indispensable coadjutors. Men- 
 tally we are amenable to the principles that 
 underlie our experience as rational crea- 
 
116 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 tures. The man who attempts a disregard 
 of them we stamp with imbecility. 
 
 In like fashion are we subject to the laws 
 that underlie our religious life. Prayer, 
 faith, love, temperance, patience, goodness, 
 are basic in the religious life. Their validity 
 is beyond question. They are as firmly es- 
 tablished in religious development as are the 
 laws of gravity, chemical affinity, in our 
 physical life. 
 
 But all law, whether physical, mental, or 
 moral, is valueless only as it is of every-day 
 expression, of normal and orderly operation. 
 The opposition of the natural and supernat- 
 ural doubtless arises in some minds from the 
 sense in which the term natural is employed 
 in the Pauline writings. This opposition, 
 however, can only exist through our self-im- 
 posed limitation of the apostle's thought. 
 Writing to the Corinthian believers, he de- 
 clares, ^^The natural man receiveth not the 
 things of the Spirit of God ; for they are fool- 
 ishness unto him : neither can he know them, 
 because they are spiritually discerned.'^ 
 
Religion. 117 
 
 Again he wrote, ''That was not first which 
 is spiritual, but that which is natural ; and 
 afterward that which is spiritual." 
 
 The wisdom of Paul in affirming that the 
 natural man,— the man on the low level of 
 a universe minus God, the man who is con- 
 tent with a purely inductive efficiency, who 
 protests that the rain-fall and the snow- 
 storm find their ultimate cause in the forces 
 of cohesion and cr^^stallization,— receives not 
 the things of the Spirit of God, and views 
 them only in the light of foolishness, is be- 
 yond question. Such a man finds his mental 
 processes paralleled in the African Kaffir 
 who holds in contempt all character and con- 
 duct as embodied in a cultivated Christian. 
 
 The apostle is also in perfect coincidence 
 with the science of thought in declaring the 
 efficiency of the sensuous nature prior in 
 point of time to the spiritual nature. The 
 helpless babe, the benighted heathen, the 
 bestial savage, are keenly alive sensuously. 
 They give little or no proof of the efficiency 
 of the spiritual nature. Hence the apostolic 
 
118 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 word, that was not first which is spiritual, 
 but that which is natural, and afterward that 
 which is spiritual, are words which become 
 sound logical doctrine. 
 
 In the larger sense, however— the sense 
 which recognizes the natural as an order in 
 which all law is regnant— the apostle had an 
 abounding appreciation. To the Roman be- 
 lievers he wrote, ^'Let not sin [lawlessness] 
 reign in your mortal [natural] body;" 
 ^' Yield the members of your body as instru- 
 ments of righteousness unto God/' Let the 
 natural order of your life be the agency for 
 the outworking of the Divine thought and 
 purpose, is a legitimate paraphrase of the 
 above passage. 
 
 Again, he recognized the natural order as 
 a medium for the supernatural in the words, 
 ''I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the 
 mercies of God, that ye present your bodies 
 a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, 
 which is your reasonable sei^ice." The Di- 
 vineness of the natural order of life, when 
 informed and directed by the Infinite Spirit, 
 
Religion. 119 
 
 is iterated and reiterated throngliout the 
 Scriptures. Indeed, it can not be too fre- 
 quently affirmed that it is in the order of ob- 
 servable and traceable law that religion finds 
 its highest certitude. God works through 
 law, and not against it. What appears to us 
 extraordinary and miraculous, is the Infinite 
 Spirit working through laws which the finite 
 mind can not grasp. 
 
 But the extraordinary and the miraculous 
 are figments of the imagination unless re- 
 lated to the moral and spiritual development 
 of the race. And this relatedness means the 
 Divineness of the natural order, and the nat- 
 uralness of the Divine order. Jesus made 
 the natural order of life Divine. He made 
 the Divine order natural. His body was to 
 Him the temple of the Holy Ghost. His 
 hands, His feet. His tongue, were instru- 
 ments unto righteousness. His ministry of 
 helpfulness to man was a continual presen- 
 tation of His body unto God as a living sac- 
 rifice. 
 
 He dined at the table of Simon the 
 
120 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 Pharisee, of Zacchens the publican, and thus 
 transfigured the social relations of men. He 
 interested Himself in the success and failure 
 of His fishermen disciples. In so doing He 
 made divinely luminous the industry of the 
 world. He took the little children into His 
 arms, and, putting His hands upon them, 
 blessed them. In so doing He made radiant 
 with Divinit}" parenthood and childhood. He 
 made effulgent the mustard-seed, the leaven, 
 the hidden treasure, the wandering sheep, 
 the piece of lost silver, the net cast into the 
 sea, the gathered fish, through their symbolic 
 relatedness to the kingdom of righteousness. 
 
 With His ministry among men, the living 
 of His normal life, He saw the imperative 
 value of love intensive and extensive toward 
 God, of doing His Father's will rather than 
 His own, of prayerful communion and fel- 
 lowship with God. 
 
 He thus, in His own character and con- 
 duct, illustrated the coincidence of the nat- 
 ural with the Divine, of the supernatural 
 with the natural. 
 
( 
 Religion. 121 
 
 III. 
 
 Jesus as a religionist gave chief place 
 to the moral and spiritual values of life. 
 
 For the man of ceremony, of tradition, of 
 pretense, of unbelief, He had no word of ap- 
 probation. In His judgment, they were not 
 eligible to citizenship in the kingdom of God. 
 ^'Except your righteousness,'' He said, ^'ex- 
 ceed the righteousness of the scribes and 
 Pharisees [the formalists and traditional- 
 ists], ye shall in no case enter into the king- 
 dom of heaven. ' ' To the unbeliever He said, 
 ^'He that believeth not is condemned al- 
 ready." To the pretender He said, ^^If ye 
 were blind, ye should have no sin; but now 
 ye say, We see; therefore your sin remain- 
 eth." For Him there was an ideal order 
 of life, and this ideal was surcharged with 
 ethical and spiritual worth. From the view- 
 point of the Incarnate Son of Grod life has 
 utterly no value exclusive of these values. 
 
 Doctrines of the Divine Immanence are 
 abroad, which fail to transcend the meta- 
 physical order of the universe. God is postu- 
 
122 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 lated as the immediate upholder of all finite 
 life, but the ethical and spiritual qualities of 
 life are conspicuously absent. The Divine 
 quality of man finds its otherness in the Di- 
 vine quality of the horse, the oriole, the fly. 
 No higher or lower purpose is admissible in 
 the Divine Mind, according to this doctrine. 
 Therefore all moral distinctions are canceled. 
 *^ Whatever is, is best," becomes the accepted 
 maxim. The libeler as truly executes the In- 
 finite Will as his victim. The adversary of 
 all goodness is as fully in league with the 
 Divine causality as is the man of noble im- 
 pulses and refined character. Such an emas- 
 culated and aimless philosophy of life found 
 no approver in Jesus. Only that doctrine and 
 manner of life which conforms to a moral 
 and spiritual test met with His acceptance. 
 
 God does uphold all things by the word 
 of His power, and in Him all things consist ; 
 but between the ideal order of life and the 
 actual a coincidence is frequently absent. 
 Metaphysically, the worker of iniquity has 
 his being through Infinite Power as truly as 
 
Religion. 123 
 
 the worker of good. God makes His sun to 
 rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth 
 His rain on the just and on the unjust ; but, 
 according to the ideal order of life in which 
 moral distinctions abound, God obligates 
 Himself for the preservation unto eternal life 
 of the worker of good, and for the overthrow 
 of the worker of evil. The moral quality of 
 the ideal order finds a perennial vindication 
 in the enthusiastic and willing service, in the 
 uprightness of life, in the boundless op- 
 timism, in the dauntless courage, in the con- 
 science void of offense, in the joy, the peace 
 of the lovers of God and man, and is likewise 
 vindicated in the melancholy, the apathy, the 
 burdened conscience, the decease from truth 
 and goodness of the lover of evil. 
 
 The naturalism in which God is regnant, 
 and the supernaturalism in which law is 
 regnant, make no concessions whatsoever to 
 non-ethical living, nor do they minify the 
 twentieth part of a tithe the doctrine of retri- 
 bution. Behind natural law no prodigal can 
 find refuge, for God is in the law. Behind the 
 
124 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 supernatural no man can find refuge for bis 
 misdoings, for all is law. '' Whatsoever a 
 man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he 
 that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap 
 corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit 
 shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting," is 
 the protestation of a true naturalism and a 
 true supernatural ism. Nature and the super- 
 natural are not antithetical to each other, but 
 are wholly complementary. 
 
 The Hebrew prophet spoke with scientific 
 precision in the words : ^ ^ Thou bast beset me 
 behind and before, and laid Thine hand upon 
 me. . . . Whither shall I go from Thy 
 spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy pres- 
 ence? If I ascend up into heaven. Thou art 
 there ; if I make my bed in hell, behold. Thou 
 art there. If I take the wings of the morning, 
 and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
 even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy 
 right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the 
 darkness shall cover me ; even the night shall 
 be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth 
 not from Thee; but the night shineth as the 
 
Religion. 125 
 
 day ; the darkness and the light are both alike 
 to Thee/' 
 
 The besetting God is the fundamental fact 
 of the universe. ^ ^ In Him we live, and move, 
 and have our being. ' ' 
 
 Law minus God is philosophic and reli- 
 gious illiteracy. God minus law is philosophic 
 and religious illiteracy. God working in and 
 through all life gives to religious experience 
 a clearly defined and serviceable content. 
 This conception duly magnifies the Divine 
 causality. It duly magnifies finite initiative 
 and responsibility. It arouses the moral 
 sluggard and the destructive profligate to a 
 sense of their peril. It incites the believer, 
 the doer of good, to ever-increasing service. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Divineness of nature and the natural- 
 ness of the Divine give to all experience a 
 content that is at once inspiring and full of 
 comfort. It makes of God's world a world 
 directed by Infinite Wisdom, Power, and 
 Love. It gives to life something more than a 
 
126 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 metaphysical meaning. From this angle of 
 vision we are in a world in which the highest 
 moral purpose is being accomplished. No 
 ponderous juggernaut is crushing to nothing- 
 ness the bodies and souls of men. We have 
 nothing to fear if we are co-working with the 
 mighty God, the Giver of all good, the Pre- 
 server of all flesh, the Father of all spirits. 
 
 The doctrine of the Divine Immanence 
 has only blessing for the worker of righteous- 
 ness. God is set for the upbuilding of all that 
 is praiseworthy. He is set for the destruc- 
 tion of all that is blameworthy. 
 
 The religionist relates his life to the In- 
 finite plan. In thought and in service he finds 
 in God his consistency. 
 
 The line of separation drawn by the non- 
 moral man between God and business, God 
 and politics, God and education, God and art, 
 God and literature, he does not essay to draw. 
 He clearly discerns the presence of God in 
 the laws which underlie the flower and fruit- 
 age of the earth, the teeming life of the sea, 
 the ebb and flow of tides, the physical neces- 
 
Religion. 127 
 
 sities of the race, the economy of households 
 and nations, the beauties and utilities of all 
 temporal and spatial life. He repudiates the 
 self-sufficiency of law. He repudiates the 
 lawlessness of the Divine causality. The con- 
 cept of life which does not appreciate the 
 daily round of activities and interests as an 
 offering unto God is essentially non-ethical. 
 Jesus, in the living of His life, established 
 no lines of cleavage between the secular and 
 the sacred. All life was for Him the offering 
 of sacrifice unto God, the doing of the 
 Father's will, the upbuilding of the kingdom 
 of righteousness. He thus gave to all thought 
 and service a true unity. He saw in the 
 whole of life the meaning of its parts. From 
 his view-point commerce is not a detachment 
 from education, nor education from govern- 
 ment, nor government from art, nor were any 
 of these a detachment from religion. God, 
 in His thought, is in all things expressive of 
 law; and law, in his thought, is God's method 
 of manifestation. 
 
 Beligion as one concern of men, among 
 
128 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 many, is false, speculatively and practically. 
 It is a heathenish notion which has ingrafted 
 itself upon quasi-religious thought. The 
 Christian business man has the gracious op- 
 portunity of making God manifest to men in 
 the market, the bank, the shop. The Chris- 
 tian politician has a similar opportunity in 
 the municipality, the State, the Nation. 
 
 The Divine quality of all natural life, and 
 the naturalness of the Divine causality, give 
 to every man who would accept it the office 
 of working together with God for the uni- 
 versal inbringing of righteousness. Life 
 thus informed with ethical and spiritual pur- 
 pose, makes possible the bearing of our bur- 
 dens with a joy that no man can take from 
 us, with a peace that passeth all understand- 
 ing, with a restfulness Divinely begotten. 
 
 Consonant with our working out our sal- 
 vation with fear and trembling, God our 
 Father works in us both to will and to do 
 of His good pleasure. If the universe is 
 God's method of making real His infinite 
 wisdom and love, then only that which fur- 
 
Religion. 129 
 
 thers the well-being and felicity of the worker 
 of righteousness can possibly ensue. In all 
 temporal experience we may undergo much 
 which brings us grief, disappointment, loss, 
 hardship. But if our life is a commitment 
 to God, even these will work out for us a far 
 more exceeding and eternal worth of charac- 
 ter. Manifestly it is not God's purpose to 
 make the continuous experience of even a 
 righteous man one of ease, self-indulgence, 
 sensuous comforts. E-ather it is the purpose 
 of our Heavenly Father to accomplish in us 
 a higher end than our finite knowledge yet 
 has fashioned. 
 
 We fill our span of twenty, fifty, seventy, 
 eighty years, and then a new beginning is 
 before us. Time measurements acquaint us 
 but fractionally with our Father's will. Our 
 duty lies in the acceptance of the endowment 
 which He gives us and its employment in His 
 name. The abiding assurance which brings 
 good cheer to the heart of him who loves 
 God and his fellow-man intensively and ex- 
 tensively, is that righteousness is being ac- 
 
 9 
 
130 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 complisbed in the working of all law, and that 
 at God's right hand only are there pleasures 
 for evermore. Jesus gave this assurance to 
 His disciples in the words, ^^Fear not, little 
 flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to 
 give you the kingdom;" namely, that which 
 is real, abiding, and blessed. 
 
 Prior, however, to its possession they 
 were to make all things subordinate to the 
 Father's will. Every fleshly relationship- 
 father, mother, brother, sister, wife, children, 
 estate— was to assume secondary rank in 
 the execution of the Infinite purpose. But 
 this secondary rank involved a relatedness to 
 the kingdom of righteousness which made 
 fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood, sister- 
 hood, wifehood, childhood, and every conceiv- 
 able chattel, transcendently efficient and 
 effulgent. 
 
 Eighteousness is rightness, and Israel's 
 prophet spoke the mind of God when he de- 
 clared concerning the worker of rightness, 
 **No evil shall befall thee." No time loss 
 or grievance has in it an element of endur- 
 
Religion. 131 
 
 ance. Like morning clouds and early dews, 
 they go away. 
 
 It was this faith in the reality of God's 
 purpose pertinent to His children that gave 
 voice to Paul's enheartening words, ^'We 
 know that all things work together for good 
 to them that love God/' The conversion of 
 apparent defeat into real and abiding con- 
 quest is a perpetual fact causally, and with 
 great frequency circumstantially, in God's 
 world. 
 
 David the shepherd lad suffered repeat- 
 edly at the hand of Saul, the malevolent mon- 
 arch of Israel. To escape death, he fled 
 precipitantly. But from his adversities 
 issued the forgiving spirit, trust in God, sym- 
 pathy for the oppressed, integrity of soul. 
 This was causal conquest. Circumstantially, 
 David, as Israel's king, reached a greater 
 pinnacle of power than did Saul, his perse- 
 cutor. 
 
 Daniel cast into the den of lions under- 
 went a temporal forfeiture of political pres- 
 tige in the Babylonian Empire through the 
 
132 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 sanguinary counselors of King Darius. But 
 from this ostensil)le overthrow issued the 
 sublimity of his faith, his insurpassable cour- 
 age, his unexcelled manliness. This was 
 causal conquest. Circumstantially, he also 
 conquered in that he prospered according to 
 historic record in the reign of Darius and in 
 the reign of Cyrus the Persian. 
 
 The Garden of Gethsemane, the hall of 
 Caiaphas, the judgment-seat of Pilate, the 
 hill of Calvary, registered manifest reversals 
 of righteousness ; but from these seeming re- 
 pulses came forth in beauty and in benefi- 
 cence the Infinite purpose. Causally, Jesus 
 conquered through His unfeigned submission 
 to the Father's will, in His complete renun- 
 ciation of time values and fleshly supremacy, 
 in the incomparable lovableness of His na- 
 ture. Circumstantially, He shattered the 
 weapons of His enemies through His break- 
 ing asunder the tomb of Joseph and His 
 ascension into the heavens. 
 
 Causal conquest over all evil, regardless 
 of its face or form, is inevitable if we are in 
 
Religion. 133 
 
 league with God. If our faith and service 
 are in love and truth, the hostile fronts of 
 vice can not withstand our progress, nor 
 affect our peace. In circumstance we may 
 not always see the confusion of evil-doers, 
 nor have the experience of a complete out- 
 ward vindication. Savonarola did not cir- 
 cumstantially look upon the mastery of good; 
 nor did Hugh Latimer and John Eidley. 
 Their end was the fagot and the flame. But 
 that circumstantial triumph shall complete 
 causal triumph in the appointed time and 
 season is the inviolate pledge of God in law 
 and law in God. 
 
 The crux of the argument is : Is the world 
 of, in, and through God, or is it a self-suffi- 
 cient mechanism, blind and purposeless, 
 defying every law of thought, being, and 
 morals? The verity of the prophetic word, 
 ^ ' Thou hast beset me behind and before, and 
 laid Thine hand upon me," and the apostolic 
 word, ''In Him we live, and move, and have 
 our being," Jesus the Eeligionist evinced in 
 His thought, and word, and deed. 
 
Chapter V. 
 STRATEGY 
 
'* The Ruler of the Universe has ordered all things with 
 a view to the preservation and perfection of the whole, and 
 each part has an appointed state of action and passion. 
 
 *' And one of the portions of the universe is thine own, 
 stubborn man, which, however little, has the whole in view ; 
 and you do not seem to be aware that this and every other 
 creation is for the sake of the whole, and in order that the 
 life of the whole may be blessed and that you are created for 
 the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of 
 
 ^°"* —PLATO. 
 
 Christ was intended to be, in the fullest sense, a Savior, 
 not only of the individual, but also of society, making the 
 man new, but doing it that He might renew mankind. 
 Within Him were the energies needed to create a perfect 
 order, a holy society, a humanity that should articulate the 
 Creator's ideal. The work that He came to do was to recon- 
 cile man to God, to bring alike our nature as persons and 
 the order in which we lived and worked into harmony with 
 
 the will of God. 
 
 —A. M. FAIRBAIRN. 
 
 ISti 
 
STRATEGY. 
 
 I. 
 
 The strategist is the man of generalship. 
 He has outlook. The Now is not the limita- 
 tion of his thought and purpose. The Here 
 is not the boundary-line of his activity. He 
 thinks in centuries and millenniums rather 
 than in days and decades. His strides are 
 across continents and hemispheres, rather 
 than across communities and common- 
 wealths. He appreciates particulars only in 
 the light of the universal. The details have 
 no appreciable worth for him exclusive of the 
 whole. 
 
 Jesus was a strategist of the highest or- 
 der. At every period of apparent defeat He 
 proved Himself to be the victor. Chicanery, 
 corruption, and conspiracy, begotten under 
 the shadows dense of the midnight hour, 
 made notorious the day in which He lived. 
 
 137 
 
138 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 With strict regard for fact, it may be said 
 that the age in which the Son of God moved 
 among men was pre-eminently the age of 
 ^ ' treasons, stratagems, and spoils. ' ' The mo- 
 tions of men's spirits were as dull as night, 
 and their affections dark as Erebus. The 
 unity of the social body was a fiction; the 
 predominance of individualism was a fact. 
 The Roman Empire, with its one hundred 
 and twenty millions of subjects, was devoid 
 of homogeneousness. The only safeguard of 
 the Caesars against political disintegration 
 was the ubiquitous imperator, centurion, and 
 file of soldiery. Men were coerced into obedi- 
 ence. The efficienc}^ and physical courage of 
 the Eoman soldier were the substrata of Im- 
 perial Rome. The willing mind and heart, 
 the fraternal spirit, the love of righteous- 
 ness, the altruistic impulse, the reverential 
 attitude, were in subservience to sensualism, 
 and all mechanical essays of statute and of 
 State to renew life found themselves frus- 
 trated, whether in Europe, Asia, or Africa. 
 The principles that underlie the common weal 
 
Strategy. 139 
 
 were dallied with. Men saw their own inter- 
 ests as paramount. An Ishmaelitish spirit 
 was in the ascendant, and ostensibly perpetu- 
 ating itself for all time to come. Not only 
 was the knowledge of dnty toward God be- 
 dimmed, but the knowledge of duty toward 
 man was under a cloud. The incoming into 
 the world of a true prophet of God, a sincere 
 ministrant at the altar of humankind, a sov- 
 ereign in the realm of thought and deed, was 
 the crying necessity of a sentient, conceiving, 
 acting world. 
 
 An immense significance attaches itself to 
 the apostolic word, ^^In the fullness of time 
 God sent forth His Son.'' With correspond- 
 ence to fact we may read, in the day of oppor- 
 tunity God sent forth His Son. The advent 
 of Jesus among men was the finale of the 
 Infinite Mind and Heart in behalf of human- 
 kind. It was purity incarnate, love in flesh 
 and blood, strength putting itself forth for 
 the renovation of a degenerate world. It was 
 the supreme endeavor to restore man to the 
 splendor and service of a son of God. The 
 
140 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 greatness of such a consummation the world 
 has not yet esteemed at its just value. In 
 our unspeakable obtuseness we are prone, 
 even in this braggadocio year of civilized life, 
 to give pre-eminence to the man who bows 
 down to wood and stone, who worships the 
 work of his own hands, who builds the mod- 
 ern city, the improved railroad, and the most 
 effective machine. Materialism, with the 
 slime of the bottomless pit in its trail, com- 
 mands too great a respect among us. It is 
 not the function of good sense to say that 
 the well-constructed city, the railway that 
 awakens the sleeping energies of hill, dale, 
 and prairie, the steamship that makes one 
 the opposing shores of continents, nor the 
 mechanical device that multiplies the effec- 
 tiveness of the human body, are facts of no 
 worth. Indeed, they are facts of extraordi- 
 nary value, but they are at no time to be 
 accepted as facts of fundamental value. 
 
 Jesus, in His concept of life, did not give 
 the premiership to matter, force, or motion. 
 He did not any time, nor in any fashion, 
 
Strategy. 141 
 
 make of them a trinity worthy of human 
 homage. It is the man of circumscribed 
 vision who affirms the primacy of the senses. 
 It is the man of limitless outlook who de- 
 clares the primacy of the spirit. The mili- 
 tary authorities ascribe to the strategist a 
 vision that sets aside all limitary marks. He 
 thinks in generals, not in parts. For his real 
 efficiency he demands a world in which to 
 move. He is, as Emerson said of Napoleon: 
 ''Put him in an island prison, and let his 
 faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to 
 climb, no stake to play for, and he would 
 beat the air and appear stupid. Transport 
 him to large countries, dense population, 
 complex interests, and antagonist power, and 
 you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded 
 by such a profile and outline, is not the vir- 
 tual Napoleon." 
 
 The strategist refuses to be insulated. 
 He is a universal figure. He is a complete 
 man. The striking deficiency among men is 
 their incompleteness. It is this which ac- 
 counts for our stupidity and our sin. We 
 
142 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 a 10 prone to be content with a partial expres- 
 sion of our nature. The strategist, the man 
 of outlook, of universality, of completeness, 
 of generalship, is the true conception of man. 
 Every man in the wholeness of his nature is 
 a strategist. Primarily he is not what is 
 termed in military parlance a tactician. The 
 tactician gives emj^hasis to particulars, to 
 detachments. The move of the immediate 
 present is with him all-important. In the 
 maneuvers and deployment of platoons and 
 companies he is expert. In the handling of 
 regiments and brigades he is inexpert. His 
 ability to govern extends to district or muni- 
 cipality, but his capacity does not extend to 
 commonwealth or republic. He is an au- 
 thority on species, but not on genera. In the 
 individual Church he is of value. In the uni- 
 versal Church he is of limited worth. The 
 tactician is a partial man. The strategist is 
 a whole man. As a poet-philosopher puts it, 
 ^^Man is a knot of roots whose flower and 
 fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer 
 to natures out of him. All his faculties pre- 
 
Strategy. 143 
 
 diet the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of 
 the fish foreshow that water exists, or the 
 wings of an eagle presuppose a medium like 
 air. ' ' 
 
 In our affinities we recognize no Ultima 
 Thule. We declare our kinship to the plant 
 world, the mineral world, the animal world, 
 in every mouthful of food that we digest and 
 assimilate. We affirm our tangency with all 
 physical creation in the application and ar- 
 ticulation of our mental powers. The house 
 is the builder projected in wood and stone. 
 The locomotive engine is the machinist in 
 brass, in iron, in steel, in copper. The piano- 
 forte is the man of melody in reed, in ivory, 
 in metal, in polished wood. ^^The book is 
 the life-blood of a master spirit," fluent on 
 page, in paragraph, in type. The geologist 
 would be nonplussed in the study of earth and 
 stone if the earth and stone were not himself 
 in other form. 
 
 The beautiful enthusiasm that led Audu- 
 bon into woodland depths for a fellowship 
 with the birds, ^ ^ the feathery denizens of the 
 
144 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 air," had its genesis in his kinship witli the 
 oriole, the thrush, the vireo, tlie che-winR, 
 the goldfinch, the cardinal grosbeak. With 
 the blithe songsters he was at one. They 
 reproduced the music and aestheticism of his 
 own nature. Agassiz would have lived in 
 vain scientifically had there not been a unity 
 between himself and the halibut, the pick- 
 erel, the spider, and the fly. Strangerhood 
 in the physical world is eliminated by the 
 mind of the scientist, else science would have 
 no existence whatsoever. 
 
 Government itself would be as inane as 
 the woundless air if the qualities of the 
 strategist did not inhere in the race. The 
 Greek, the Koman, the Slav, the Asiatic, do 
 not in themselves represent the ideal of gov- 
 ernment. They are declarative of the indi- 
 vidual. But humanity, the common good, is 
 the ideal of all civilized government. It was 
 not the begetting of a vain fantasy Avhen Ten- 
 nyson wrote of ^ ^ The Parliament of man, the 
 Federation of the world. ' ' 
 
 In the differentiated life of a republic, or 
 
Strategy. 145 
 
 an empire, the notion of completeness, of 
 unity, or identity, does not rest in the city, 
 the county, the State, but in the nation. The 
 federal sovereignty is always the prominent 
 concept. It is this notion that has made so- 
 ciety issue from the clan, the class, the com- 
 munity into the kingdom, the republic. If 
 the mind of the strategist, the universal man, 
 did not hold the place of primacy in the poli- 
 tics of the world, government as we now 
 know it would not be. Through such a mind 
 flow the currents of universal being. The 
 complete man is God^s vicegerent upon the 
 earth. He is the true general. 
 
 Jesus, in announcing Himself as the Son 
 of Man, was declaring the universality of His 
 nature. It was His assurance to the Jew 
 that he was greater than Abraham, Moses, 
 David, Isaiah, Habakkuk. It was His avowal 
 to the Hellenic peoples that He was infinitely 
 greater than Homer, Herodotus, Pericles, 
 Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates. It was an an- 
 nouncement to the Roman world that the 
 Gracchi, Augustus Ca3sar, Horace, Cicero, 
 
 10 
 
146 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 13aled before His effectual fire. All things 
 and all men are the dowry and estate of 
 Jesus, the Son of God, the Son of Man. 
 
 II. 
 
 It is this universal quality that projects 
 the personality of Jesus across the centuries 
 and millenniums. By the world of His day 
 He could not be encompassed. He is the true 
 ^^ Ancient of Days." 
 
 The strategic character of Jesus' thought 
 and service is graphic in the progressive un- 
 folding of the notion of unity among men. 
 
 The diverse peoples of the earth, as a 
 family identical in their interests despite the 
 endless differentiae of their activities and 
 thinking, did not suggest itself, even in its 
 remoteness, to the great thinkers and doers 
 of the pre-Christian periods. Heterogeneity 
 they saw everywhere. They could not con- 
 ceive of an identity asserting itself in the 
 divergent intents of the Greek, the Eoman, 
 the Asiatic, the African. The scientific 
 faculty of classification they did not possess. 
 
Strategy. 147 
 
 To their mind the leaf was not declarative 
 of the tree, the segment affirmative of the 
 sphere, the child a prophecy of the man, the 
 man a pronnnciamento of the race. 
 
 They did not think in universal terms. 
 Racial prejudgments preponderated. To the 
 seed of xlbraham the seed of Aristides, of 
 Tarquin Superbus, of Hasdrubal, were dogs. 
 To the sons of Hellas all men, exclusive of 
 their own proud lineage, were barbarians. 
 In similar fashion thought the imperial Ro- 
 man of other men. To use the military appel- 
 lation, they were tacticians. Their concep- 
 tion of men and their inter-relationship was 
 provincial. It was devoid of outlook. It was 
 an absorption in particulars. It was a con- 
 centration of thought on detachments. 
 
 Jesus did not at any time interpret men 
 and measures in a detached fashion. He 
 affirmed always a simplicity underlying dif- 
 ference, a unity fundamental to all variety. 
 In the language of philosophic sanity. He 
 declared that the greatest differentiation was 
 compatible with the most inviolate Integra- 
 
148 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 tion. In practical speech, the ramification 
 of the British Empire, the American Repub- 
 lic, are finely-spun figments when dissevered 
 from a centralized government; the human 
 hand, foot, eye, ear, tongue, are ugly and 
 useless separate and apart from the organ- 
 ized life of the body. Jesus thus regarded 
 humanity. The Jew, the Greek, the Roman, 
 the African, the Asiatic, have nothing of 
 social value apart from humankind. They 
 are as savorless salt, fit for nothing but to 
 be cast out and trodden under foot of men. 
 
 Against all phases of egoism, of indi- 
 vidual centripetence, Jesus protested with 
 vehemence. He gave no aid or comfort to 
 Simon the Pharisee, to Herod the Judean 
 governor, to the rich young ruler, or to the 
 illegitimate ambitions of James and John, 
 the sons of Zebedee. He declared the world 
 to be a brotherhood; that men should be 
 lovers of men; that unity of spirit was the 
 Divine order. 
 
 The tendency to apotheosize titular king- 
 ship has, through the pervasive influence of 
 
Strategy. 149 
 
 Jesus, been relegated to Limbo. The empha- 
 sis put upon the machinery of State as suffi- 
 cient for the common weal has been largely 
 nullified through Jesus' appreciation of the 
 man. Legislation is the body of government, 
 not its spirit. In the light of the Incarnate 
 Son of God, the man must be in the body, 
 the legislator in the legislation. The body 
 politic is to-day esteemed according to its 
 value of personality. The small worth that 
 attaches itself to Eussia, Spain, China, Tur- 
 key, is because of their persistent degrada- 
 tion of the man. They fatuously interpret 
 manhood as mechanism. They subordinate 
 the substance to the semblance. 
 
 Jesus in His conception of government 
 made the form subservient to the spirit. The 
 social distinctions among men expressed in 
 such terms as Pharisee, publican, Sadducee, 
 sinner, aristocrat, democrat, patrician, ple- 
 beian, lords, serfs, nobles, people, were not 
 given root nor room in the thought of Jesus. 
 The evangelistic record that the common 
 people heard Him gladly is indicative of His 
 
150 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 appreciation of men as men. Nothing is 
 greater than soul, is the dictmn of Jesus. 
 And soul is independent of class or clique. 
 
 III. 
 
 Jesus as the universal man saw the sun- 
 rise of that day when all men would be under 
 the conquest of His spirit. And this vision 
 was not the coinage of a diseased brain. It 
 was sanity in its final word. Had Jesus been 
 a mere Jew, filling no larger sphere than was 
 filled by Moses, David, Daniel, Plato, Epicte- 
 tus, Heraclitus, then His vision of universal 
 conquest would have been as insubstantial 
 as the air, as fleeting as the dissolving cloud. 
 
 But Jesus as the world's spiritual Im- 
 perator is beyond the pale of controversy. 
 No historian can give an adequate interpre- 
 tation to the spiritual and ethical aspirations 
 of men for the past nineteen centuries with- 
 out considering Jesus Christ as the prime 
 factor. 
 
 His spirit has been mighty in great crises. 
 'W'hen Charles Martel, in the eighth cen- 
 
Strategy. 151 
 
 tury, threw into confusion the Saracenic 
 hosts that sought to Moslemize the European 
 Continent, the spirit of the Son of God was 
 the real conqueror, and Charles Martel was 
 eager to acknowledge it. 
 
 When Oliver Cromwell wrested from 
 Charles I. civil and religious liberty for the 
 English-speaking people on the field of 
 Naseby and Marston Moor, it was the 
 triumph of Jesus Christ, and Cromwell was 
 keen to so announce to all the world. 
 
 When Wellington covered with the mantle 
 of confusion the flower of the French army 
 under the leadership of the mighty Napoleon, 
 and thus saved the European world from the 
 crushing heel of despotism, it was the master- 
 ful hand of Jesus Christ made manifest, and 
 no man was more willing to so declare than 
 the Iron Duke. 
 
 In the struggle of the American colonies 
 for political freedom. He was the potent per- 
 sonality, and in the issue of the fratricidal 
 strife between our own North and own South 
 
152 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 no man of legitimate thinking can gainsay 
 Ilis overwhelming and gracious presence. 
 
 Jesus saw Himself as the world's con- 
 queror while he was yet the rejected and 
 despised of men. The cross, with its out- 
 stretched arms of shame, did not becloud His 
 vision. Under its ominous shadow He 
 avowed, '^And I, if I be lifted up from the 
 earth, will draw all men unto Me.'' 
 
 And surely the auroral flushes of a per- 
 ennial day of triumph met His eye when He 
 protested subsequent to His resurrection, 
 ^ ' All power is given unto Me in heaven and in 
 earth. ' ' The world has not yet with correct- 
 ness computed the greatness of His strength. 
 The great body of men see in Him only the 
 carpenter's son, a resident of Nazareth, the 
 brother of James, Joses, and Mary, an off- 
 spring from the loins of Abraham's seed. 
 As a world conqueror they do not yet behold 
 Him. 
 
 Had Jesus been a mere tactician, such 
 words as, "Go ye therefore, and teach all na- 
 tions," "Go ye into all the world, and preach 
 
Strategy. 153 
 
 the gospel to every creature, ' ' would not have 
 escaped His lips. He would have been con- 
 tent with a lesser sphere of action. And with 
 this field of limitation He would have taken 
 His place among men as did Charlemagne, 
 Marcus Aurelius, Peter the Great, or Wash- 
 ington. 
 
 But in the Son of God the attentive mind 
 sees the arrest and fixation of the currents of 
 Divinity. What is transient good in us, is 
 fixed in Him. What is a faint spiritual 
 glimmer in us, is exceeding brightness in 
 Him. What is prophetic of righteousness in 
 us, is fulfilhnent in Him. What is of moral 
 and spiritual promise in us, is flower and 
 fruitage in Hmi. He infinitely transcends us, 
 and by virtue of His transcendency He con- 
 quers us. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The world-wide evangelism of the Church 
 of Jesus Christ is profoundly wise. It is 
 not a chase of the will-o'-the-wisp. It em- 
 bodies the largest statesmanship; it is the 
 
154 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 concretion of man's highest self; it is the 
 projection of mental and moral sanity; it is 
 the reincarnation of our ascended Lord and 
 Master unto the uttermost parts of the earth. 
 To declaim against this evangelism is to re- 
 pudiate the upper ranges of our nature. It 
 is the degradation of the unitary, abiding, 
 synthetic selfhood. It is a declination to com- 
 plete manhood and womanhood. It is the 
 metamorphosis of the man into the beast. It 
 is the conversion of the highest possibility of 
 our nature into a base and groveling actu- 
 ality. 
 
 The kingdom of God is universal ; likewise 
 the kingdom of man. Our knowledge of 
 numerals came from our Arabian brothers. 
 Our knowledge of letters came from our 
 Phoenician kinsmen. The Greek gave us our 
 art, our philosophy, our poetry. The Eoman 
 has put us in bondage for our jurisprudence. 
 Our hunger and thirst after rightness of 
 living finds its incipiency in the Hebrew. In- 
 deed, the whole realm of education is indisso- 
 lubly bound uj) with all iDeoples of the earth. 
 
Strategy. 155 
 
 Our ships sail the watery expanse to bring us 
 fruit from the tropics, furs from the arctics, 
 conveniences, comforts, and necessaries from 
 every land and clime. 
 
 In like fashion the mind and heart must 
 make of themselves spiritual benefactors 
 unto the uttermost parts of the earth. The 
 integration of our highest consciousness is a 
 more imperative duty to our fellow-men than 
 the integration of ourselves expressed in 
 terms of culture and commerce. 
 
 Jesus' word to His disciples upon the eve 
 of His ascension into the heavens was : Com- 
 plete yourselves ; do not be fractional in your 
 thought, will, emotion; be an integer men- 
 tally, morally, sjDiritually ; go ye into all the 
 world, and preach the gospel to every crea- 
 ture ; be a witness unto Me unto the uttermost 
 part of the earth. 
 
 V. 
 
 The strategist is a man of method. He is 
 not chaotic in any enterprise. He is cosmic. 
 In his mind's eye he carries the laws which 
 
156 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 underlie all permanency of performance. 
 The harmony which to the inquisitive iniucl 
 of Pythagoras was a fancy, is to his mind a 
 fact. An orderly revolution he sees in earth, 
 in star, in sun. A cosmic develoi)ment he 
 sees in plant and flower. The ethical energy 
 of child and man he sees in embryo, and the 
 evolution of the centuries in blessing and 
 beauty is to his methodical mind involution 
 expressed. Haphazard is not in his vocabu- 
 lary. A commensurability between cause and 
 effect is existent everywhere. Shakespeare's 
 ^^Timon of Athens,'^ Kant's ^^ Critique of 
 Pure Reason,'' the symphonies of Beethoven, 
 the aspirations of Philip Melanchthon as 
 effects, finds no common measure, in his 
 thinking, with fiery clouds or ganglionic ex- 
 citations. 
 
 Jesus in His methods was a strategist. 
 The activity of Infinite thought and will He 
 constantly affirmed. In His thinking, per- 
 sonality was primal. Hence in His work of 
 renewing men and women in the image and 
 likeness of God, of welding the human family 
 
Strategy. 157 
 
 into a brotherhood, in His work of bringing 
 the world into subjection to Himself, He 
 made the largest possible use of finite per- 
 sonality. He called unto Himself men who 
 represented in themselves powers latent and 
 patent alike unto those possessed by all men. 
 Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha, and other 
 great pseudo-religionists, did not establish 
 between themselves and their disciples that 
 intelligence of relationship, that familiar and 
 friendly contact, such as Jesus established 
 between Himself and James, Thomas, John, 
 Simon Peter, Philip, and others of the apos- 
 tolic body. 
 
 Jesus appreciated personality at its pos- 
 sible rather than actual worth. Jesus saw in 
 His disciples democratic predilections. They 
 were men of the people. They were not ex- 
 clusionists. Actually, they were provincial 
 Jews. Potentially, they were universal men. 
 Strategy, generalship, outlook, were latent in 
 them. 
 
 The wisdom of Jesus in the call of these 
 men has been fully attested by succeeeding 
 
158 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 generations. Under the tutelage of their 
 Lord and Master they became cosmopolites, 
 citizens of the world. The metamorphosis 
 thus ^vrought in them changed the aspect of 
 civilizations. Indubitably we afifirm the vir- 
 tues of the first and second Christian cen- 
 turies to be the lengthened shadows of Peter, 
 John, Philip, Paul ; the virtues of the fourth, 
 fifth, sixth centuries, to be the lengthened 
 shadows of Athanasius, Chrj^sostom, Am- 
 brose, Jerome; the virtues of the sixteenth, 
 nineteenth, twentieth centuries, to be the pro- 
 jected personalities of Zwingli, Luther, Wes- 
 ley, Knox, Phillips Brooks. 
 
 The real efficiency of the kingdom of God 
 is not in wood and stone of cathedral and 
 chapel, in the multiplied pages of theologic 
 lore, nor in liturgy or sacrament, but in the 
 personality of believers. Thus Jesus taught, 
 and thus He exemplified. 
 
 yi. 
 
 The strategy of Jesus is fully demon- 
 strated in His teaching. Mr. Emerson in his 
 
Strategy. 159 
 
 '^Circles" writes, ^^ Beware when the great 
 God lets loose a thinker upon this planet! 
 Then all things are at stake." Jesus was not 
 a man of conventions. He pierced to the core 
 of things. To the plane of semblance He 
 brought the law of substance. He was a 
 categorist of the highest order. His thinking 
 was in strict parallelism with the celestial 
 currents of being. He saw the poetic con- 
 struction of the Avorld of things, and the pri- 
 mary relation of mind to matter. The de- 
 votees of Phariseeism and the traditional be- 
 lievers of all ages have made the egregious 
 blunder of attaching themselves to symbols, 
 of declaring the dependence and stability of 
 thought on the symbol. Jesus at no time at- 
 tempted the fixation of these evanescing 
 images. The sun, the stars, the fruits of the 
 field, the sacrificial offering, the temple, 
 frankincense, gold and myrrh, were in His 
 thought true in transition, but false if fixed. 
 Ceremonial righteousness, if otherwise than 
 incidental and fugacious, from His point of 
 view was exceedingly offensive. 
 
160 Jesus : The \A/'orld Teacher. 
 
 Jesus attached Himself to the moral sen- 
 timent, which alone recreates the world in 
 righteousness. As a teacher, Jesiis did not 
 concern Himself piimarily with the phe- 
 nomena of life. He enunciated the princi- 
 ples which underlie phenomena. He gave 
 to the world no dicta concerning gravity, 
 attraction, repulsion, crystallization, cohe- 
 sion, organic and inorganic existences, 
 but He unceasing! 3^ affirmed God the im- 
 manent and efficient causality of all phe- 
 nomena. He gave to the world no treatise 
 on ethics, political economy, sociology, but He 
 ceaselessly affirmed righteousness as funda- 
 mental in the highest development of individ- 
 ual and social life. He gave form to no sys- 
 tem of thought which would eradicate the 
 prejudices and passions between Jew and 
 Gentile, between sovereign and subject peo- 
 ples, but He commanded that men should love 
 their neighbor as themselves. 
 
 Can we conceive of fundament a which 
 mean more for the individual and society 
 than God, righteousness, and love? The phil- 
 
Strategy. 161 
 
 osophic interpretation of history verifies the 
 sanity of the doctrines of Jesus. An attempt 
 to build individual or community life on 
 foundations other than these, is comparable 
 to the building of a house upon the sand. 
 Pelting rains, onrushing floods, cyclonic 
 winds, mean disaster and death for such 
 structures. The strategy of Jesus is fully 
 established in the announcement of these 
 foundation principles of thought and activity. 
 A mere tactician, an incomplete man 
 would have been entrapped by the petty 
 ^prejudgments and antagonisms of that day. 
 With the rancor that swayed the emotions of 
 the J ew toward the Samaritan, or the adverse 
 criticisms of Caesar's governmental policy, 
 Jesus did not intermeddle. He gave no ex- 
 cathedra utterance concerning the merits or 
 demerits of the Eoman system of taxation. 
 He answered in terms universal: ** Render 
 unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and 
 unto God the things that are God's." In 
 affirming righteousness and love He spoke the 
 speech of all men under every possible condi- 
 11 
 
162 Jesus: The ^A^ORLD Teacher. 
 
 lion. The policy of imperialism or republi- 
 canism is not a vital factor in the world's 
 weal, but the question of righteousness is. 
 The ascendency of aristocracy or democracy 
 is not the supreme issue, but the ascendency 
 of righteousness is. Whether a Jew has min- 
 gled his blood with the purple currents of 
 Gentile life, or whether he has not, is of small 
 moment. But whether love for his brother- 
 man is regnant in his thought and purpose 
 is of vast significance. The patrician is not 
 blessed of God, neither is the plebeian ac- 
 cursed of God, because of their relative social 
 positions. The all-absorbing issue is, are 
 they workers of righteousness, are they 
 lovers of God and man in their respective 
 spheres? 
 
 The debates, endless as they were in tedi- 
 ous logomachies, between Pharisees and 
 Sadducees, as to the reality or unreality of 
 spirit, found in Jesus no protagonist. His 
 word was, ^^God is a Spirit, and they that 
 worship Him must worship Him in spirit and 
 in truth." 
 
Strategy, 163 
 
 According to this word, the only reality is 
 spirit. Ail else is but spirit in manifestation. 
 The metaphysics of the ancients and the 
 moderns that is worthy of acceptation, roots 
 and grounds itself in the strategic word, 
 ^ ^ God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him 
 mnst worship Him in spirit and truth.'' 
 
 Every conceivable contention between 
 capital and labor finds solution, not in wage- 
 scale, nor in fiery harangue, nor in comfort- 
 able housing, nor in stipulated hours of work, 
 but in the word of Jesus, ^*A11 things what- 
 soever ye would that men should do to you, 
 do ye even so to them. ' ' 
 
 Jesus sought to renew the man in his in- 
 tellections, volitions, and emotions. Working 
 thus from within outward, the social weal 
 was assured. The man as organized truth, 
 love, righteousness, reproduces himself in 
 other men, and this is the only true and abid- 
 ing regeneration of society. '* Nature exists 
 entirely in leasts," said Emanuel Sweden- 
 borg; and the macrocosm, said Plato, is 
 known by the microcosm. Jesus appreciated, 
 
164 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 as is evident in His doctrine, the worth of the 
 individual man. His command was, Preach 
 the gosiDel to every creature, seek ye first the 
 kingdom of God. In the publican purified by 
 a new affection He saw a redeemed humanity 
 individualized. In the kingdoms of this 
 world brought under subjection to Himself, 
 He saw the regenerated outcasts of Israel, 
 Zaccheus, Mary Magdalene, Saul of Tarsus, 
 universalized. 
 
 Philosophy, statecraft, commerce, reli- 
 gion, and every other phase of legitimate 
 thought and service, iterate and reiterate the 
 strategy of Jesus. 
 
Chapter VI. 
 CONSERVATISM. 
 
" Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteous- 
 ness." — JESUS. 
 
 '* Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good." 
 
 —PAUL. 
 
 " Lo ! before us gleam truth's camp-fires — 
 We, ourselves, must pilgrims be; 
 Launch our * Mayflower ' and steer boldly 
 
 Through the desperate winter sea; 
 Nor attempt the Future's portal 
 With the Past's deep-rusted key !" 
 
 —JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 The thing which is unjust, which is not according to 
 God's law, will you, in a God's universe, try to conserve 
 that ? It is so old, say you ? Yes, and the hotter haste 
 ought you of all others, my conservative friends, to be in, to 
 let it grow no older. 
 
 If but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimates to you 
 that it is not fair, hasten, for the sake of conservatism itself, 
 to probe it vigorously, to cast it forth at once and forever, if 
 guilty. How will or can you preserve it, the thing that is not 
 fair ? Impossibility a thousand-fold is marked on that. 
 
 — THOS. CARLYLE. 
 166 
 
CONSERVATISM. 
 
 I. 
 
 The word conservatism, and its implica- 
 tion for many members of the social body, 
 is invested with all the sacredness that lan- 
 guage and custom are able to bestow. For 
 another social class it is ^'rank and smells to 
 heaven, ' ' and, adopting the speech of Hamlet, 
 they exclaim, ^ ' Fie on it ! " This variance of 
 opinion is chargeable to our partial interpre- 
 tation of the word and that which it imports. 
 
 That there is a pseudo conservatism and 
 a sane conservatism, history and experience 
 affirm. It is not congruous with wisdom to 
 repudiate the sane because of the pseudo. 
 That conservatism is legitimate in many 
 phases of experience and thought is undeni- 
 able. That it is illegitimate in other phases 
 is equally undeniable. The conservatism 
 which stands opposed to all change, giving 
 
 167 
 
168 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 no valid reason for its opposition, is worthy 
 of universal repudiation. The conservatism 
 which insists upon the preservation of what 
 is established, giving a legitimate reason 
 for its attitude, is worthy of all acceptation. 
 That the sane conservatist fills a large 
 place in the world's thought and achievement 
 can not be controverted. That the pseudo 
 conservatist is a contumacious impediment in 
 the path of the world's progress can not be 
 controverted. Conservative view-points of 
 the fictitious type obscure the shining of 
 every sun. In matters religious, political, 
 commercial, educational, their antagonism 
 becomes chronic. Indeed, with some fre- 
 quency conservatism has been confounded 
 with unqualified contumacy. In the thought 
 of some, conservatism and innovation are 
 regarded as ceaseless antagonists. That this 
 is true as regards a spurious conservatism 
 and a spurious innovation is self-evident. 
 But it is not true as regards a vital conserva- 
 tism and a vital innovation. The conflict be- 
 tween the Jew and the Gentile, the Hellenic 
 
Conservatism. 169 
 
 aristocrat and democrat, the Roman patrician 
 and plebeian, the English barons and the 
 English yeomanry, was not a conflict between 
 a sane conservatism and a sane innovation. 
 It was the blind fury of lunatic conserv- 
 ators and lunatic innovators. Class conten- 
 tions, whether in Jew, Gentile, patrician, 
 plebeian, aristocrat, democrat, baron, yeo- 
 man, wealth, poverty, literacy, or illiteracy, 
 is madness, and has no inherent or ac- 
 quired right to stigmatize conservatism or 
 innovation. Wise conservatism is the cham- 
 pion of equality, of opportunity, fraternity of 
 relation, legitimate liberty. Likewise is a 
 sane innovation. Therefore, these two prin- 
 ciples, which are evermore avowing them- 
 selves in our thinking and doing, are in their 
 best estate mutually inclusive and mutually 
 helpful. They find their physical parallelism 
 in the forces of centripetence and centrifu- 
 gence. 
 
 II. 
 A pseudo conservatism is the creature of 
 fear. It palls in resolution. The word ' ' sug- 
 
170 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 gestion" is a horrid image that doth unfix 
 its hair, and makes its seated heart knock at 
 its ribs against the use of nature. 
 
 This conservatism pauses on the last mo- 
 ment. It has no salient energy. Its fingers 
 clutch the present fact, and will not open to 
 receive even a better fact. It rings the 
 changes without ceasing on man's limitations. 
 It has no iron in its blood. It looks upon all 
 newness as deterioration. It chooses to bear 
 upon its shoulders the mountainous load of 
 social violence and vice, rather than incur the 
 risk incidental to all forward steps. It builds 
 and garnishes the tombs of the prophets, but 
 has no attentive ear for the prophet who now 
 is. It looks with senile delight upon the well- 
 filled barns, but declines to part with the 
 seed-corn. It exults in the presence of a 
 good, but has no eye for an advancing better. 
 This conservatism of fear sought to per- 
 petuate the fruitless stock of Judaism despite 
 the presence of a virile Christianity. It 
 quoted the traditions of the elders while the 
 words of Him who spake as never man spake 
 
Conservatism. 171 
 
 sounded in their ears. It was insistent upon 
 the perpetuity of the eifete governments of 
 the Holy Roman Empire, of papalized 
 Britain, of monarchized France, despite the 
 legitimate cries for reform. 
 
 This conservatism is the victim of woeful 
 presentiments. It is pushed from its stool 
 by imaginary ghosts, as was Macbeth by the 
 ghost of Banquo. Its vision is not normal. 
 It sees in every lusty and new-born champion 
 of progress an age-long enemy. Its timidity 
 forbids the spirit of inquiry. It sees in 
 democracy only mobocracy. In the demands 
 of capital it sees only coercion. In the de- 
 mands of labor it sees only lawlessness. In 
 the evolution of religious thought it sees only 
 Medusa-faced error. In all newness of 
 method it sees only useless machinery. 
 
 A fictitious conservatism is the creature of 
 prejudice. It lacks the judicial temper. Its 
 judgment is purely ex-parte. Such a spirit 
 would speedily bring to a surcease the prog- 
 ress of the race if perpetuated. All experi- 
 mentation in science, in government, in com- 
 
172 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 merce, education; all reforms, moral and 
 spiritual, would come to a summary and 
 sorrowful close if a prejudicial conservatism 
 met with widespread acceptance. 
 
 Conservatism biased lias been a bane to 
 the social unit. It is the prolific breeder of 
 malcontent. The refusal of Tiberius Caesar, 
 Caligula, Nero, to consider the inalienable 
 rights of the people precipitated the downfall 
 of the Roman Empire. The eye of Louis 
 XVI, blinded by a prejudicial conservatism, 
 made his neck a tempting bit of flesh and 
 blood for the guillotine. The American colo- 
 nies, the richest possession ever held by the 
 British Empire, were wrested from the hand 
 of George III because of his pertinacious 
 prejudgments. 
 
 This pseudo conservatism has stood spon- 
 sor for a numerous progeny of mis-shapen 
 ecclesiasticisms, governments, and social sys- 
 tems. We should be devoutly thankful that 
 its dominance diminishes with the diffusion 
 of ethical and spiritual light. 
 
Conservatism. 173 
 
 III. 
 
 A false conservatism is revertive. Its 
 spirit finds content ecclesiastically in the 
 Eomish Church. Every movement author- 
 ized by that hierarchy declares its supreme 
 devotion to the past. If Alexander VI and 
 his predecessors could be re-established in 
 the papal chair, and their diabolisms perpe- 
 trated throughout the habitable earth, the 
 consummation would bring halcyon delight to 
 the great body of present-day prelates of that 
 ecclesiasticism. Their conception of the king- 
 dom of God is priestly profit, rather than the 
 ethical and spiritual enrichment of the race. 
 The peoples of the globe under the dominance 
 of the Eomish Church confirm this character- 
 ization. 
 
 This fatuous conservatism finds an ex- 
 emplar politically in the burnt-out govern- 
 ments of Spain, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, 
 Russia, and China. It is the past which they 
 revere. The ancients fabled of a monster 
 who walked through the earth with reverted 
 
174 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 eyes. He saw only what was in his rear. 
 These governments convert that fable into a 
 fact. 
 
 Commercially, this spurious conservatism 
 finds a voice in China, in India, in Russia, in 
 Persia, and other sluggish nations of the 
 earth. Vast wealth is lodged in their soil, 
 their waterways, their mountain ranges, in 
 their physical energies; but they see it not. 
 What their fathers thought and did they per- 
 sist in thinking and doing. The consequent is 
 a pauperized people. Starvation, with his 
 keen-edged scythe, mows them level with the 
 earth. In their distress they cry unto the 
 progressive peoples of the globe for succor. 
 
 In Protestantism this revertive conserva- 
 tism occasionally finds articulation. It dis- 
 counts every expression, verbal and practical, 
 of present-day Christian experience that dif- 
 fers from the verbal and practical expression 
 of the past. It emphasizes the mechanical 
 aspects of life instead of the spiritual. In its 
 thinking it cancels freedom as an immanent 
 
Conservatism. 175 
 
 mental and moral principle, and therefore 
 cancels progress. It would make of men and 
 women automata. It allows no play to in- 
 dividual initiative. This conservatism cries 
 aloud against all newness of method. It is 
 oblivious of the world's increasing need. If 
 its voice were authoritative, the far-flung bat- 
 tle-line of the Protestant Church represented 
 in missions, in church extension, in education, 
 in humanitarianism, in the religious press, 
 would be non-existent. 
 
 This conservatism, in its insistence on the 
 old methods, fails to perceive the necessity 
 for many new methods, if the hearts of men 
 are to be reached and transformed. The 
 Church is not encompassing the mind of 
 Jesus Christ when it fails to make provision 
 for the advancing physical man, the advanc- 
 ing mental man, the advancing moral and re- 
 ligious man. The gospel of the Son of God 
 involves completeness. A revertive conserv- 
 atism sheds no luster on itself when it does 
 not discern this profound fact. 
 
176 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Pseudo conservatism is inert. It believes 
 in negation. It makes no appeal to Heaven's 
 invisible justice against earth's visible force. 
 It does not with mailed hand smite the evils 
 which threaten the weal of humankind. Of the 
 fierce lightnings of Savonarola, John Knox, 
 Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Earl 
 of Shaftesbury, it knows nothing. Nor does 
 it care to know. It marvels why Jeremiah 
 declaimed against the heaped-up iniquities of 
 Israel, or why Wesley cried aloud and spared 
 not the degeneracy of the English people. 
 
 That a battling reformer is from time to 
 time a needful and inevitable phenomenon, 
 an inert conservatism does not acknowledge. 
 The French monarchy, in the last days of 
 the eighteenth century, was the political in- 
 carnation of an inert conservatism. It did 
 not see, nor did it hear, the gathering storm 
 of an outraged commonalty. That the 
 iniquitous accretions of centuries would ever 
 be blasted asunder volcanically, Louis XVI 
 and his counselors did not remotely imagine. 
 
Conservatism. 177 
 
 The accumulated doctrinal errors of a 
 millennium cried out for destruction in the 
 sixteenth century. Inert Eome gave no heed 
 to the clamor. Martin Luther heard the cry. 
 The crack of doom for the papalism that 
 inheres in the Eomish Church was sounded 
 when Luther nailed his Theses to the door 
 of the Church of All Saints at Wittenberg, 
 October 31, 1517. From that day to this, 
 hierarchy throughout the civilized world has 
 been rapidly approaching the nadir of intel- 
 ligent thought. 
 
 English Puritanism was the protest of a 
 living conscience against the sluggish con- 
 servatism which feared lest God's world 
 would fall apart because a parchment more 
 or less was torn asunder. This conservatism 
 did not see that 
 
 " Truth is Eternal, but her effluence, 
 With endless change, is fitted to the hour ; 
 Her mirror is turned forward, to reflect 
 The promise of the future, not the past." 
 
 On the symbol of God, not on God Him- 
 self, is the thought of inert conservatism 
 
 12 
 
178 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 fixated. 8uch a fixation is idolatry. Against 
 this apathy of soul Cromwell, Pym, Hamp- 
 den, and other high souls called to overleap 
 the vulgar lot and mold the world unto the 
 scheme of God, did battle. 
 
 V. 
 
 A sane conservatism has placed the world 
 under bonds. It is open-minded. Whatever 
 has found establishment among men that is 
 worthy of continued life, it tenaciously holds. 
 It is not eager for change for change's sake. 
 But it is not averse to change if a better is to 
 succeed a good, or a best succeed a better. 
 Its windows are open to receive the bright- 
 ness of recurring suns. It loves light rather 
 than darkness. Stagnation of thought and 
 action a sane conservatism repudiates. It is 
 ever a learner. It is willing to sit at the feet 
 of to-day, if to-day has a helpful lesson for 
 the morrow. The youth is not discounted by 
 this conservatism while age is valued, but is 
 accepted at his present and future values. 
 
Conservatism. 179 
 
 What may be, is as truly in its thought as 
 what is. 
 
 Jesus was an open-minded conservatist. 
 As a Jew He did not intrench Himself be- 
 hind the redoubts of Judaistic thought and 
 achievement. He was not an exclusionist. 
 The sin of limitation had no part nor lot in 
 His selfhood. He welcomed each new day, 
 and saw in it the birth of a new world. He 
 appreciated selfhood as a great affinity. The 
 true man takes up into himself all things. 
 Every science, every art, every knowable 
 thing, he converts into food for his mind and 
 heart. Jesus, with the estimate which He 
 Xjlaced upon man, could not be other than 
 open-minded. The petty partialities which 
 found vent in disingenuous souls could not 
 find issuance from Him. 
 
 The two poles of thought, the universal 
 and the particular, appeared always in Jesus' 
 statement and service. He said or did noth- 
 ing for private ends which was inimical to 
 general ends. He said or did nothing for 
 general ends which was ultimately subversive 
 
180 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 of particular or private ends. He saw all in 
 one; He saw one in all. 
 
 As an open mind, Jesns explored the cen- 
 tuple, indeed the manifold, meaning of every 
 sensuous fact. Jewry He saw as the world 
 of sentient, conceiving, achieving peoples. 
 In the provincialized life of the multitude 
 about Him He saw the latency of the kingdom 
 of God. Among partial men He stood as the 
 complete man. For Him the leaven, the mus- 
 tard-seed, the hidden treasure, the penitent 
 son, the found piece of silver, had an endless 
 significance. They were to Him symbolic of 
 truth in its beauty and beneficence. His 
 finely organized nature penetrated into re- 
 gions where all was music. His ear caught 
 cadences which have become the songs of 
 regenerate souls under every sun. His 
 mind. His heart were open. 
 
 '^A man is a method, a progressive ar- 
 rangement; a selecting principle, gathering 
 his like to him wherever he goes, like the 
 loadstone among the splinters of steel, '^ ob- 
 serves Mr. Emerson in his ^ * Spiritual Laws. ' ' 
 
Conservatism. 181 
 
 This is the philosophy of open-mindedness. 
 All truth, not a single or a few aspects of it, 
 is the element in which we move. The disin- 
 genuous mind loses its balance by the exag- 
 geration of a single topic. 
 
 John Calvin, because of his undue em- 
 phasis on theological dogma, gave his consent 
 to the execution of Michael Servetus in 1553. 
 This emphasis was incipient insanity. It was 
 a holding fast to one thought; a refusal to 
 flow with the course of nature. The love of a 
 brother man is of greater worth in the light 
 of the Incarnation than verbal orthodoxy. 
 But Calvin did not so esteem it. Dr. George 
 P. Fisher, in his ^'History of the Christian 
 Church," states, ^^ Calvin believed that such 
 an attack upon the fundamental truths of 
 religion as Servetus had made should be pun- 
 ished with death. ' ^ 
 
 The Evangelist John tells us of Jesus 
 healing an impotent man on the Sabbath-day. 
 Ecclesiastical hatred was incurred. John de- 
 scribes this malevolence in the words, 
 ^'Therefore the Jews persecuted Jesus, and 
 
182 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 souglit to slay Him because He had done 
 these things on the Sabbath-day." Jesus 
 made the Sabbath-day one of helpfulness to 
 man. The ecclesiastics made it a day of 
 abstraction; a period of barren negation. 
 Jesus' conservatism was sane; the Jews' was 
 spurious. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Legitimate conservatism esteems the 
 solid, columnar body which gives to the tree 
 of the wood its power of resistance and en- 
 durance. This body is the product of the 
 years. It is a voice out of the past. But 
 legitimate conservatism also sees in the per- 
 fected acorn the promise of other columnar 
 bodies. Hence it is progressive. The flow 
 of nature arrested means decease. Jesus 
 taught that life was tendency; that all things 
 are initial; that termini are found nowhere. 
 Eternal life means life evermore. 
 
 This progressive conservatism is affirmed 
 in all thought. ^'To make habitually a new 
 estimate, that is elevation.'' All else is deg- 
 
Conservatism. 183 
 
 radation. The progressive conservative is 
 a diviner of tendency. He is a true prophet. 
 He sees the age that is to be. The fortunes 
 of a thousand years flow at his feet. He 
 discerns with awe man's symmetry with all 
 law. He is willing to set sail on an unknown 
 sea, having implicit confidence in the attrac- 
 tive and repulsive forces which compel all 
 waters to lave all shores. Static conservatism 
 converts nature into an inclosed system. It 
 mechanically interprets God's world. In- 
 finite mind and will it courteously conducts 
 to the front or rear door of the universe, and 
 bows out. Such a conception of things and 
 thoughts, however, has no legitimate stand- 
 ing. It is the apotheosis, as Carlyle puts it, 
 of dirt. It finds itself confused irrecover- 
 ably upon every mention of miracle, forgetful 
 of the larger fact that nature has no meaning 
 apart from mind and will. 
 
 It is God who girds the mountains with 
 power, who commands the uprising and 
 downsetting of suns; who covers the valleys 
 with corn, the pastures with flocks ; who gives 
 
184 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 to all flesh their meat in the season; who 
 made the sea, and in whose hand are the 
 deep places of the earth. As Professor 
 Bowne, in his ''Immanence of God,'' de- 
 clares: *' Nature conceived as a barrier to 
 God, or as something with which God must 
 reckon, is a pure fiction, a jDroduct of unclear 
 thought, which has lost itself in abstrac- 
 tions. God never acts against nature, be- 
 cause for Him there is no nature to act 
 against. His purpose, founded in His wis- 
 dom and goodness, is alone lawgiving for His 
 action, and all else, whatever it may be, is 
 but the expression of that purpose." And 
 this eminently profound and sane thinker has 
 the thought of Jesus as his basis. ''It is the 
 Spirit that quickeneth: the flesh (nature) 
 profiteth nothing." 
 
 Static conservatism does not so interpret 
 life. Jesus stood as a bulwark against the 
 materialistic thought which would invalidate 
 the initiative of the individual, and the re- 
 sponsibility of society. He held in sacred 
 regard the attributes of personality. He did 
 
Conservatism. 185 
 
 not read God or man out of the universe. 
 Nature He saw as the forthputting of Infinite 
 Mind and Will. Art He saw as God working 
 in and through man for the transmutation of 
 nature. 
 
 The premiership of personality Jesus 
 ceaselessly affirmed. Eliminate this premier- 
 ship, and paralysis of achievement inevitably 
 follows. The conservative of dynamic quality 
 gives to the immanent mental principles, 
 freedom and purpose, their proper place in 
 all articulate experience. And with a due 
 appreciation of these mental principles 
 13rogress must ensue. 
 
 According to Jesus' interpretation of life, 
 the work of prophet, priest, philosopher, 
 poet, warrior, keeper of flocks, tiller of the 
 earth, father, mother, wife, husband, brother, 
 sister, no matter by whom done, or when, 
 can not absolve us who think and do in this 
 year of our Lord. We, too, must believe, 
 think, suffer, and serve. We are the children 
 of His hand and heart; we are the sheep of 
 His pasture. We are His vicegerents in all 
 
186 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 the earth. The doings of Israel will not 
 answer for the doings of the Teutons, the 
 Slavs, the Anglo-Saxons, the Asiatics of to- 
 day. The melodies which issued from the 
 Psalmist's soul, the visions which filled with 
 rapture the Prophet Isaiah, the sublime faith 
 and heroism which characterized Daniel in 
 Babylon, the quenchless enthusiasm of Paul, 
 the charm and lovableness of the Evangelist 
 John, must in some measure be reproduced 
 in us. Newness of life is the clarion note of 
 the gospel of the Son of God. 
 
 The God-life within us must find in our 
 hands, our feet, our tongues, instruments 
 unto righteousness. Through us the Divine 
 purjDose must vocalize and accomplish itself. 
 In David's stead we must declare : ' ' The Lord 
 is my light and my salvation; whom shall I 
 fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; 
 of whom shall I be afraid?" 
 
 In Moses' stead we must, in thunderous 
 voice, pronounce in the hearing of all peoples 
 the commandments of the Lord God. As re- 
 incarnations of Simon Peter, of Paul the 
 Apostle to the Gentiles, of Luke the Evangel- 
 
Conservatism. 187 
 
 ist, of Dorcas the worker of good works, we 
 must establish throughout the earth the king- 
 dom of righteousness. Our relation to God 
 and His world must be an original relation- 
 ship. Cromwell can not gird on the sword 
 in our name for the preservation and per- 
 petuation of civil and religious liberty. Philip 
 Melanchthon, with his profound, pungent, 
 and prayerful scholarship, can not in our 
 name grapple with the present-day enemies 
 of the faith of the gospel. Savonarola, with 
 his sacrificial spirit and leonine courage, can 
 not in our behalf pronounce eternal judgment 
 against the present-day moral degeneracy. 
 These duties are ours. And if we would es- 
 cape the Divine disfavor, we must assume 
 them. With the achievements of days agone, 
 regardless of their beauty and their blessing, 
 we must not rest content. 
 
 To be new men, to think new thoughts, to 
 meet new duties now and for evermore, is the 
 ideal of Jesus. Pseudo conservatism is bane^ 
 ful. Sane conservatism is the stepping-stone 
 to better things and thoughts. 
 
Chapter VII, 
 ETHICS. 
 
You will get many a beautiful proverb in Seneca ; you 
 will get many a fine ethical principle in Plato ; you will find 
 in Stoicism some of the most exalted precepts that human 
 ethics have ever known. But mark you one thing : You will 
 never discover that these elevated the common life of man, 
 affected the course of lust, made the bad good, or the impure 
 holy. 
 
 Where they failed, Christ succeeded with splendid, glori- 
 ous success ; He made out of the very outcasts men that be- 
 came saints to God. 
 
 —A. M. FAIRBAIRN. 
 190 
 
ETHICS. 
 
 I. 
 
 Much of the ethical contention that has 
 greeted the ear of men has been on the as- 
 sumption that life is a series of abstractions, 
 and that men and women are hypothetical, 
 rather than creatures of flesh and blood. 
 
 The moral life of the race did not have 
 its genesis in the general principles of con- 
 duct, but by forming codes of concrete duties. 
 What we owe to our parents, our children, 
 our neighbors, our fellow-countrymen, the 
 world, is the concrete form in which the 
 ethical nature declares itself. 
 
 A striking analogy between the mental 
 and moral nature is evident. Abstract specu- 
 lative principles do not mark the initiation 
 of the mental life. The child, the savage, the 
 illiterate, know nothing of the framework of 
 reason, the regulative ideas of the thought- 
 
 191 
 
192 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 life. Their mental unfolding is through the 
 medium of specific acts of knowing. The 
 child is alert over the colored ball as such. 
 He is not interested in the chemical combina- 
 tion which makes the ball possible; neither 
 is he enthusiastic over the law of gravity 
 which enables him to hold the ball in his 
 hand. The savage is nimble in his pursuit of 
 the game of the forest, but the sciences of 
 zoology, biology, anatomy, and the classifica- 
 tion of the beasts and birds, do not stir his 
 embryonic mentality. 
 
 The illiterate man has his existence within 
 the proximate range of the alphabet or Ara- 
 bic numerals. The realms of speculation in- 
 habited by Democritus and John Locke have 
 no significance for his latent powers. But 
 as the mind grows through specific acts of 
 knowing, a search for principles is begun 
 whereby the colored ball, the beasts and 
 birds, the alphabet, the numerals, may be 
 understood in all their relatedness. This is 
 the significance of education. The thought 
 jjrinciples which are utilized by the mature 
 
Ethics. 193 
 
 mind are implicit in the child mind. The 
 high civilization is latent in the savage mind, 
 and the realms of speculative and scientific 
 thought are implicit in the mind of the illiter- 
 ate. The implicit becoming explicit, the 
 latent becoming efficient, the possible emerg- 
 ing into the actual, is what we call mental and 
 moral progress. 
 
 The sensational school of philosophy has 
 sought to deduce our rational ideas and facul- 
 ties from sensation and the sensibility. This 
 thesis would make all mind a child mind. It 
 gives distinction to the savage and the illiter- 
 ate, and utterly ignores the higher forms of 
 intelligence. It makes the lower explain the 
 higher, the child explain the sage. It is not 
 denied that the mind is objective in its first 
 activities, and becomes reflective at a later 
 date. A six-year-old lad with the thought 
 capacities of Louis Agassiz or John Marshall 
 would be monstrous. 
 
 But the human mind does not rest in im- 
 pressions of the sensibility. It works them 
 over into forms inherent in its own nature, 
 
 13 
 
194 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 In so doing it transcends the sense fact en- 
 tirely. If a prankish boy pricks me with a 
 pin, my sensations are tactual and painful. 
 This summarizes ray sensation. But when I 
 protest against being pricked with a pin I 
 transcend the sense fact. I attribute to the 
 pin an objectivity and an efficiency that 
 causes me certain sensations and certain 
 aspects of mind. In all this experience the 
 abiding, thinking, self-determining, conscious 
 ego plays the major role. The receptivity 
 of the senses is an accepted fact, but their 
 primacy is repudiated. 
 
 Sense life means nothing for us only as 
 the mind works over all sense data into 
 rational forms. If the contention of the sen- 
 sational philosopher is valid, then the moral 
 life is nothing more than a series of nervous 
 excitations, a congeries of sights, sounds, 
 tastes, smells, touches. If sensation is pri- 
 mary, then, as John Locke affirmed, the mind 
 is a tabula rasa. It possesses no initiative. 
 It is not conscious, it is not unitary. This 
 thesis makes of all implicit mental and moral 
 
Ethics. 195 
 
 principle a figment of the imagination. The 
 man is not a personality, but a psychical 
 mechanism. The call and the place for a 
 free, intelligent, constitntive selfhood is pith- 
 less and pointless. Moral skepticism finds 
 its birth and perpetuity in the school of sen- 
 sational thought. No other issue is possible. 
 
 If the object is the determinant of all 
 thought, then the moral life consists pri- 
 marily of physical desires and of the lower 
 egoistic sentiments. The elimination of moral 
 ideals, of implicit moral tendencies, of the 
 power of reflective thought, can have but one 
 ultimate, namely, a baseness of desire and a 
 vicious practice. If the puerilities of child- 
 hood, the crudities of the savage, the stupid- 
 ities of the illiterate, are the sum and sub- 
 stance of the race, then all work of education, 
 mentally and morally, is wholly gratuitous. 
 
 The doctrine of evolution as taught by Mr. 
 Plerbert Spencer and his ardent disciples is 
 an attempt to reinforce the sensational philos- 
 ophy. Man, affirms Mr. Spencer, is the emer- 
 gence from the brute, and in his upper ranges 
 
196 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 is nothing more than the brute condition ad- 
 vanced. How John Milton, Philip Melanch- 
 thon, Edmund Burke, as essentially and only 
 brutes, become anything else, or how the 
 brute which transcended himself remained 
 the identical brute, the Spencerian evolution- 
 ist does not tell us. 
 
 That which comes out must have been 
 within. The actual is implicit in the poten- 
 tial, and the potential is explicit in the actual. 
 The boy is the embryonic man. The refine- 
 ments of civilized life are inherent in the 
 destructive Goths and Vandals, and the sci- 
 entific mind of the electrician was implicit in 
 Thomas Edison, the rustic and unsuspecting 
 youth. 
 
 If our mental and moral natures are noth- 
 ing more than the product of the senses, the 
 unfolding of the brute and the brute only, 
 then the science of ethics is a verbal manipu- 
 lation. If this thesis is valid, then men are 
 automata, and nothing more. They do not 
 initiate, they are initiated. What of mind 
 and conscience we have are but the accom- 
 
Ethics. 197 
 
 paniments of the movements and interactions 
 of the material world. Spirit is subordinated 
 to matter. As Professor Huxley, the enthu- 
 siastic champion of conscious automatism, 
 puts it, ^^The extension of the province of 
 what we call matter and causation has had 
 as its concomitant the banishment of what we 
 are pleased to term spirit and spontaneity 
 from all regions of human thought." If the 
 primacy of the senses and the brute are be- 
 yond all disputation, then the conduct of an 
 Asiatic typhoon has just as much moral 
 validity in it as the conduct of men and 
 women. 
 
 But the theses of the sense philosopher, of 
 the Spencerian evolutionist, are excursions 
 into the realm of the hypothetical. Actual 
 men and women, struggling civilizations, or- 
 ganized community and governmental life, 
 the conscious recognition of moral ideals both 
 in ourselves and others, without which moral 
 responsibility is a fiction, unite in a repudia- 
 tion of all thought that disregards the imma- 
 
198 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 nent mental and moral principles which un- 
 derlie all articulate and practical experience. 
 
 II. 
 
 The ethicist who thinks legitimately has 
 a keen appreciation of the practical phase of 
 life, but he is not unmindful of the immanent 
 principles which make the practical life a 
 fact. The sciences of geometry, of mechanics, 
 of chemistry, of physics, are the corner- 
 stones of the skyscraper, the modern city. 
 The locomotive, the plow-point, the tele- 
 phone, the steamship, have no significance 
 apart from these sciences. Mind is funda- 
 mental. In like manner moral insight is pri- 
 mary in the development of individual char- 
 acter, in the formation and perpetuity of gov- 
 ernment, and in the diverse ramifications of 
 social life. As a study, ethics has been vari- 
 ously pursued. Some have given their 
 thought to the history of the genesis and 
 emergence of the ethical idea. In so doing 
 they have sought to affirm its validity. But 
 it is not strikingly wise to attach a thought 
 
Ethics. 199 
 
 value to chemistry because of its emergence 
 from alchemy, nor to affix a logical validity 
 to the British Empire because of its begin- 
 ning in the barbarisms of the Jutes and 
 Angles. 
 
 Chemistry and empires have their value 
 independent of superstition and primeval 
 savagery. The worth and validity of moral 
 ideas can not be determined by their geneses 
 and emergences. The psychological study 
 of the faculties concerned in the production 
 of moral ideas— namely, conscience, will, rea- 
 son, sensibility— has engaged the thought of 
 some moralists. But such study is of the 
 negative character, and usually serves as an 
 apologist for moral skepticism or vice. The 
 ethical study that has a theoretical and prac- 
 tical value is the study of moral ideas, their 
 postulates, implications, and application. 
 
 It is not affirmed for one moment that all 
 difficulties vanish when the relation of the 
 individual man to the ideal of conduct and 
 the ways and means of bringing men into 
 harmony with the ideal are clearly stated. 
 
200 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 The obstacles in human nature to the realiza- 
 tion of the moral ideal are oftentimes ap- 
 parently insuperable. Despite the unfolding 
 of the highest ideals of character and con- 
 duct, men are practically indifferent to them. 
 This difficulty and indifferentism invariably 
 lead to a consideration of moral and spiritual 
 dynamics. And this consideration involves 
 primarily the doctrine and life of the Chris- 
 tian religion. Of this we shall speak later. 
 The indeterminateness of the moral prob- 
 lem confronts every thinker. Ipsedixitisni 
 can not solve the individual puzzles, nor cut 
 the knot of social complication. In ethical 
 affirmation a wide divergence is seen between 
 Aristippus and Plato, between Epicurus and 
 James Martineau. Human nature is end- 
 lessly differentiated in its activities and 
 manifold in its sources. But every moral life 
 has two general aims: individual worth and 
 peace, a social happiness and fortune. The 
 former aim has its dependence upon the at- 
 titude of our will toward our ideal of life and 
 action. A hopeless pandemonium asserts 
 
Ethics. 201 
 
 itself in every man who does not enthusias- 
 tically will the highest possible worth and 
 the profoundest peace as his inner posses- 
 sions. 
 
 The second aim depends for its consum- 
 mation upon our individual compliance with 
 laws psychological, political, social, ethical, 
 and physical. All the prowess of thought, 
 will, and emotion are called into requisition 
 if these two general aims of life are to find 
 even a partial realization. No ethical system 
 is complete which does not evoke the capacity 
 of the whole man, and which does not invite 
 every man into every sphere of thought and 
 activity. 
 
 Systems of prudence which look to ex- 
 ternal fortune and happiness, and disregard 
 moral insight, and systems of abstraction 
 which seek for inner worth and peace and 
 ignore external fortune and happiness, are 
 incomplete views of life, and fail to effect 
 even a remote solution of the ethical problem. 
 
 The complete man individually, the com- 
 plete man socially, is the only ethical aim 
 
202 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 which elicits our cordial acceptance, because 
 it is the only ethical aim which comprehends 
 life. 
 
 ni. 
 
 Ethical philosophy finds its range in two 
 grand divisions. One division seeks to found 
 the notion of duty in some form of acquirable 
 good. The other seeks to make duty an ab- 
 solute, self-sufficing imperative. This second 
 division affirms that if duty is deduced from 
 anything, it must be from the nature of the 
 moral subject, and not from any evolution of 
 external ends. 
 
 To us it is self-evident that these two 
 great divisions mutually imply each other, if 
 the full moral consciousness of mankind is 
 anything more than a verbal abstraction. 
 Much of profound and luminous truth is 
 found in each of these ethical divisions, but 
 it is truth of the semi order. The ethical 
 thought which gives primacy to the notion of 
 duty in external good is designated in modern 
 speech as the doctrine of utility. It is the 
 
Ethics. 203 
 
 legitimate offspring of Hedonism and Epicu- 
 reanism. 
 
 The division which makes duty an 
 absolute, self- sufficing imperative, modem 
 thought designates the doctrine of the in- 
 tuitions. It is traceable to the refined ab- 
 stractions of Socrates and the Platonic 
 school. 
 
 The doctrine of utility or goods ethics 
 decries action for form's sake. And this de- 
 crial gives to the doctrine a far-reaching 
 value. All action which ends in itself and 
 leaves things where they were before is 
 irrational and inane. No one of us can ignore 
 the postulate that moral action must be 
 rational action, and rational action must have 
 an end beyond itself. And to be rationally 
 obligatory, every end must be a good of some 
 sort. No man for the sake of activity is war- 
 ranted in doing mischief; neither is his ac- 
 tivity rational and moral if it is an indifferent 
 activity. Hence, we repeat, the ground of 
 obligation to action perforce lies in some 
 good to which the action is directed. The 
 
204 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 evolution of family, coiiini unity, national arid 
 international life, has come to its present 
 good fortune through the rational and moral 
 seeking of the good. 
 
 Our adaptation to the world about us 
 makes imperative the rejection of the notion 
 that external goods and fortune have no part 
 in our lives. Utility is, beyond peradventure, 
 a great fact in the living of a normal life. 
 If ethics are to be rationalized we can not rest 
 in a mere law. We must have an open eye 
 for ends. The constitution of human nature 
 makes certain goods possible and desirable, 
 and laws are Divinely ordained by the ob- 
 servance of which these goods may be pos- 
 sessed. If duty has anything of practical 
 worth in it, then it is patent that our duty 
 lies within the range of these goods and laws. 
 Even though the goods may not be reached 
 by us, nevertheless ethics demands that we 
 put ourselves in co-operation with all law 
 which underlies a practical good. The man 
 of hereditary j)hysical weakness is not moral 
 if he does not studiously regard the laws 
 
Ethics. 205 
 
 which underlie health. He may never become 
 a vigorous man, nevertheless he is obligated 
 to live in co-operation with all hygienic law. 
 The muddy-m.ettled mechanic may never be- 
 come a master workman, yet he is obligated 
 to exert every energy of body and mind in 
 co-operation with all law which underlies the 
 highest mechanical proficiency. 
 
 The commonwealths of these United 
 States are obligated to enact and enforce 
 every law which has for its end the well-being 
 of their respective citizenship, even though a 
 moral millennium is not ushered in with the 
 rising of each sun. Morals and reason de- 
 mand that we have as an end in life a normal 
 good. This good may be, from our present 
 outlook, what Mr. Emerson in his essay on 
 ^^ Circles" terms the ^^ Flying Perfect,'' but 
 our morality is conditioned on the pursuit 
 of it. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The doctrine of the good has not always 
 cherished ideals that were inspirational in 
 their nature. Indeed, such unsavory philo- 
 
206 Jesus : The W^orld Teacher. 
 
 sophic companionship has characterized it in 
 modern times, and such low conceptions of 
 the good soiled its escutcheon in ancient 
 times, that its character is greatly discounted 
 by all impartial judgment. If a tree is known 
 by its fruit, then the utility doctrine is, theo- 
 retically and practically, *^a goodly apple 
 with a rotten heart. ' ' 
 
 Philosophic history introduces us to the 
 champions of the good in the person of Aris- 
 tippus of Cyrene, who declared that the in- 
 tense pleasures of the body were the pri- 
 mary good; but since it is wisdom to avoid 
 I^ain as well as win pleasure, the life of 
 purely sensuous enjoyment needs to be mod- 
 erated and checked in some degi'ee in favor 
 of the less intense but safer mental joys. 
 The prestige here given by Aristippus to the 
 mind is conditioned on prudential grounds, 
 and nothing more. It is the penalty attached 
 to physical indulgence which persuades one 
 to give any value to the joys of mind. Aris- 
 tippus in this postulate gives to the doctrine 
 of Hedonism its most consistent and forcible 
 
Ethics. 207 
 
 expression. And Hedonism historically is in- 
 dividualism without admixture. No obliga- 
 tion to society or State is recognized. The 
 pleasure to be sought is the pleasure of the 
 individual man. 
 
 Society hedonistically is a segregation; 
 a bundle of individual units. 
 
 Theodorus, an ardent Hedonist, protested 
 that it was ^^not reasonable for a wise man 
 to hazard himself for his country and en- 
 danger wisdom for a set of fools." 
 
 Directly or indirectly, Cynicism, Stoicism, 
 and Epicureanism issued from Hedonistic 
 loins. 
 
 Antisthenes the Cynic declared that the 
 only rational and virtuous life is the life of 
 fewest wants. 
 
 And this fewness of wants, in the Cynic's 
 mind, involved the severance of all ties that 
 related a man to the remainder of the world. 
 Every national and civic bond is broken on 
 the mistaken ground that the State and com- 
 munity must be repudiated if a man would 
 be a cosmopolitan, a world-citizen. 
 
208 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 Diogenes, wandering through the Greek 
 provinces with no other shelter than a tub, 
 and holding in contempt all the refinements 
 of civilization, is a typical world-citizen from 
 the Cynic's standpoint. The Greek Sophist 
 intrepreted life ethically as the ascendency 
 of private and personal interests. The Stoic 
 philosophy produced a tj^pe of robust souls 
 superior in many respects to anything in the 
 way of ethical character in the ancient world. 
 The flaw, however, in the philosophy of Zeno, 
 the founder of Stoicism, was his denial of the 
 legitimacy of the emotions. Aristotle im- 
 bibed so completely the ethics of Zeno that he 
 declared, ^'The emotions are not something 
 to be simply regulated and held in check by 
 reason ; they must be destroyed utterly ; as a 
 disease, emotion is not to be tolerated for a 
 moment. ' ' 
 
 An inhumanity stamped the Stoical notion 
 of life. ^^At its best,'' remarks Professor 
 Arthur Kenyon Eogers, ^ ^ Stoicism was a re- 
 spect for one's self and one's own integrity. 
 At its worst, it was a Pharisaic pride in one's 
 
Ethics. 209 
 
 individual achievements and a contemptuous 
 disregard for the mentally and morally in- 
 firm. Its self-centeredness, its apathy toward 
 all pain or pleasure, rendered it useless as a 
 regenerator of society." 
 
 Epicurus found in pleasure the one ob- 
 vious and undeniable good. And in his 
 thought, pleasure had as its definite content 
 bodily enjoyment. ^'No conception," says 
 Epicurus, ^^of the good is possible apart 
 from physical pleasure. ' ' Metrodorus, a fol- 
 lower of Epicurus, had the temerity to say 
 that everything good had reference to the 
 stomach. 
 
 These variant views of the good, of the 
 pleasurable life, of ethical character and con- 
 duct, are the early forerunners of the modern 
 doctrine of utility. It is apparent that the 
 normal good was not comprehended by the 
 Hedonist, the Sophist, the Cynic, the Stoic, 
 or the Epicurean. 
 
 And neither is life in the sense of com- 
 pleteness interpreted by the modern utilita- 
 rian. The unchastened egoism of Aristippus 
 
 14 
 
210 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 and Epicurus finds itself iiropagated in the 
 ethical thought of Jeremy Bentham, John 
 Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Bentham 
 declared with gusto : ' ' I have accepted as my 
 guide the principle of interest, and I will fol- 
 low it wherever it may lead me. When the 
 moralist speaks of duty, every one thinks of 
 his own interest. Virtue is a skillful econo- 
 mist who serves his own interests.*' 
 
 Mr. Spencer, in his ''Data of Ethics,'' 
 declares substantially the premiership of in- 
 dividual pleasure. 
 
 John Stuart Mill in his ethical thought 
 found an ultimate in the subordination of 
 physical happiness to the refinements of the 
 mind. The utility doctrine never fails, even 
 when most luminously stated, to reveal the 
 Hedonistic rock out of which it is hewn and 
 the Epicurean hole whence it was digged. 
 5'rom its loins have sprung no virile reforms. 
 The Hedonist, the Epicurean, the Utilitarian, 
 are almost invariably ethical molluscans. 
 They have not stood, and do not stand, upon 
 their feet and challenge the corruptions of 
 
Ethics. 211 
 
 the social body. They have been willing for 
 the world to jog along at any pace which it 
 chose. The beneficient work of municipal and 
 national reform, of public education, of spir- 
 itual enlightenment it has not accelerated. 
 
 The reason is palpable: As a doctrine it 
 has assiduously disregarded the self-con- 
 scious, reflective, self-determining nature of 
 the individual. It has emphasized unceas- 
 ingly the primacy of sensuous experience, the 
 association of ideas gathered from the expe- 
 rience of the race, the parallelism of mind 
 and matter, the spiritual life admitting of 
 explanation in terms of the physical catego- 
 ries. The phenomena of chemical affinity, of 
 gravity, of conserved energy, of all quantita- 
 tive sciences, it accepts as fundamental phe- 
 nomena. The phenomena of personality and 
 the multifarious interrelationship of person- 
 ality with the visible and invisible worlds, are 
 ignored by the egoistic and utility propagan- 
 dists. Based on this logical and epistemo- 
 logical falsism, the construction of a complete 
 ethical system is beyond the possible. 
 
212 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 V. 
 
 The notion of duty separate and distinct 
 from all outer good and fortune has had its 
 champions from the beginning of ethical 
 statement to the present. 
 
 Socrates may be considered the founder 
 of this school of thought, the intuitional 
 school. He esteemed duty as basal. The 
 fundamental nature of moral insight he em- 
 phasized. But a clearly defined content in 
 his notion of the true end of life was lacking. 
 Virtue or duty, he affirmed, is the highest 
 good, and virtue or duty is intimately bound 
 up with the possession of knowledge or in- 
 sight. But what virtue or insight is good for, 
 he does not tell us. His reasoning, remarks 
 Professor Arthur Kenyon Rogers, was cir- 
 cular. He reached no ultimate. This over- 
 sight is largely characteristic of the duty 
 ethicists. 
 
 Every essay to make of good- will an end 
 in itself, to affirm formal rightness as all- 
 sufficient, has ultimated in ethical perversion. 
 It is imperative that we look beyond form to 
 
Ethics. 213 
 
 content if we would prevent the degeneration 
 of ethics into a perfectly barren doctrine of 
 good intentions. The abstract good-will is 
 an empty figment. Beyond peradventure the 
 good-will is the center of the moral life, but 
 the good-will must concrete itself. Indeed, 
 the good- will willing nothing good is a verbal 
 manipulation. The contradiction is palpable. 
 As Professor B. P. Bowne, in his ^^Princi- 
 ples of Ethics,'' puts it, ^^Duty ethics and 
 goods ethics must be combined before we 
 reach any complete moral system. Duty 
 ethics taken alone is an unlawful abstraction 
 resulting from considering the good-will 
 apart from its conditions and objects; and 
 the goods ethics taken alone is an equally un- 
 lawful abstraction resulting from considering 
 conduct apart from the living subject. The 
 good-will must aim at well-being, and well- 
 being is realized in and through the good- 
 will. '' Every expression of one's nature 
 must have the moral form, and the moral 
 form must realize itself in normal goods. 
 Duty absolutely conceived has proven its 
 
214 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 inutility in the work-a-day world. A pro- 
 fessor of deserved renown in one of our great 
 universities, when urged to assume a definite 
 position in a political situation that was not 
 wholly ideal, replied with some heat, '^No 
 man can make me choose between two evils." 
 His notion of duty was categorical. The 
 relativity of practical life he overlooked. 
 Men and women, as creatures of strength 
 and weakness, wisdom and ignorance, vir- 
 tues and vices, he ignored. His world was a 
 fictitious one. The best may not be always 
 realizable, but the better of every situation 
 is the stepping-stone to the best. And to be 
 moral a man must concrete his notion of duty 
 in every situation of life. We can not escape 
 action because a situation is not wholly ideal. 
 A casual survey of practical life stamps 
 with disapproval the man who is content with 
 formal rightness, who blindly adheres to 
 duty absolutely conceived. Kev. Dr. J. M. 
 Buckley, editor of the New York Christian 
 Advocate, tells that upon one occasion he 
 determined to refrain from casting his ballot 
 
Ethics. 215 
 
 because of the delinquencies in character of 
 the candidates presented. On the day of the 
 election he made ready to leave his home 
 for an outing. Prior to his departure a lady 
 friend asked him if he had voted. He re- 
 plied, ' ' No, ' ' and told her why. I can never 
 forget, he says, the look of disdain upon her 
 face as she remarked, ^^Well, if I was a man 
 and had the opportunity to vote, I would 
 vote for somebody or something.'' ^^It is 
 needless to say that I remained at home and 
 voted.'' 
 
 If we would be factors for the well-being 
 of the race we must be materially right as 
 well as formally right. And material right- 
 ness means duty seeking the good in every 
 situation. Ethics has a larger sphere than 
 is included in mere will and motive. Conse- 
 quences are inseparably bound up with all 
 life. The citizen who declines to assume re- 
 sponsibility in government forfeits his mem- 
 bership in the governmental body. Despite 
 his enthusiasm for the right, his hue-and-cry 
 of no compromise with evil, no leagues with 
 
216 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 death, no covenants with hell, no com- 
 munion with darkness, he is a sanguinary 
 anarchist, a destructive nihilist. If empires, 
 republics, States, municipalities, were de- 
 pendent on men of his character for their 
 perpetuity and efficiency, their day of decease 
 would be at hand. 
 
 The stickler for formal rightness is 
 usually the misanthrope, the pessimist in the 
 social commonwealth. His biliary duct is 
 overcharged. He sees but one outcome for 
 the Church and the State ; and that outcome 
 is irreparable disaster. Formal rightness 
 ringing the changes on freedom demands 
 that the right of suffrage be granted to all 
 men despite their mental and moral unfitness. 
 The material folly of such an action has been 
 superabundantly established within every 
 parallel of the American Republic. 
 
 Formal rightness, iterating and reiterat- 
 ing individual interest, is clamorous for the 
 demolition of all gigantic combinations of 
 capital. The material fatuity of such an 
 event is apparent when one completes his 
 
Ethics. 217 
 
 ethical thought. The form of Tightness is 
 possessed by the Turkish Empire, but Euro- 
 pean and American capital are loath to in- 
 vest in the Sultan's domain because of the 
 absence of material rightness. The basal 
 fact of moral experience is better expressed 
 by the notion of duty than by the notion of 
 the good, yet high ideals are vain fantasies 
 unless they realize themselves in the normal 
 pleasures and fortune of all men. 
 
 All strictures on duty categorically con- 
 ceived do not invalidate in any degree sub- 
 jective ethics. Practical life demonstrates 
 that in the nature and insight of the indi- 
 vidual man is the ideal conception, the inner 
 law. This inner law the moral subject im- 
 poses on himself. It is the condition of all 
 moral activity. It is the idea of rightness 
 and the inviolable obligations which it in- 
 cludes that lies at the foundation of all moral 
 progress. 
 
 The basic principle of the political, com- 
 mercial, educational, and religious life of 
 the race is, to use the phrase of Kant, the 
 
218 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 autonomy of the spirit. As a vigorous 
 thinker asserts, ''We reach the truly moral 
 life only when we come to the free spirit 
 giving law to itself in accordance with its 
 perceptions of right reason.'^ If man is 
 not a self-directing, conscious, rational, and 
 morally invested creature, then the rewards 
 and penalties that attach themselves to every 
 aspect of life are vicious and absurd. 
 
 David Hume, in his ^'Inquiry Concerning 
 Principles of Morals,'' wisely remarks: 
 *'Had nature made no original moral dis- 
 tinctions independently of education, distinc- 
 tions founded on the original constitution of 
 the mind, the words honorable and shameful, 
 lovely and odious, noble and despicable, had 
 never had place in any language; nor could 
 politicians, had they invented these terms, 
 have ever been able to render them intel- 
 ligible or make them convey any idea to the 
 audience.'' But it is worthy of all repetition 
 that the individual man must complete him- 
 self in the normal well-being of the social 
 unit. The outcome of moral insight realizing 
 
Ethics. 219 
 
 itself in moral conduct is a moralized hu- 
 manity, and this is the highest good possible 
 to us. 
 
 VI. 
 
 History admits of a philosophic interpre- 
 tation if life is other than a hopeless chaos. 
 The validity of legitimate thought and voli- 
 tion practical life declares despite the 
 chimerical thinking of the sensational phi- 
 losopher and the vagaries of the mechanical 
 evolutionist. And with a philosophic inter- 
 pretation to historical unfoldment the af- 
 firmation may be made that Jesus Christ in 
 character and conduct is the Ethicist whose 
 postulates and practice are without flaw or 
 foible. He considered men and women, not 
 hypothetically, but as creatures of reality. 
 He gave no place in His thought to abstrac- 
 tions. He personalized His teaching. When 
 He spoke of love, of truth, of righteousness, 
 of purity, He incarnated His speech. With 
 theory He always conjoined practice. In His 
 thought He repudiated the primacy of mat- 
 
220 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 ter. At no time did He intimate that phys- 
 ical causation was a reality in itself. The 
 subordination of matter to spirit was the 
 recurring decimal of His thinking. The 
 abiding, self -directing, conscious, thinking 
 man was fundamental in His thought. From 
 His angle of vision, man in his lowest estate 
 is not a brute, but a potential child of God. 
 In his highest estate he is not an emergence 
 from the brute, but an actual child of God. 
 According to Jesus, God is the immanent, 
 ever-active cause in all mental and moral 
 unfolding, not a blind, persistent force. 
 
 The categorical conception of duty Jesus 
 did not accept. He functionalized Himself 
 among men as citizen, artisan, friend, 
 preacher, i^hilanthropist. He was not will- 
 ing to be formally right and nothing more. 
 He completed form by giving it content. The 
 conception of the good as held by the 
 Hedonist, the Stoic, the Epicurean, the Utili- 
 tarian, He rejected. From Jesus' point of 
 view, individual well-being was inclusive of 
 social well-being. In seeking the normal 
 
Ethics. 221 
 
 good of all men, the individual found his 
 own good. In Jesus' thought, self-sacrifice 
 was the only sure way to self-realization. 
 The man must integrate himself in all men. 
 
 Jesus in His teaching and character gave 
 a value to man approached by no other 
 ethicist. He founded the finite nature in the 
 Infinite, and thus gave an inalienable sacred- 
 ness to every man. Mr. Emerson, in his ad- 
 dress to the Senior Divinity Class in Cam- 
 bridge, Massachusetts, in 1838, remarked, 
 ^^ Alone in all history Jesus Christ estimated 
 the greatness of man. He is, I think, the 
 only soul in history who has appreciated the 
 worth of a man.'' 
 
 Plato, in his devotion to formal right- 
 ness, wrote wisely concerning the just and 
 the good, but he did not consider his theories 
 incompatible with infanticide and the slay- 
 ing of the helpless and aged. Aristotle, as 
 an ethical formalist, saw in the perpetuity 
 of slavery a lasting benefaction to the race. 
 The potential worth and the high destiny of 
 
222 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 mankiDd these notable Greeks did uot cor- 
 rectly estimate. 
 
 The man whose baseness gives some coun- 
 tenance to the doctrine of anthropoidal de- 
 scent, or the man whose pseudo penitence 
 gives flesh-and-blood outline to hypocrisy, 
 may provoke our disgust, but never can we 
 despair of any man if we share in the view- 
 point of Jesus Christ. In assuming the title 
 Son of Man, Jesus declared Himself to be 
 a mental and moral unit with the potential 
 nature of all men. 
 
 Jesus posited God as the moral World- 
 Governor. Hence a moral world order 
 exists. This interpretation gives to all life 
 a moral integrity. It permits no event to be 
 chaotic. Causally and circumstantially the 
 moral universe is integral. Every causal 
 and circumstantial good thing is the heritage 
 of the worker of righteousness. Every 
 causal and circumstantial punishment is the 
 Nemesis of the evil doer. Jesus made of the 
 invisible the center of moral gravity. All 
 temporal and spatial limitation He disre- 
 
Ethics. 223 
 
 garded. The eternal world was more vivid 
 to Him than the world of time; the present 
 but the segment of an Infinite arc. 
 
 Live in obedience to Infinite wisdom, 
 goodness, purity, and God is pledged for 
 your compensation, is Jesus' word. The 
 universe is a moral integration. It is not 
 possible for the man of integrity to suffer 
 permanent loss. Conscious of this great 
 fact, Jesus lived a life of unique distinction. 
 His devotion to righteousness has never been 
 paralleled. His love for man has never been 
 approximated. In the realization of Him- 
 self through self expenditure. He was de- 
 terred by no adverse conditions. If the path 
 of duty was rugged, He chose the rugged 
 way. If persecution awaited Him in the per- 
 formance of His life mission. He brooked the 
 persecution. If the shame of the cross was 
 the finale of His allegiance to the kingdom 
 of righteousness. He endured the shame. 
 Participating in the spirit and adhering to 
 His ethical teaching, men have gladly immo- 
 lated themselves upon the altars of patriot- 
 
224 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 ism, of lioino, of truth, of human brother- 
 hood. This moral interpretation to life 
 Jesus gave. And His interpretation per- 
 sonalized in Himself has become the master 
 light of the world's seeing and its chief spir- 
 itual inspiration. 
 
Chapter VIII. 
 INNOVATION 
 
 15 
 
Our whole thought of God and man ; our entire working 
 philosophy of life; our modes of intellectual vision, types of 
 feeling, habits of will ; our instinctive, customary, rational, 
 emotional, institutional, and social existence is everywhere 
 encompassed and interpenetrated by Christ. His empire 
 over our civilization is complete in this sense, that it expands 
 only under His power, and can not define or describe itself, 
 except in terms of His teaching and character. We are here 
 under the shadow of an Infinite Name; we are living and 
 dying in the heart of an enfolding Presence. 
 
 We are compelled to acknowledge that the secret mold- 
 ing energy of our entire civilization is the mind of Christ. 
 It is out of this consciousness of the indwelling, wide-spread- 
 ing, and overruling mind of Christ that the belief comes 
 
 in His essential Deity. „ . ^^t^t^^^^t 
 
 —GEORGE A. GORDON. 
 
 It is the historical task of Christianity to assume, with 
 every succeeding age, a fresh metamorphosis, and to be for- 
 ever spiritualizing, more and more, her understanding of 
 
 ^^"^'- -AMIEL. 
 
INNOVATION. 
 
 I. 
 
 In the best sense of the word, the innova- 
 tor is the reformer, the maker of all things 
 new, the champion of wholeness, the apostle 
 of love, light, liberty. 
 
 Jesus was not the prisoner of ideas, past 
 or present. He assumed His place among 
 men as Incarnate newness. Neither His 
 thought nor His service graced the chariot- 
 wheels of the past. His doctrines and deeds 
 were ever prophetic of new and brighter 
 days. He was not eager to escape the af- 
 fronts and oppositions which intimidate 
 apologetic and timorous men. He did not 
 slip through the world as a fawning foot- 
 man, nor as an audacious interloper; but 
 with an incomparable courage He fronted 
 the sanguinary stubbornness of judicial un- 
 believers and the conceited contumacy of 
 
 227 
 
228 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 prejudicial thinkers. He was intent upon 
 cutting a straight road to things, honest, just, 
 true, pure, lovely, and of good report. For 
 the practicalizing of love, joy, peace, long- 
 suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek- 
 ness, self-control. He wrought through suc- 
 cessive days and years. 
 
 The spirit of innovation is the spirit of 
 the immanent and transcendent God, ever 
 manifesting Himself among and through 
 men. The believer and the thinker are 
 coerced by the demands of exact thought to 
 give their unqualified assent to the spirit of 
 progress. Ends, in the ultimate sense, do 
 not exist. Apparent ends are in reality new 
 beginnings. ^' Every ultimate fact is the 
 first of a new series ; every general law only 
 a particular fact of some more general law 
 presently to disclose itself,'' writes a New 
 England seer. 
 
 The vanguards on the yesterday of sci- 
 ence, reform, government, education, are the 
 rear-guards to-day. The Pauline writings 
 make large use of the figures, newness of 
 
Innovation. 229 
 
 life, renewal of the spirit of the mind, new 
 creature in Christ Jesus, putting on the new 
 man, which is renewed in knowledge after the 
 image of Him that created him. As to the 
 imperative need of spiritual newness, Jesus 
 was explicit in His colloquy with the master 
 of Israel: '^Except a man," he averred, ^^be 
 born again, (made anew), he can not see, 
 (understand), the kingdom of God." 
 
 These words are affirmative of soul prog- 
 ress: that every promise of the man within 
 has innumerable fulfillments; that in every 
 soul there is a greater possibility. Innova- 
 tion is the smnmoning of all things to judg- 
 ment. The State, the school, the Church, the 
 laws and usages of trade, the individual man, 
 are not exempt from the relentless search- 
 ings of the reform spirit. 
 
 The innovator is the champion of the 
 whole truth. He refuses to lose his balance 
 maugre the importunity of partialities and 
 prejudices. God's world is an entirety, and 
 demands integrity in our every word and 
 work. It is fatuity personified for any man 
 
230 Jesus : The 'World Teacher. 
 
 to make of himself an impediment to the 
 wholeness of tliouglitliood and tliingbood. 
 
 Spiritual well-being consists in our pious 
 attitude toward the perennial newness of life. 
 The authority of the days agone is of slight 
 avail for the day that now is. We can not 
 with impunity detach life from its universal 
 relations. The social, the integral nature of 
 all being, organic and inorganic, is every- 
 where perceptible. A spiritual voice is 
 eagerly sought by the lowest form of crea- 
 tion. The wayside rock, the stalactite, the 
 mica-flake, besought Hugh Miller and Sir 
 Roderick Murchison to become their mouth- 
 pieces among men. Mars, Venus, Saturn, 
 Jupiter, prevailed upon Sir AVilliam Herschel 
 and Sir Isaac Newton to become their ora- 
 tors. The pickerel and the halibut foimd in 
 Professor Agassiz their spiritual incarna- 
 tion, while in Audubon and James Buckham 
 the vireo, the pewee, the oriole, the blue- jay, 
 find enchanting speakers. The bush, the 
 beast, the bird, the stone, the sea, the moun- 
 tain, the mote, declare in vociferous vowels 
 
Innovation. 231 
 
 their discontent if a voice in tlieir behoof is 
 not uplifted by synthetic and syllabic man. 
 Gravity, chemical cohesion, organic and in- 
 organic speechlessness can not content them. 
 The sciences of botany, ichthyology, physics, 
 geology, chemistry, astronomy, are insub- 
 stantial dreams save as they publish them- 
 selves in the person of thinkers and doers. 
 The wholeness of life is the overwhelming 
 fact. And the innovator is its apostle. 
 
 Ultra conservation is a pause on the last 
 moment. It emphasizes limitation. It gives 
 undue prominence to circumstance. It is a 
 practical unbeliever in the infinitude of 
 God's universe. It is always an apologist, 
 never a polemic. The innovator contem- 
 plates all life as a spiritual affiliation. The 
 inferior forms of life re-exist and reappear 
 in the finer world of spirit, and fill the world 
 with their fame. This re-existence and reap- 
 pearance we designate as merchant, me- 
 chanic, poet, philosopher, farmer, inventor, 
 scientist, and every other conceivable form of 
 mental activity. 
 
232 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 The analyst and the experimenter find 
 themselves baffled in their essays to establish 
 boundary lines between the man and his 
 method, between spirit and its projection. 
 
 The innovator has for his goal, not a 
 special but an infinite benefit. He sees in all 
 particular and personal ends a body of death. 
 He sees in all general and social ends life 
 for evermore. He avows with ceaseless repe- 
 tition the immensity and eternity of the 
 mental and moral universe in which we find 
 ourselves. To seek to arrest and fixate any 
 form of thought or action that has for its 
 objective a universal legitimacy, is to sin 
 against the Holy Ghost. Such a misdoing is 
 an impeachment of God's will concerning us. 
 It is the apotheosis of ourselves. It is a 
 contumacious attempt to destroy the cosmic 
 beauty and beneficence of our Father's world. 
 
 The history of the soul in its best estate 
 is found in its fullness of reception and ex- 
 pression. The reform spirit has all worlds 
 for its arena. What for verbal convenience 
 we term knowledge, virtue, power, are the 
 
Innovation. 233 
 
 f orthgoings of the reform spirit against igno- 
 rance, necessity, and weakness. It is the 
 man seizing the opportunity for world con- 
 ciuest. Souls of such temper have never 
 failed to ultimately command the admiration 
 and gratitude of their fellows. They are its 
 saviors from sin, its redeemers from spiritual 
 insolvency, its benefactors in the midst of 
 clamant need. 
 
 II. 
 
 Jesus, in His interpretation of spirit, of 
 its activity and interrelatedness, is the true 
 innovator, the sane reformer, the apostle of 
 love, light, and liberty. He announced Him- 
 self as the Truth in the presence of twelve 
 men who, in many respects, were spiritual 
 dullards, obtuse moralists. The announce- 
 ment elicited from them no enthusiastic re- 
 sponse. The centuries and millennia, how- 
 ever, have borne silent and vocal attestation 
 to the verity of His claim. 
 
 As Incarnate Truth, Jesus introduced an 
 innovation both in the speculative and prac- 
 
234 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 tical world in His concept of God. He gave 
 to this concept, through His own character 
 and conduct, an inviolable completeness. He 
 invested it with a moral and spiritual inte- 
 gration which is at once ideal and practical. 
 He made it impossible, through His word and 
 work, for any theistic, metaphysical, or 
 ethical postulate to save itself from irrecov- 
 erable collapse, only as it is in agreement 
 with His teaching and life. Jesus affirmed: 
 God is a Spirit, unitary, abiding, self-deter- 
 mining, universal, intelligent, ethical. In 
 conflict with His word and work all sensuous 
 conception of Deity is utterly frustrated. 
 
 The mythologies of Greece and Rome and 
 the sensualities of heathen religions find 
 themselves vehemently outlawed by the spir- 
 itual conception of Jesus. And this outlawr)^ 
 has been extended to every system of thought 
 and every i^liase of conduct that gives prece- 
 dence to matter and impersonalism. Legiti- 
 mate thought, finding its vantage-ground in 
 the concept of Jesus, disallows the question- 
 begging of John Locke, August Comte, Her- 
 
Innovation. 235 
 
 bert Spencer, Ernest Haeckel, Democritus, 
 Tliales, or Heraciitus. 
 
 Water, fire, atoms gross and refined, 
 primitive fire-mist, sensations vivid and 
 faint, are of the earth, earthy, and mnst go 
 the way of all the earth. God as a Spirit is 
 the supreme causality behind all phenomena. 
 He is the basal reality, the world-ground. 
 Between finite consciousness and all organ- 
 ized life, sense faculties are not able to medi- 
 ate. Between man, the finite knower, and the 
 world as a system of objective existence, a 
 bond of connection in the realm of the sensu- 
 ous does not exist. Professor Tyndall once 
 remarked that it was easier for a man to lift 
 himself by his own waistband than for him to 
 prove any causal relation between his organ- 
 ized life and his consciousness. But when we 
 accept Jesus' notion of God our difficulties 
 vanish. Between man the finite knower and 
 the world without, God, the ever-present, 
 ever-working Spirit, effects a continuous con- 
 nection. 
 
236 Jesus ; The World Teacher. 
 
 III. 
 
 God as the ever-efficient cause in all life 
 Jesus explicitly taught. '*My Father work- 
 elh hitherto, and I work;'' ''The Father tliat 
 dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works;'' ''God 
 is not the God of the dead, but of the living;" 
 "I must work the works of Him that sent 
 Me," are a few of His many utterances de- 
 clarative of the immanent, operative God. 
 Deistic theses find no warrant in Jesus ' words 
 nor in His work. Impersonalism is likewise 
 repudiated by Him. 
 
 The bruited warfare between science and 
 religion finds no acknowledgment in Jesus' 
 teaching. As causal explanation, science is 
 without standing. As classification, as co- 
 ordination according to rule, as a descriptive 
 order of procedure, science is of great value. 
 Any study of Jesus' words and of His ac- 
 tivity that goes beyond the superficial, easily 
 discerns the above distinction. 
 
 The visible, audible, tangible world as its 
 own fashioner Jesus ceaselessly denied. The 
 visible, audible, tangible world as the expres- 
 
Innovation. 237 
 
 sion of Infinite Wisdom and Will Jesus cease- 
 lessly affirmed. Legitimate thought to-day- 
 roots itself in the teaching of Jesus. It de- 
 clares the validity of science in the realm of 
 the phenomenal. It declares the invalidity of 
 science in the realm of the metaphysical. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Jesus, in His announcement of the Father- 
 hood of God, made anew the thoughts of men 
 concerning the Infinite. No prophet, poet, or 
 philosopher had conceived of God in such fa- 
 miliar terms. For Moses, He was the Judge 
 of all the earth; for Nehemiah, He was the 
 God of Heaven ; for Isaiah, He was the Holy 
 One of Israel; for Plato, He was Pure 
 Reason; for Aristotle, He was Impassive 
 Will; while to other of the Greek philoso- 
 phers. His nature was nebulous and non- 
 ethical. 
 
 The qualities that inhere in Fatherhood 
 were not apposite, in their thinking, to the 
 Infinite Personality. Jesus stands separate 
 and alone in His appreciation of the ethical 
 
238 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 nature of God. God, the Creator of the ends 
 of the earth, the Preserver of all jflesh, the 
 Lord of Hosts, the King of kings, according 
 to Jesus, finds His highest function in the 
 office of Father. 
 
 ^* Whenever a true theory appears, it will 
 be its own evidence. Its test is that it will 
 explain all phenomena, ' ' remarks a discrimi- 
 nating writer. Jesus' teaching as to God is 
 explanatory of all phenomena. God is the 
 primal and ever-operative Cause. He is a 
 Spirit, and therefore omnipresent. He is the 
 Father of spirits, the God of all comfort. 
 His solicitude in behalf of sinning, striving, 
 suffering humankind is so minute, says Jesus, 
 that He reckons the hairs of our head. 
 
 Beyond peradventure, Jesus' concept of 
 God, incarnated as it was in Himself, has es- 
 tablished, strengthened, settled philosophic 
 and practical thought. No thought system 
 has to-day any repute that is worthy of men- 
 tion exclusive of the view-point of Jesus. 
 Positivism and Causal Evolutionism made 
 bold essays to eliminate Jesus' conception of 
 
Innovation. 239 
 
 God from the province of valid thinking. But 
 their philosophic mischief has returned upon 
 their own heads, and their violent dealing has 
 come down upon their own philosophic pates. 
 '^The Unknowable," '^ Persistent Force," 
 ^^ Deified Humanity," ^ ' Impersonalism, " 
 i i Priniitive Fire-Mist, ' ' are the merriment of 
 sane thought. So true is Jesus' doctrine con- 
 cerning God, to the mental and moral expe- 
 rience of humankind, that in this year of 
 grace no labored argument is needful to give 
 it permanence and power. The aspiration 
 of spirit, -the oppressive sense of sin, the un- 
 speakable soul-hunger, the love of man latent 
 and patent for the pure and the good, the 
 outreaching of the helpless hand for Infinite 
 help, the cry of the child for father-love, are 
 phenomena that find no complete answer in 
 Moses' Judge of all the earth, in Nehemiah's 
 God of Heaven, in Isaiah's Holy One of 
 Israel, in Plato's Pure Reason, in Aristotle's 
 Impassive Will, in Herbert Spencer's *^ Per- 
 sistent Force," or in August Comte's ^^ Dei- 
 fied Humanity." But Jesus' interpretation 
 
240 Jesus : The "World Teacher. 
 
 of God is integral. All that the mind of man 
 can fashion as queiy, and all that the heart 
 of man can yearn for, is not only answered, 
 but also transcended, in Jesus' conception of 
 God, our ever-living, ever-working, ever-lov- 
 ing Father. 
 
 Professor James, in his ^ ' The Will to Be- 
 lieve," inquires, ^'What are the essential fea- 
 tures of Theism?" His answer is a re- 
 affirmation of Jesus' word. ^' First, it is es- 
 sential that God be conceived as the deepest 
 Power in the universe ; and second, He must 
 be conceived under the form of a mental per- 
 sonality. The Personality need not be de- 
 termined intrinsically any further than is in- 
 volved in the holding of certain things dear 
 and in the recognition of our dispositions 
 toward those things, the things themselves 
 being all good and righteous things. But 
 extrinsically considered, so to speak, God's 
 Personality is to be regarded, like any other 
 personality, as something lying outside of my 
 own and other than me, and whose existence 
 I simply come upon and find. A power not 
 
Innovation. 241 
 
 ourselves then, which not only makes for 
 righteousness, but means it, and which recog- 
 nizes us— such is the definition which I think 
 nobody will be inclined to dispute. Various 
 are the attempts to shadow forth the other 
 lineaments of so supreme a Personality to 
 our human imagination ; various the ways of 
 conceiving in what mode the recognition, the 
 hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are 
 gross and idolatrous ; some are the most sus- 
 tained efforts man's intellect has ever made 
 to keep still living on that subtle edge of 
 things where thought and speech expire. But 
 with all these differences, the essence re- 
 mains unchanged. In whatever other re- 
 spects the Divine Personality may differ 
 from ours or may resemble it, the two are 
 consanguineous at least in this— that both 
 have purposes for which they care, and each 
 can hear the other's call.'' 
 
 When brought into antagonism with the 
 completeness of Jesus' thought, Neo-Platon- 
 ism, Eclecticism, Scholasticism, Empiricism, 
 Encyclopedism, Causal Evolutionism, find 
 
 16 
 
242 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 themselves dissolved as in a resistless men- 
 struum. Philosophic vagaries are easily dis- 
 covered when brought into the light of Ilis 
 thinking. No mental output dealing with 
 thoughthood or thinghood is anything more 
 than a phantasmagoric passage save as it is 
 the iterance of Jesus' doctrine. 
 
 All theologies, whether from Augustine, 
 Origen, Luther, Wesley, Calvin, or Paul, in 
 comparison with the words of Jesus, are 
 swept away as by a flood. He is the final 
 arbiter of all truth, for He is Himself the 
 Truth. 
 
 Jesus is the true innovator in His con- 
 ception of man. Emerson's apostrophe, in 
 his * ^ Method of Nature, ' ' is genetically at one 
 with Jesus' appreciation: ^^0 rich and va- 
 rious Man! thou palace of sight and sound, 
 carrying in thy senses the morning and the 
 night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy 
 brain the geometry of the city of God ; in thy 
 heart the bower of love and the realms of 
 right and wrong!" 
 
 The virtues that glitter for commenda- 
 
Innovation. 243 
 
 tion Jesus left for the superficial observer. 
 As the Teacher of teachers, as the Practical- 
 izer of ideals, we can not picture Jesus find- 
 ing satiety for His mind and heart save as 
 He pierced the deep solitude of absolute 
 ability and worth. What self-aggrandize- 
 ment accepted as a criterion of value He re- 
 nounced. It is not a herculean labor to se- 
 cure the praise of the self-seeker, nor is it 
 arduous to satisfy the sensuous enthusiast. 
 Jesus was a student of the beautiful and 
 beneficent indices of rectitude. The pulsa- 
 tions of virtue alone engrossed Him. And 
 these pulsations He discovered while His con- 
 temporaries walked in darkness. ^^Why eat- 
 eth your Master with publicans and sin- 
 ners!" queried the superficial ethicists of 
 Jesus' day. The only conceivable answer to 
 such an interrogation is: The candid soul, 
 despite its criminality, is potentially a new- 
 born bard of the Holy Ghost, the kingdom 
 of righteousness in embryo, the child and co- 
 worker in latency of God, the infinitely wise, 
 powerful, and good. 
 
244 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 To an eariy missionary in India a skep- 
 tical observer remarked: *^You surely do 
 not expect to convert these idolatrous hordes 
 to the religion of Jesus Christ. It is my 
 opinion that your undertaking would be 
 easier of accomplishment if you attempted to 
 transmute one of these blocks of stone into 
 a breathing, thinking embodiment of the 
 Christian religion.'' This judgment is of a 
 kind with the age-long doubt of the possible 
 in man. 
 
 The man of progress, of newness, never 
 sees the same object twice. With his own 
 enlargement, the object acquires new aspects. 
 We nullify our judgment if we insist that the 
 actual man is identical with the potential 
 man. Such an insistence is the invariable an- 
 nouncement of our non-growth, and non- 
 growth is the synonym of death. When Jesus 
 said to Matthew, ^'Come, follow Me,'' he was 
 not fixated in the Master's thought as a 
 public plunderer, but as a potential upbuilder 
 of the kingdom of God. Nor did Simon 
 Peter, James, and John find themselves ar- 
 
Innovation. 245 
 
 rested in Jesus' thinking as Galilean fisher- 
 men. In them He rather saw the surging 
 tides of life under the control of the Infinite 
 Spirit enriching all peoples of the earth. In 
 the dust of the actual He always saw the 
 pearl of the possible. And this appraisement 
 of man is the only conceivable indemnification 
 which the lover and worker of good finds in 
 the midst of unspeakable moral perversities. 
 Jesus' conception of man is startlingly 
 new. It is for us to-day a series of surprises. 
 Again and again we find ourselves severely 
 taxed in our efforts to adjust individual 
 and social life to the Master's ever-advancing 
 view. It was a dictum of Aristotle that no 
 man could practice virtue who lived the life 
 of a laborer. The potential in man was not 
 vivid to the mind of the great Peripatetic. 
 
 VI. 
 
 As regards the relatedness of the individ- 
 ual man to God, Jesus allowed no oppor- 
 tunity to escape to declare man's utter in- 
 sufficiency in himself. *^In God all things 
 
246 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 [man included] live, move, and have their be- 
 ing.'^ Of Himself as the son of Joseph, as 
 a man among men. He averred, ^^The words 
 that I speak nnto you I speak not of Myself: 
 but the Father that dwell eth in Me, He doeth 
 the works;'' ''The Son can do nothing of 
 Himself. ' ' 
 
 According to Jesus, God is the World- 
 Ground, the Basal Reality, the Father of 
 Spirits, the Savior of men. Ethically, no less 
 than metaphysically, God is the Supreme Will 
 among men. All life is founded in Him, and 
 all life is transcended by Him. No man is 
 physically self-sufiicient. His bread can not 
 be accounted for inductively. Something 
 more is involved than the loaf, the mill, the 
 field, the baker, the miller, the farmer. These 
 are but modes of operation which in them- 
 selves are nothing. 
 
 ** Back of the loaf is the snowy flour, 
 Back of the flour the mill ; 
 Back of the mill is the wheat and the shower, 
 And the sun, and the Father's will." 
 
 Legitimate thought never wearies of as- 
 serting ''the Father's will" as the ground 
 
Innovation. 247 
 
 of the existence of sun, shower, wheat, mill, 
 flour, and loaf. 
 
 Similarly is the moral and spiritual na- 
 ture of man conditioned. The immanent and 
 transcendent God is demanded by exact 
 thought in the ethical and spiritual life as 
 truly as in the metaphysical realm. Hence 
 the word of Jesus, ^^ Except a man be born of 
 the Spirit [find a continual renewal of him- 
 self in God], he can not enter into the king- 
 dom of God,'' is exact thinking. Excluded 
 man is from the upper ranges of life save 
 as he finds in God his continuous being. 
 
 The doctrine of conversion thus com- 
 mands our assent, not on the ground pri- 
 marily of an isolated individual experience, 
 but on the ground of all life finding its exist- 
 ence in and through God. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Jesus gave to social membership a new 
 meaning. He first promulgated the doctrine 
 that chieftaincy in life lay not through 
 Sybaritism, but through sacrificial service; 
 
248 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 not through political preferment, nor per- 
 sonal privilege, but tlirough the propagation 
 of ourselves for the common weal. Of Him- 
 self He avowed, ^^The Son of Man came not 
 to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
 give His life a ransom for many.'^ In Chris- 
 tian discipleship is exemplified the paradox 
 of the highest self-realization issuing from 
 the most complete self-renunciation. 
 
 Aristippus, Antisthenes, Epicurus, Zeno, 
 did not discern this great truth ; nor is it dis- 
 cerned to-day by any of the ethical disciples 
 of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Her- 
 bert Spencer. In announcing this doctrine, 
 Jesus did nothing more than complete His 
 thought. In Him there was an evident spirit 
 of revolt against all incompleteness. Self- 
 finding through self-abnegation is no new 
 doctrine metaphysically. The seed comes to 
 itself in the luscious fruit and golden grain. 
 The path which it treads is marked at every 
 step by self-sacrifice. The stone of the moun- 
 tain surrenders itself for the enrichment of 
 the valley below and thus enters a higher 
 
Innovation. 249 
 
 range of being. The ray of light buries itself 
 in the dull earth for a season, and then re- 
 appears in the beauty and fragrance of the 
 violet and the lily. The merchant feeds fat 
 his love of gain, not by self-indulgence, but 
 by physical and mental disbursement. The 
 student opens the door of knowledge, not 
 through nonchalance, but by strenuous ex- 
 penditure of himself. The child reaches a 
 wise and effective maturity through the sub- 
 servience of its will to the parental will. 
 This is the order of life. And yet ethical 
 theory, exclusive of the doctrine of Jesus, has 
 always oscillated between a useless abstrac- 
 tion and a sensual indulgence. Apply, said 
 Jesus, the principle of all life to your mem- 
 bership in societ}^ In so doing you will find 
 local loss reappearing as universal gain; you 
 will find individuality reappearing as catho- 
 licity ; you will find the partial man reappear- 
 ing as the whole man. Gradually, but with 
 certainty, humankind is coming to that angle 
 of vision where the exceeding practicalness 
 
250 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 and profit of Jesus' doctrine is fully- 
 esteemed. 
 
 The social body is perpetuated through 
 individual subordination. And the individual 
 perpetuates himself through his re-existence 
 in the social body. The self-denials of life 
 thus prove themselves ultimately to be the 
 real utilties of life. In the final analysis the 
 common good and the individual good are in 
 perfect coincidence. In giving to society 
 the ideal of sacrificial service, Jesus saved 
 it from an impending death. Social decease 
 is inevitable if each for all, and all for each, 
 is not the regnant spirit. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Jesus announced Himself as the Light of 
 the world, as Incarnate Love, as the Spiritual 
 Liberator of the race. His assuring words 
 are: ''He that followeth Me shall not walk 
 in darkness, but shall have the light of life; 
 as the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved 
 you ; continue ye in My love ; if the Son shall 
 make you free, ye shall be free indeed.'' 
 
Innovation. 251 
 
 These words made flesh in the Son of God 
 have given newness to individual and col- 
 lective life. The hour of mental and moral 
 darkness for the myriad millions of human- 
 kind has been banished to the perpetual 
 gloom of Pluto's underworld. Jesus, as the 
 Light of the world, shed a luster hitherto 
 unseen on the Greek Demos, the Roman pro- 
 letariat, the Jewish commonalty. And these 
 common folk of the first Christian century 
 are the prototype of the common folk in all 
 days and within all parallels. 
 
 With the Incarnation the social body for 
 the first time in human history began an un- 
 deviating x)rogress toward abiding unity and 
 co-operative service. After the advent of 
 Jesus the respect for persons which had 
 characterized all pre-Christian civilizations 
 found itself under a withering reproach. 
 Jesus championed man without regard for 
 place, property, or power. He did not give 
 countenance to the artificial distinctions with 
 which the Greek aristocrat, the Roman pa- 
 trician, and the Jewish exclusionist had in- 
 
252 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 vested themselves. It was character, not 
 chattels, which elicited His esteem. It was 
 the image and likeness of God for wliich He 
 searched among all men, and not the tinsel 
 and wrappage of wealth or preferment. 
 
 No pages of history are so criminally in- 
 carnadined with the blood of men as those 
 of the first Christian century. In Rome, dur- 
 ing the days which proximately and actually 
 marked the ministry of Jesus, the gladiato- 
 rial combats between captives and slaves 
 were the favorite amusement for the patri- 
 cian class. For these pseudo leaders of the 
 social commonwealth purple currents gushing 
 from the founts of human life afforded inex- 
 pressible delectation. 
 
 In the year 48 A. D., during the reign of 
 Claudius Caesar, the passion of the populace 
 for gory scenes was so great that the em- 
 peror gratified them with a sea-fight in which 
 the fleets, manned by nineteen thousand 
 gladiators, engaged in actual conflict. 
 
 The Emperor Caligula had an unappeas- 
 able hunger and insatiable thirst for human 
 
Innovation. 253 
 
 blood. The old and the infirm were thrown 
 to his wild beasts. At his meals he had per- 
 sons racked before him that he might enjoy 
 their groans. In one of his passionate out- 
 bursts he exclaimed, '^ Would that the people 
 of Rome had a single neck, that I might dis- 
 l^atch them at a blow!'' 
 
 But with the birth of new decades, the 
 evaluation placed upon man as man by the 
 Son of God became the possession of the 
 wielders of imperial authority. Flavins, 
 Vespasian, Titus, Trajan, Hadrian, Pius An- 
 toninus, and Marcus Aurelius approximated 
 measurably Jesus' doctrine as to the value of 
 man in their guidance of the Empire. 
 
 These wearers of the purple do not com- 
 plete our present-day conception of the Chris- 
 tian sovereign, but that they were govern- 
 mental benefactors rather than malefactors 
 in their day, impartial critics must admit. As 
 the Light of the world, Jesus illumined their 
 moral nature. It was not possible for the 
 exceeding brightness of the Son of God to 
 be concealed. The value of captives, slaves, 
 
254 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 and every man classified as plebeian and as 
 barbarian, dawned upon the minds and hearts 
 of political, commercial, and social posses- 
 sors of power. The common good, rather 
 than individual indulgence, became the all- 
 consuming passion. The world came into the 
 holding of a new objective. 
 
 The democracy, the proletariat, the com- 
 monalty, in the light of all historj^, can not 
 do otherwise than acknowledge with pro- 
 foundest gratitude their indebtedness to 
 Jesus Christ. As Incarnate Love, Jesus de- 
 molished the hoary antipathies which nations 
 and races had harbored against each other. 
 The Jew found felicity in designating all 
 Gentiles as dogs. The Gentiles cordially re- 
 ciprocated the repugnance. 
 
 Not many decades since, a rancorous an- 
 tagonism was felt by the European toward 
 the Asiatic, and the Asiatic in unmistakable 
 vocables made known his animosity toward 
 the European. But into a fraternity Jesus is 
 rapidly bringing all men. The brotherhood 
 of the race is not an empty figment. It is in 
 
Innovation. 255 
 
 perfect agreement with the purpose of the 
 ages. Individual animosities simply can not 
 exist when Jesus Christ has a dwelling-place 
 in the individual heart. And the individual 
 is the miniature paraphrase of humankind. 
 Liberation of soul is the work of Jesus in 
 individual and social life. He it is who has 
 opened the doors of the prison, who has 
 brought deliverance to the captives, and 
 made all responsive souls free through the 
 power of an endless life. Time and sense 
 are no longer the incarcerators of the soul, 
 and space is no longer its jail-yard. Freedom 
 from the grossness of sensual passion, free- 
 dom from the siren allurements of the world, 
 freedom from the fatal grip of moral weak- 
 ness, are a few of the manifold blessings 
 which Jesus has brought to humankind. 
 
 He who believes in Jesus Christ shifts 
 through His belief the center of moral 
 gravity. His thoughts find in God their be- 
 ing. His will is subordinated to the Divine 
 will. His affections are fixed on things above, 
 not on things below. He is a new man. His 
 
256 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 citizenship is in the heavenlies. In God he 
 lives, he moves, he has his being. 
 
 As the introducer of newness of thought, 
 newness of will, newness of affection, Jesus 
 stands alone. He is unique. In Him we find 
 righteousness, in Him we find wisdom, in 
 Him we find sanctification, in Him we find 
 redemption. He alone is the power of God. 
 He alone is the wisdom of God. He is the 
 true Innovator, the true Reformer, and all 
 worthy newness, and all permanent reform, 
 find their genesis and perpetuity in and 
 through His spirit. 
 
Chapter IX. 
 MODERNNESS, 
 
 17 
 
Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever. 
 —PAUL. 
 
 ** If Jesus Christ is a man, 
 And only a man, I say 
 That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
 And to Him will I cleave alway. 
 
 " If Jesus Christ is a God, 
 
 And the only God, I swear 
 I will follow Him through heaven and hell. 
 The earth, the sea, and the air!" 
 
 —RICHARD WATSON GILDER. 
 
MODEENNESS. 
 
 I. 
 
 The present-day reality of Jesus Christ 
 is the most commandiiig of all facts. It were 
 easier for us to escape from our shadow 
 than to escape His perpetual presence. He 
 is indeed transcendently more to the world 
 to-day than in any aforetime period. He con- 
 tinuously convinces us of His superiority to 
 time and place. 
 
 As Jesus of Nazareth He entered into his- 
 tory, as did Alexander, Ambrose, Pindar, 
 Erasmus. As God manifest in the flesh, as 
 the brightness of the Father's glory, as the 
 Power and the Wisdom of God, as the Savior 
 of all men. He has been, and is, believed on, 
 loved, and obeyed. 
 
 This consummation in itself makes impos- 
 sible all moral evasiveness. The dominant 
 question in every candid soul who lives to-day 
 is: *^Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" 
 
260 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 Our individual attitude toward Jesus Christ 
 brooks less of indifferentism than does any 
 law which operates in the material and 
 mental spheres of being. 
 
 As a transcendent personality, Jesus pos- 
 sesses more of ethical and spiritual reality 
 than of historic actuality. Historically, He 
 is a Jewish peasant, the brother of James 
 and Joses, a prophet in succession to David, 
 Moses, Malachi, Ezekiel, appearing under the 
 limitations of space, time, and racial homo- 
 geneity. Ethically and spiritually, however. 
 He is inexpressibly greater. He stands for 
 the whole order of legitimate thought, for the 
 sane comprehension of the universe, for the 
 interpretation of God and man in their mu- 
 tual relatedness. Logical formulae and cir- 
 cumscribed literary criticism are not, there- 
 fore, capable of giving form and content to 
 Jesus. He exceeds immeasurably their 
 province. The facts of history and the ulti- 
 mate mysteries of being alone give to us an 
 approximate interpretation of His person- 
 ality. 
 
MODERNNESS. 261 
 
 Jesus as the Eternal Reason made flesh 
 has created through His thought and life a 
 religion which absorbs the noblest elements 
 of all the past, and is the most potent factor 
 in the moral and intellectual progress of the 
 world. He can not from any angle of vision 
 be classified as a particular individual. He 
 stands apart from Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 Plato, Socrates, Confucius, Mohammed, 
 Buddha. He is organically related to the 
 whole system of thought and experience. 
 Born in the Orient, of Oriental blood, bath- 
 ing in its languid sunshine, nestling in the 
 arms of its soft ether, holding converse with 
 the traditions of His own people. He is also 
 an Occidental of the Occidentals. To the 
 highest selfhood of Melanchthon the Teuton, 
 of John Knox the Scot, of John Marshall the 
 Anglo-Saxon, of Pocahontas the American 
 Indian, He was bound by every affiliation of 
 soul. The beauty and the utility of all 
 spheres of life find in Him an inspiration, 
 never a retardation. Indeed, what of govern- 
 ment, commerce, art, invention, reform, edu- 
 
262 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 cation, religion that is granitic in quality and 
 beneficial in operation, is the outflow of 
 Jesus ' nature. He is the soul of modernness. 
 All conception and all action that have in 
 them coherency find in Him their inception. 
 
 In relation to all post-Christian history 
 Jesus stands as does the idea of God toward 
 all nature. Legitimate metaphysics conceives 
 of God as the moving factor in the natural 
 order. Legitimate ethics conceives of Jesus 
 as the primal factor in the moral order. The 
 Son of God can not be thought of as a unit. 
 He is the whole. He can not be thought of as 
 an individual. He is the human race. He is 
 not a moral microcosm. He is the moral 
 macrocosm. 
 
 Wisdom, therefore, dictates that we ad- 
 just ourselves to the word and work of Jesus. 
 He is less inescapable than are the laws that 
 underlie all physical life. To treat lightly 
 the significance of personality as involved in 
 and evolved from Him is to degrade ourselves 
 and to provoke the Divine disfavor. Our life 
 in harmony with the laws of physical gravity, 
 
MODERNNESS. 263 
 
 chemical cohesion, attraction, repulsion, is 
 personality expressed in material terms. In 
 this harmony there is a temporal good. It is 
 a good under limitation. It is of the earth, 
 earthy. Life in harmony with the laws of 
 love, of truth, of righteousness, as personal- 
 ized in Jesus Christ, is personality expressed 
 in ethical and spiritual terms. 
 
 In this harmony there is an eternal good. 
 It admits of no circumscription. It is of the 
 heavens, heavenly. Belief in the Son of God 
 is an adjustment of ourselves to all law as 
 personalized in Him. 
 
 II. 
 
 Our notion of God, if possessed of valid- 
 ity, must be in strict coincidence with that of 
 Jesus. Prior to the Incarnation, gods were 
 as numerous as men. Among the cultivated 
 Greeks and worldly-wise Eomans, dreams 
 had more meaning than either observation or 
 experience. The sons of Abraham had be- 
 come Deistic in their conceptions of God. In- 
 terferences with the natural order they 
 
264 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 ascribed to God. The ceaseless ongoings of 
 all physical life they did not ascribe to God. 
 To nature under normal conditions they gave 
 a self-sufficiency. God was only to be ob- 
 served in the extraordinary, the astounding, 
 the apparently anarchic. A false naturalism 
 as a terrifying incubus had fastened itself 
 upon their thought. We are not, therefore, 
 surprised that the Jewish populace found 
 mental satiety only in the miracle working 
 of Jesus. 
 
 Jesus, however, stamped the extraordi- 
 nary with a secondary value. God working 
 always and everywhere was His primary em- 
 phasis. For Him all life was supernatural 
 in the sense of causality. No fact is more pa- 
 tent, both in speculation and experiment, than 
 that thought perishes save as we accept 
 Jesus' view-point. Nature as an independent, 
 self-directing order, no man knows. Nature 
 as the embodied order of Infinite Wisdom and 
 Will, as a system in which ordinary manifes- 
 tations may be, and are, set aside when higher 
 ends are involved, we do know. Jesus gave 
 
MODERNNESS. 265 
 
 no priority to sensuous phenomena. He gave 
 priority always to free and conscious intelli- 
 gence, and this intelligence, in the sense of 
 universal efficiency, he denominated, God. 
 
 Hume's famous thesis to the effect that 
 miracles are imjDossible because of the im- 
 plied violation of natural law, and are incred- 
 ible because of their contradiction of human 
 experience, can not withstand the warfare 
 waged by the metaphysics which find their 
 genetic being in the mind and ministry of the 
 Son of God. Natural law per se is ''a false 
 creation, proceeding from a heat-oppressed 
 brain,'' while human experience tis related to 
 the lower economies of life is an unceasing 
 miracle. Thought can find no place for 
 standing if nature is self -running, sel-f -equal, 
 self-sufficient. The automatic, passive regis- 
 tration theory of mind to which Hume clung 
 tenaciously, collapses when brought into the 
 complexities of every-day life. How it is pos- 
 sible for the human mind to convert crude 
 iron into watch-springs, electric energy into 
 arc-lights, dull earth into master paintings, 
 
266 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 the entrails of a sheep into the melodious 
 violin, is quite beyond us, only as we posit 
 the superiority of mind to matter ? 
 
 In His stress of moral values Jesus gave 
 to the ideal order of life an abiding and prac- 
 tical worth. The doctrine of Divine imma- 
 nence which does not distinguish between the 
 Infinite manifestation in the rock stratum, 
 the globule of water, in the pinion of the bird 
 and the Infinite manifestation in the human 
 soul, is fatuous and unworthy of our mental 
 entertainment. 
 
 The Divine wisdom and will are apparent 
 in every moss, cobweb, crystalline dewdrop, 
 in the tawny coat of the wood-thrush, in the 
 mastodonic bulk of the elephant, in the iris- 
 hued beauty of the orchid. But moral dis- 
 tinctions are absent in these forms of life, 
 and it is moral distinction only which gives 
 to the ideal an abiding and practical evalua- 
 tion. 
 
 Idealism is the begetting of a vain fantasy 
 if alienated from the moral sphere of life. 
 Too much of credence has been given to ideal 
 
MODERNNESS. 267 
 
 conceptions that had no ethical quality within 
 them. Buddhism, Mohammedanism, The- 
 osophy. Christian Science, Pantheism, Deism, 
 Encyclopedism, come within the category of 
 fantastic idealism. 
 
 Deism and kindred conceptions invest 
 necessity with rulership. According to this 
 conception, John Adams and Patrick Henry, 
 as leading actors in the American Revolution, 
 were moved by the same fixedness of law that 
 whirls the cloud of dust in a tornado and 
 tosses the particles of water in a tempest. 
 
 The mechanism of the universe is so in- 
 flexible that no appreciable ethical difference 
 exists between the man who casts himself 
 from an Alpine height and the man who is 
 hurled to the rocks below by another. In the 
 one instance the impulse comes from within, 
 and in the other from without. But whether 
 from within or from without, it is necessity, 
 and therefore no moral distinction is at 
 issue. 
 
 Christian Science, Pantheism, and similar 
 modes of conceiving the universe and its spir- 
 
268 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 itual relatedness, are outright denials of 
 personality, both finite and Infinite. God is 
 regarded as a world-substance rather than 
 a first and ever-present Cause. He is one 
 with beasts, with birds, with stones, with 
 clay. All things are part and parcel of God. 
 Sharers they are in the Infinite world-sub- 
 stance. Man, in conjunction with machines 
 and with mud, participates in this Infinite 
 stuff. All finite ignorance, weakness, sin, and 
 brutishness are removed from the sphere of 
 responsibility since they are modes of the 
 Divine manifestation. These fantasies make 
 of the Divine government and of human gov- 
 ernment unspeakable travesties. When what 
 we are pleased to term wrong-doing occurs 
 among men the only consistency possible 
 for us, if these vagaries are operative, is to 
 accept the wrong-doing as the method chosen 
 by the Infinite world-substance for its mani- 
 festation. 
 
 Christian Science vociferously denies any 
 consanguinity whatsoever between itself and 
 the gross atomism of Democritus, but all 
 
MODERNNESS. 269 
 
 thought that demands a finality readily dis- 
 cerns a common parentage. Jesus never 
 blundered in such a fashion. He made all 
 life in its intent moral. He declared that 
 God, the Infinite Thinker and Doer, the 
 Everlasting Father, was the most deeply 
 obligated personality of the universe; that, 
 transcending the metaphysical aspect of life. 
 He was intent upon making, through His all- 
 sufficient grace and never-failing love, every 
 son and daughter of humankind the reflectors 
 of His holiness and the executors of His 
 benevolent will. And man, the finite per- 
 sonality, He declared must rightly appraise 
 the Divine purpose and work in enthusiastic 
 co-operation with God. 
 
 The good man, Jesus never confounded 
 with the criminal. Between Zaccheus the 
 philanthropist and Zaccheus the public plun- 
 derer He saw a great gulf fixed. As God in- 
 carnate He set Himself for the doing of good. 
 As God incarnate He set Himself for the 
 overthrow of evil. Eewards causal and cir- 
 cumstantial, He averred, were the heritage 
 
270 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 ordained before the foundation of the world 
 for all workers of righteousness. Penalties 
 causal and circumstantial, He asserted, were 
 the inevitable resultants of the working of 
 unrighteousness. In so teaching, the man of 
 to-day is asked: Did Jesus stultify Himself? 
 The Wall Street broker, the State Street 
 banker, the Idaho farmer, the British com- 
 moner, the German peasant, the American 
 Kepublic, the Japanese Empire, thunderously 
 answer. No! 
 
 III. 
 
 In His freedom from petty tactics and 
 worldly-wise prudence Jesus integrates Him- 
 self across the centuries. The strategy 
 displayed by Him in the execution of His life 
 purpose is commanding. 
 
 As an idealist of the practical order, as 
 the Teacher of teachers, He dwelt upon and 
 enforced the value of the moral sentiment, 
 the supremacy of spirit, the dynamism of per- 
 sonality, the homogeneity of humankind. 
 
MODERNNESS. 271 
 
 Prejudices, partialities, partisanships, can 
 not withstand the antagonism of great catho- 
 lic convictions. The Jew in his malevolence 
 toward the Gentile, the aristocratic antipathy 
 to all forms of democracy, the haughty 
 disdain felt by the patrician for the plebeian, 
 find no place in Jesus' thought. Love for 
 man as- man, regardless of race, color, or 
 place, was His constant word. The parable 
 of the Good Samaritan, and Jesus' colloquy 
 with the woman of Samaria at the well of 
 Jacob, are illustrations of His mental and 
 moral attitude toward all men. The inborn 
 antipathy of the pronounced Jew against the 
 mongrel-blooded Samaritan, the Son of God 
 did not harbor. He unfolded God as the God 
 of all men. The crimson currents of life 
 which speed through the veins and arteries 
 of humankind are identical in their constitu- 
 ents. Eespect for Israel as opposed to Rome, 
 for America as opposed to China, for the 
 red man as opposed to the black man, God 
 does not entertain. Jesus declared every 
 man to be a social center from whom all men 
 
272 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 had the right to claim fresh and nobler im- 
 pulses. 
 
 In all men sacred and heroic attributes 
 are sleeping, if not awake. The capacity for 
 high-souledness inhered in the slaves of the 
 imperial household as truly as in Marcus 
 Aurelius, the emperor. A worker together 
 with God is latent in the sanguinary Moslem 
 as truly as in the self-immolating Adoniram 
 Judson. 
 
 The modernness of these contentions 
 admits of no controversy. The Asiatic is 
 demonstrating himself to be in agreement 
 with the European in ethical and spiritual 
 quality. Joseph Neesima, the Japanese 
 Christian, by eveiy conceivable bond is a 
 brother beloved to William E. Gladstone, the 
 English Christian. Mr. Wang Chengpai, the 
 Chinese believer in the Christian religion, 
 proved his capacity for the carrying out of 
 God's will toward men no less than the most 
 devoted Christian within American parallels. 
 The unity of all men Jesus taught and exem- 
 plified, and our ethical and spiritual redemp- 
 
MODERNNESS. 273 
 
 tion is conditioned upon our acceptance of 
 His word and reproduction of His practice. 
 
 Petty tactics in the religious life were the 
 adopted measures and method of the Jew, 
 the Greek, of the Roman, of the self-sufficers 
 everywhere. Jesus repudiated them. He was 
 strategic in His positions; He was cosmic 
 in His outlook; He was all-inclusive in 
 His spmpathies. The petty Jew, the partial 
 Greek, the self-sufficing Eoman, have been 
 securely interred, and none are so poor 
 as to do them reverence. In shutting the 
 door of the kingdom of heaven against otEers, 
 we ultimately exclude ourselves. 
 
 The present-day conquest of the heathen 
 world, in the name of and through the spirit 
 of Jesus Christ, abundantly establishes the 
 modernness of His wisdom and mission. 
 The dynamic quality of personality Jesus 
 stressed. He did not conceive of man as a 
 passive receptacle, a tabula rasa, a bit of 
 mechanism to be operated by sensation, by 
 custom, by playful or obtreperous atoms; a 
 jack-in-the-box to be manipulated by fan- 
 
 18 
 
274 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 tastic impersonalisms. He conceived of man 
 as the personal articulation of love, truth, 
 goodness. The mechanical philosophy of life 
 He decried. Thought, will, emotion. He de- 
 clared to be transcendently more than excited 
 nerve-centers, or faculties ancestrally com- 
 municated. 
 
 He saw in man self-determination, self- 
 consciousness, self-activity. He did not 
 enunciate great truths, vainly expecting them 
 to propagate themselves. He called twelve 
 men unto Himself. They appropriated His 
 exceeding wisdom. Subsequent to this ap- 
 propriation He sent them throughout the 
 Jewish and Roman worlds, and from thence 
 to the uttermost part of the earth. His com- 
 mand was: '^Go teach all nations;" ^^Go ye 
 and preach the gospel to every creature." 
 He saw in Peter, in John, in Thomas, in 
 Philip, and others of the apostolic body, a 
 dynamism that would renew the earth in 
 righteousness. And this moving force He 
 discerns in every responsive personality. 
 Christianity alone, of all religious systems, 
 
MODERNNESS. 275 
 
 has given to the iDersonality of man its true 
 value. Man static it renounces. Man dy- 
 namic it affirms. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Jesus was not an iconoclast in the popular 
 acceptation of the term. He was an icono- 
 clast in the sense of destroying all form that 
 was insufficient for the content. Judaism as 
 a worn bottle could not contain the new wine 
 of the gospel. As a doctrinal conception it 
 was of value in the early twilight of the race. 
 But with the fullness of life which Jesus 
 brought to the world, Judaism, as a mode of 
 conceiving God and the universe, lapsed into 
 desuetude. Greek polytheism had function- 
 alized itself in a somewhat luminous fashion 
 in the |3eriod of man's moral ignorance, but 
 with the dawning of the Sun of Eighteous- 
 ness, the Brightness of the Father's Glory, 
 it speedily withdrew into obscurity. 
 
 And the same destiny has overtaken every 
 metaphysical and ethical form that was in- 
 sufficient for the content. God and His truth, 
 
276 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 as related to man and the world, could not 
 find full vocalization in Judaic legalism or 
 Greek polytheism. Nor can ceremony or 
 tradition fully vocalize the Infinite Person- 
 ality and His Infinite relatedness. Larger 
 generalizations are needed than are afforded 
 by impersonalism, natural apotheoses, ritual- 
 ism, or oral transmission. 
 
 Dogmatism Jesus never failed to rend to 
 chips and splinters. He could not tolerate 
 the ethical fixtures, the spiritual termini, 
 which the pseudo religionists of His day 
 sought to establish. He knew the world to be 
 saturated with God and His law. He was 
 unwilling for any man or body of men to 
 declare it otherwise. Of life in colossal re- 
 lations He was always mindful. He did not 
 permit the hours to exalt themselves above 
 the years, the decades to pronounce strictures 
 concerning the centuries, the centuries to 
 cast indignities upon the millennia. He en- 
 couraged men, always and everywhere, to 
 resist the usui-pation of particulars, to pene- 
 trate to the catholic sense of all thought and 
 
MODERNNESS. 277 
 
 experience. God, He affirmed, puts to con- 
 fusion the misdirections of human thinking 
 and doing, and, despite the train of felonies 
 which the immediate past and living present 
 may present to our eye, the ends of truth, 
 of rectitude, of altruism, are finally answered. 
 The prophet was not making the circumfer- 
 ence his focus of vision, but the center, when 
 he asserted, '^Surely the wrath of man shall 
 praise Him; the remainder of wrath shalt 
 Thou restrain." No truth was more fre- 
 quently uttered in substance by the Son of 
 God than this: ''The Lord reigneth; let the 
 earth rejoice: let the multitude of isles be 
 glad thereof. Clouds and darkness [often- 
 times] are round about Him; [nevertheless] 
 righteousness and judgment are the habita- 
 tion of His throne.'' 
 
 Through all days, all years, all centuries ; 
 through all agents, even though malignant; 
 through all forces, physical and moral; 
 through all atoms; through all peoples, a 
 great and beneficent tendency irresistibly 
 
278 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 streams. No human invention can withstand 
 it. Racial oppositions to it are overcome 
 with as much ease, apparently, as is indi- 
 vidual opposition. 
 
 Hence we are not made to drink of the 
 wine of astonishment when doctrinal con- 
 ceptions appear and disappear like the grass 
 of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow 
 is cast in the oven. 
 
 Platonism as a conception was too meager 
 to contain the fullness of God and its signifi- 
 cance for men. The notions of Heraclitus, 
 Democritus, Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, 
 and other Greek speculators, were meta- 
 physically straitened. Hedonism, Stoic- 
 ism, Utilitarianism, Categorical Intuition- 
 ism, are ethically perplexed on every side. 
 Augustinianism, Calvinism, Pelagianism, 
 Sabellianism, Socinianism, and some Armin- 
 ian conceptions, are straitened media for 
 the forthsetting of the Divine will and work. 
 No aspiring soul finds itself willing to ac- 
 knowledge allegiance to any theological or 
 philosophical system which does not give root 
 
MODERNNESS. 279 
 
 and room to God, the All-Wise, the All- 
 Efficient, the All-Fair, the All-Loving. 
 
 But every worker of good, every lover of 
 truth, every seeker after God, finds himself 
 or herself responsive to any and every con- 
 ception which approximately contains the 
 doctrine of the Divine will and work, and 
 allows scope for its ever-increasing signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 V. 
 
 The perennial modernness of Jesus is evi- 
 dent in His appreciation of moral wholeness. 
 The greatest of ethicists and religionists have 
 broken life into multitudinous mites. Men 
 and women, of low estate and high, have 
 ever been prone to fractionalize themselves. 
 We do not address our thought and energy 
 to the work of self-completeness. We are 
 farmers, or merchants, or mechanics, or stu- 
 dents, or housewives, but not integrated per- 
 sonalities. The man is absorbed by the mer- 
 chant, the mechanic, the student. Our crea- 
 tion is a calling, a vocation. Our daily work 
 
280 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 is a pursuit, an avocation. Every man is 
 called of God to incarnate love, truth, good- 
 ness; to embody the kingdom of heaven; to 
 complete himself. Our avocation may be the 
 tilling of the soil, the fashioning of machines, 
 the construction of railways, the solution of 
 mathematical problems, the writing of books. 
 Jesus protested against the man scattering 
 himself. Manhood and womanhood, accord- 
 ing to Jesus, are the desiderata of all legiti- 
 mate thought and energy. They are the only 
 accomplishment worthy of the endowment 
 and effort of the human family. 
 
 Good farmers, skillful mechanics, are good 
 hands and feet, but nothing more, if love, 
 truth, and righteousness are lacking. Bril- 
 liant jurists, scientific experimenters, if 
 minus moral and spiritual integrity, are good 
 brain-cells, but pauperized men. Jesus de- 
 clared the world to be God's world, and men 
 and women are the Divinely appointed stew- 
 ards of His manifold grace. This steward- 
 ship must be fully discharged, whether 
 through the media of medicine, of art, of 
 
MODERNNESS. 281 
 
 education, of mercantilism, of manual labor. 
 All life is to find expression in sacred speech 
 and in pious performance. What in limitary 
 language we term the secular, is the vanity 
 of vanities. It is not rooted in the nature of 
 God's universe. It is of lunacy all compact. 
 The integration of our selfhood is the 
 primal duty of life. To God's will concern- 
 ing us and our fellows we must relate our 
 thinking, our willing, our doing. This is in 
 every-day speech, concentration. In sacred 
 speech it is consecration. It is the antithesis 
 of selfishness. It is accepting the Divine 
 intention as the sum of wisdom. It is life 
 finding its completeness in God. It is the 
 regnancy of the spiritual. 
 
 VI. 
 
 In His appraisement of all material mani- 
 festation as symbolic of spirit and its phe- 
 nomena Jesus gave to us the true basis of 
 scientific development. The growth of scien- 
 tific knowledge is in strict proportion to the 
 dominance of Jesus' evaluation of material 
 
282 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 ]ife. The progress of science is practically 
 nil wherever spirit is subordinated to matter. 
 Sensuous ascendency invariably means scien- 
 tific paralysis. Superficiality of spiritual life 
 has as its consequent superficiality of scien- 
 tific life. The earth, the stars, chemical 
 elements, physics, biology, and all other 
 realms of knowledge, are absolutel)^ uninter- 
 pretable if we regard them as self -existent. 
 They assume a defiant attitude, apparently, 
 if we deny their spiritual genesis and preser- 
 vation. They seem to say to us with great 
 gusto, we are the externizations of free and 
 conscious intelligence. We are the retinue 
 of Infinite personality. We are the goings 
 forth of God. 
 
 Mr. Emerson in his essay, ^^The Poet,'^ 
 remarks : ' ' Science always goes abreast with 
 the just elevation of the man, keeping step 
 with religion and metaphysics; the state of 
 science is an index of our self-knowledge. 
 Since everything in nature answers to a 
 moral force, if any phenomenon remains 
 brute and dark, it is that the corresponding 
 
MODERNNESS. 283 
 
 faculty in the observer is not yet active." 
 Jesus in His interpretation of nature saw 
 the whole sense of life in every individual 
 thing. The net cast into the sea entangling 
 in its meshes fish of every kind, the bit of 
 leaven working its way through the mass of 
 meal, the infinitesimal mustard-seed expand- 
 ing itself into a tree, were to Him the hiero- 
 phants of a Divine revelation. 
 
 Eliminate this Divineness, and the highest 
 incentive to the interpretation and subjection 
 of the physical world is withdrawn. The wis- 
 dom and will of God Jesus saw signified in 
 the lowest as truly as in the highest 
 economies of being, and His all-inclusive 
 vision has given newness of life to the intel- 
 lectual world. In knowing our Father's 
 world we are entering all the more com- 
 pletely into a knowledge of Him and His 
 disposition toward us. And our knowledge 
 of God, through reverence, humility, and 
 obedience, never fails to beget within us a 
 consuming desire to know His world. The 
 parabolic teaching of Jesus has been a factor 
 
284 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 of incalculable worth to tlie progress of all 
 thought. Beyond the utility and beauty of 
 things He discerned the efficiency and the 
 beauty of spirit. 
 
 He gave to the phenomenal world an in- 
 cidental value. He gave to the spiritual 
 world a fundamental value. To the world of 
 His day and to the world of the present He 
 asserts that the supremacy of the spiritual, 
 and that supremacy alone, inspires to the 
 mastery of the incidental. Mohammedanism, 
 Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Shin- 
 toism, and materialistic philosophies, are to 
 us ominous examples of the inability of 
 sensuousness to interpret and utilize sense 
 phenomena. Electric energy, atmospheric 
 vibration, water and its possible transmuta- 
 tions, iron, coal, lead, timber, grain, the soil, 
 the sunbeams, have slight significance for 
 non-Christian peoples. But Christianity in- 
 terpreting and magnifying the spiritual pro- 
 ceeds forthwith to interpret and helpfully 
 utilize all sensuous phenomena. 
 
 The Christian nations lead the world in 
 
MODERNNESS. 285 
 
 its material no less than in its moral prog- 
 ress. *^The measure of merit of any work 
 of art, ' ' says a critic of luminous discrimina- 
 tion, ^'is its perpetual modernness." Apply- 
 ing this principle to the wisdom of Jesus, 
 our conclusion is: He is the Light of the 
 world; He is Incarnate Truth; He is the 
 Practical Idealist; He is the World Teacher; 
 He is the Modern of moderns. 
 
Chapter X. 
 EPILOGUE. 
 
*• Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. For 
 he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; 
 but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life 
 everlasting." — PAUL. 
 
 In the world about, true values are 
 No less in stone than in the star; 
 We can not say of fleecy cloud, 
 Of wilderness or city crowd 
 That justice with her beam is blind, 
 That things or men are not of kind. 
 
 No truth is patent more than this. 
 Works compensation not amiss ; 
 But 'spite of sun or rain or frost 
 Its metes and bounds are never lost; 
 Whate'er may be our ruling plan, 
 We can not thwart its good or ban. 
 
 Life, as a unit, thwarts all ruth, 
 Its genesis and soul is truth ; 
 It cries aloud in street and mart 
 That no one thing is merely part ; 
 That wisdom makes the world a whole. 
 And compensation is its soul. 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 I. 
 
 There is a fortunate and fatal snreness 
 in the working of all natural law. Fool- 
 hardy, indeed, is the man who interposes 
 himself between the law of gravity and its 
 appointed office. 
 
 He who essays the building of a structure 
 without a strict regard for the center of 
 gravity announces himself either as a sense- 
 less adventurer or as a hopeless fool. The 
 man of commendable judgment will not set 
 his face like a flint against the law of chem- 
 ical combination. He knows that under 
 normal conditions an affinity exists between 
 his muscles and nutritious meat, between his 
 blood and wholesome bread, but that prussic 
 acid, putrid food, and intoxicating drinks are 
 hostile to his body^s weal. We protect our- 
 selves against ^'the icy fang and churlish 
 19 289 
 
290 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 chiding of the winter's wind'' for the reason 
 that between our exposed physical members 
 and the law of crystallization but few points 
 of tangency exist. It has not pleased God, in 
 the outworking of His Infinite plan, to sub- 
 mit His measures and methods to us. Such 
 a procedure would be the reversal of His 
 nature. Always and everywhere the finite is 
 in subordination to the Infinite. 
 
 Our highest wisdom is found in our sub- 
 mission to God's wisdom and way. Every 
 law which underlies the life of the body and 
 the spirit is promotive of our inward peace 
 and outward fortune. In scientific as truly 
 as in prophetic speech, in the realm of matter 
 as truly as in the realm of the soul, God has 
 beset us behind and before, and laid His 
 hand upon us. If we ascend up into heaven, 
 behold. He is there; if we make our bed in 
 the grave, behold. He is there ; if we take the 
 wings of the morning and dwell in the utter- 
 most parts of the sea, even there shall His 
 hand lead us and His right hand hold us. 
 We can not, if we would, mechanize the uni- 
 
Epilogue. 291 
 
 verse. Sound thinking and rationalized 
 living render impossible such an ultimation. 
 And yet we metamorphose all life into a huge 
 mechanism, with its pitiless wheels and thun- 
 dering hammers, when we obliterate God our 
 Father and the Supreme Reason, the Ever- 
 Efficient Will, from any phase of thought or 
 experience. It is the Divine intent that 
 nature should be for us an inexhaustible 
 benefactor. 
 
 Nature, ^ ^ red in tooth and claw, ' ' is poetic 
 fiction under normal conditions. Under ab- 
 normal conditions it is a tragic fact. The 
 only man who feels oppressively the hand of 
 nature is he who seeks to subvert the laws 
 that underlie all being. The man of industry, 
 of honor, of expertness, of truthfulness, of 
 sobriety, never arraigns nature as a male- 
 factor. Over him is wielded, not the scepter 
 of wrath, but of love. It is the sluggard, 
 the trickster, the falsifier, the pettifogger, 
 who declaim against the laws that underlie 
 all life. All things in God's world assume 
 a hostile front to vice. Virtue and gravita- 
 
292 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 tion, love and cohesion, truth and crystalliza- 
 tion, present invincible phalanxes against all 
 forms of lawlessness. The stars in their 
 courses fought against Sisera, Canaan's 
 military chieftain. And why? Because 
 Sisera, as the oppressor of Israel, was the 
 sworn antagonist of the stars. The uni- 
 verse is a unit in the punishment of evil- 
 doers. Corruptionists, whether in commerce, 
 in politics, in literature, in art, can not secure 
 the mermaid's head without the dragon's 
 tail. 
 
 The fancy of the Greeks that Nemesis is 
 the ever-open eye throughout the universe, 
 and allows no offense against goodness to go 
 unchastised, is a solemn fact, expressed in 
 positive terms by the immanent, ever-work- 
 ing God through the medium of law. Infinite 
 righteousness can not wink at finite unright- 
 eousness and maintain its integrity. The 
 world of sense and spirit is a whole, and 
 refuses to be disparted. We can not act 
 partially. We must act integrally. The 
 pleasures of appetite and passion can not be 
 
Epilogue. 293 
 
 severed from the needs of cliaracter. All 
 vision, all detachment, find themselves coun- 
 teracted. Life is an entirety or it is immoral 
 and meaningless. 
 
 Adventurers, exploiters, profligates, and 
 misers find no permanent gain in their en- 
 deavors to outgeneral God. '^Pleasure is 
 taken out of pleasant things, profit out of 
 profitable things, power out of strong things, 
 the moment we seek to separate them from 
 the whole. We can no m.ore halve things and 
 get the sensual good by itself than we can 
 get an inside that shall have no outside, or a 
 light without a shadow. ' ' The braggart, with 
 the brazen throat of Hector, may assert that 
 the inevitable conditions of life do not touch 
 him ; that he eats, drinks, and is merry under 
 all suns and in all seasons; that he sails all 
 seas without regard for chart or compass; 
 that he traverses all lands without respect 
 for the beaten path of law. But the boast is 
 on the braggart's lips; the conditions are in 
 his soul. 
 
 Retribution can not be eluded. Causally 
 
294 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 it is present upon the instant of our misde- 
 meanor. The malignity and the falsehood 
 within us are our decease from the whole- 
 ness of the moral universe. Through tem- 
 poral limitation circumstantial retribution 
 may be baffled. But the escape of judgment 
 in visible nature does not imply the perpetual 
 slow-footedness of the circumstance. Within 
 the matrix of the future the time is when the 
 revolter against the cosmic order of life will 
 find himself fronting the ''stunning confuta- 
 tion of his nonsense'^ in the presence of 
 angels and of men. 
 
 Jesus gives to us, in the parable of the 
 Eich Man and Lazarus the Beggar, a graphic 
 portrayal of such a scene. The man of af- 
 fluence perversely blinded himself as to the 
 meaning of his membership in the social 
 body. The beggar ostensibly was, despite his 
 material disadvantages, loyal to the Divine 
 intent of being. Causal retribution and re- 
 ward were immediate. The rich man carried 
 within himself his decease from the benefac- 
 tions of nature, and thus "benighted walked 
 
Epilogue. 295 
 
 under the midday sun. ' ' The beggar carried 
 within himself the consciousness of his moral 
 unity with the Divine aim, and thus '* enjoyed 
 bright day within the center. ' ' 
 
 Circumstantial retribution and reward 
 were deferred. But death, the democratizer 
 of all existence, introduced the rich man and 
 the beggar to the completed order of life. 
 Within this order all thoughts and acts with- 
 out exception find their integration. 
 
 Cause and circumstance, says Jesus, in 
 substance, meet each other. Their delayed 
 union they effect. ^^In hell the rich man 
 lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and saw 
 Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his 
 bosom; and he said, Father Abraham, have 
 mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may 
 dip the tip of his finger in water and cool 
 my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. 
 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou 
 in thy lifetime receivedst thy [circumstan- 
 tial] good things, and likewise Lazarus 
 [circumstantial] evil things; but now he is 
 
296 Jesus : The World Teacher. 
 
 [in circumstance] comforted, and tliou art 
 [in circumstance] tormented.'* 
 
 To complete ourselves, to become factors 
 of value in the social scheme of life, to em- 
 body all law, to reproduce the Divine will and 
 work, to deport ourselves under every condi- 
 tion and in every circumstance as sons and 
 daughters of God, is our manifest and essen- 
 tial duty. As Paul avows, it is our reason- 
 able service. To encompass these ends, even 
 measurably, is to be in league with the un- 
 derlying principles of God's world; to be in 
 correspondence with all benefaction. To 
 withhold our endeavor is to revolt against 
 the fundamental laws of life and antagonize 
 all benefaction. 
 
 II. 
 
 Jesus, as the Incarnate Son of God, per- 
 sonalized in Himself all law. 
 
 The laws underlying the physical universe 
 He spiritualized in that He made them His 
 servants unto righteousness. The laws un- 
 derlying the spiritual universe He practical- 
 
Epilogue. 297 
 
 ized in that His union with and knowledge of 
 G-od, His inapproachable purity, His Infinite 
 love, His inviolable truthfulness, became will- 
 ing and joyous helpers to all souls, whether 
 sinning or sorrowing, aspiring or achieving. 
 In His body^s behalf He utilized with the 
 utmost remove from censure every physical 
 regulation. He declared His body to be the 
 true temple of worship, and He made all ma- 
 terial good contribute to its strength and 
 service; His mind and heart, for their own 
 refinement and for the increase of personal 
 efficiency, laid hold of prayer, of faith, of 
 obedience, of service, of jjurified emotion, in- 
 deed of every principle appointed for the 
 development of the individual spiritual na- 
 ture. 
 
 As the integration of moral and spiritual 
 efficiency, as the Divine Reason made flesh, 
 as the Supreme Will in all the realms of be- 
 ing, as Law personalized, as the dominating 
 Personality in all history, and therefore in 
 all individual life, Jesus removes Himself 
 infinitely from the category of the finite. 
 
298 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 And yet He is bone of our bone, and flesh of 
 our flesh. He can be touched with a feeling 
 of our infirmities. He is the Friend who 
 loveth at all times, the Brother who is bom 
 for adversity. As Horace Bushnell elo- 
 quently and inspiringly writes: "This one 
 perfect character has come into our world 
 and lived in it ; filling all the molds of action, 
 all the terms of duty and love, with His own 
 Divine manners, works, and charities. All 
 the conditions of our life are raised thus, by 
 the meaning He has shown to be in them, and 
 the grace He has put upon them. The world 
 itself is changed, and is no more the same 
 that it was. Let the Dark Ages come; let 
 society roll backward, and churches perish 
 in whole regions of the earth; let infidelity 
 deny, and, what is worse, let spurious piety 
 dishonor the truth ; still there is a something 
 here that was not, and a something that has 
 immortality in it. Still our confidence re- 
 mains unshaken, that Christ and His ail- 
 quickening life are in the world as fixed ele- 
 ments, and will be to the end of time; for 
 
Epilogue. 299 
 
 Christianity is not so much the advent of a 
 better doctrine as of a perfect character ; and 
 how can a perfect character, once entered 
 into life and history, be separated and finally 
 expelled? It were easier to untwist all the 
 beams of light in the sky, separating and ex- 
 punging one of the colors, than to get the 
 character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, 
 out of the world.'' 
 
 And now what shall be our disposition 
 toward Him who has made all life other than 
 it was; who has exalted the significance of 
 God for man, and of man for God ; who has, 
 by His own clear shining, dissipated the 
 world's spiritual darkness; who has made the 
 tragedy of man's cheapness an approaching 
 impossibility in all parallels ; who has quick- 
 ened incomputably human thought, and has- 
 tened the world's progress in every circle of 
 activity ; who has renewed the waste places of 
 the human heart, and made them to blossom 
 like the rose; who, in Himself, has exempli- 
 fied all truth, all beauty, all good; who has 
 effected a union in Himself between man the 
 
300 Jesus: The World Teacher. 
 
 sinner and God the Savior, between man the 
 helpless and God the Almighty Helper; who 
 even now, in the minutiag and in the most bur- 
 densome of our experiences, interposes His 
 infinite wisdom, power, and love? 
 
 He calls us to a life of belief in His name ; 
 to a life expressed in His terms which are 
 the terms of the spirit. This life means for us 
 righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost. It means for us a conscience void of 
 offense toward God and toward men. It 
 means our completeness. Surely we are not 
 hesitant in giving to Him the total energy 
 of our being with utmost leal-heartedness ! 
 
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