YALE
DIVINITY SCHOOL
LIBRARY

Gift of
Library of
Dean Charles R. Brown

BOOKS BY DR. McCLELLAND

THE MIND OF CHRIST
An Attempt to Answer the Question,
What Did Jesus Believe?
12mo. $1.25, Net.
THE CROSS BUILDERS
A Study of the Various People
Concerned in Jesus' Death.
l2mo. 50 Cents, Net.
VERBA CRUCIS
A Meditation Upon What
Jesus Said on Calvary.
12mo. 50 Cent., Net.

Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., New York

THE MIND OF
CHRIST
AN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER THE QUESTION
WHAT DID JESUS BELIEVE 1

BY

T. CALVIN McCLELLAND, D.D.
? * *
MINISTER OF THE MEMORIAL PRESBYTERIAN CHDRCH OF
BROOKLYN-NEW YORK

NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1909
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
Published September, 1909

SECOND EDITION

TO
James Cruikshank, LL.D. Walter S. Finlay
George M. Van Deventer James F. Atkinson
Howard Haviland Alfred G. Reeves
RULING ELDERS IN THE
MEMORIAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
BROOKLYN-NEW YORK
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED WITH APPRECIATION
GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION

PREFACE
The following pages are an attempt to inter
pret in plain speech the belief of Jesus. There
attend upon the worship of every church numbers
of strong, spiritual people who are not confessed
followers of Jesus, because they misunderstand
Him and what He stands for. Christianity, as
they understand it, means something unintelligible
or unpractical. The religion they need is one
which they can confess with all their hearts not
only, but also with all their minds. The religion
they want is one which will make a vital difference
in their " yeses " and " noes," their loves and hates,
a religion through which they shall work right
eousness, from weakness be made strong, wax
valiant in fight, turn to flight armies of distress
and injustice. For these and for all earnest people
who want to get at the rock-bottom facts of
Christianity I have ventured to make this inter
pretation of the mind of Christ.
Jesus was the first Christian, the kind of
Christian men want to be and ought to be, the
kind of Christian men can be if only they will
think His thoughts, feel His feelings and give

vi PREFACE
themselves up to His master idea. This then, is
the vital thing to know, What did Jesus believe?
What did God mean to Him? How did He think
of Himself and of His fellow men? These are
the fundamental questions of modern religion.
In what I have written I disclaim all controver
sial intent. The thing farthest from my thought
is to suggest, or to arouse debate upon any theory
of the Person of Christ. For myself none of the
creeds, nor all of them put together can adequately
express my adoration of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But in these chapters I would so present Him that,
whatever one's personal metaphysic of Christ, he
may unite in the " Song of a Heathen, sojourning
in Galilee, A. D. 32,"
" 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."
I cannot forbear expressing my great gratitude
to two friends who among many others gave me
suggestions which have been worked out in these
essays. The one is the beloved Charles Cuthbert
Hall, who in his beautiful life and death witnessed
so splendidly to his belief in the supreme Lordship

PREFACE vn
of Jesus. The other is the Rev. Prof. George Wil
liam Knox, D.D., whose monograph in " The
Christian Point of View " gave me the idea for
the eleventh chapter, and whose " Direct and
Fundamental Proofs of The Christian Religion "
gave me material for the last essay.
T. Calvin McClelland.
Memorial Church Manse,
January 25, 1909.

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. Jesus' Idea of God  i
II. Jesus' Idea of Himself  19
III. Jesus' Idea of Man  51
IV. Jesus' Idea of Religion  69
V. Jesus' Idea of Sin  85
VI. Jesus' Idea of Salvation  99
VII. Jesus' Idea of Prayer  117
VIII. Jesus' Idea of Immortality  133
IX. The Proof of Jesus' Idea of God ... 153
X. How a Man May Know the God and Fa
ther of Jesus  167
XI. The Seriousness of Believing in the God
and Father of Jesus ... . . . i79
XII. The Religion of Jesus the Absolute Reli
gion  193

IX

I
JESUS' IDEA OF GOD

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? and not one
of them shall fall on the ground without your Father: but
the very hairs of your head are all numbered."
" What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask
him for a loaf, will give him a stone ; or if he shall ask for
a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know
how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more
shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them
that ask Him ? "
"Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat?
or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be
clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek;
for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of
these things."
"Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute
you ; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven ;
for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. Ye therefore
shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
" He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."
" Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do."

THE MIND OF CHRIST

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD
The fact of life is God. The question of life
is, what is God ? Only the " fool hath said in his
heart, There is no God." Science believes in God ;
it gathers and sifts the facts of nature and human
nature and says, " we are ever in the presence of
an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all
things proceed." Philosophy believes in God; it
makes nations and individuals pass in review be
fore its stand and reports that there " is a Power
not ourselves, which makes for righteousness."
Poetry believes in God; it searches the hearts of
things and men and sings,
" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the
plains —
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?"
Every man believes in God. When Voltaire
bought the manor of Ferney he found the parish
church in bad repair. He had it torn down, and
3

4 THE MIND OF CHRIST
in his own park, at his own expense he built a new
church, and over its door he carved, " Deo erexit
Voltaire." He, who orthodoxy said was the syn
onym for " Satan, Death and Sin," dedicated a
church to God. Every man has some sacred
shrine for God, an unknown God maybe, but God.
Every man has some solitude which he dedicates
to God, not my God maybe, but God. Every man
is conscious that he has more relationships than
those he comes to by birth and marriage. The soul
feels an ' Over-Soul ', a ' Something There ' not
flesh and blood, on which he knows he and his
destiny depend. Experience certifies the Psalmist
true when he says, " Out of the depths have I
cried unto thee, O God." This is incurable in
man, the sense of a superhuman. The fact of all
facts is God ; the question of all questions is, what
is God ? for the old saying " as the man, so his
God," is just as true turned end for end, as his
God, so the man.
So the most searching question we can ask about
Jesus is, what is His idea of God? When we get
Jesus' idea of God, we get His idea of Himself, of
man, of religion, of sin, of salvation, of life, of
prayer, of immortality.
First, after the manner of artists, we must get
in our background that we may have a due sense
of proportion and perspective for the figure which
shall stand in the foreground. We must get the

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 5
idea man had of God before Jesus came. Man's
earliest idea of God was, the Powerful One, the
Strong, the Almighty. Omnipotence was the first
quality discovered in deity; force got the first
worship. God was a splendid despot, He was the
glorified sheik of the tribe. In some of the earliest
narratives of the Bible we get glimpses of this
primitive idea. In these stories God shares
names with the pagan divinities. He is called
" Baal " and " Elohim," names that signify the
terrible and majestic. The oldest specifically He
brew name for God is " El," which means " The
Strong," and this alternates with the poetic " Zur,"
" The Rock." A favorite patriarchal name was
" El Shaddai," which might be translated " The
Irresistible." Among primitive peoples names
were not mere tags to designate objects ; they were
word pictures; they told you something about the
nature of the things named. A name for God was
really a confession of faith, a creed about Him.
But, all of these first names for God stood simply
for almighty power, absolute sovereignty. In
them the children of Abraham confessed their
faith in the Omnipotent. They saw Him in the
thunderstorm, the lightning and the fire; they
thought of Him as their leader in battle; they
devoted to Him in slaughter their prisoners of
war; and they thought of Him as claiming the
sacrifice even of human life as the loftiest expres-

6 THE MIND OF CHRIST
sion of a man's devotion. I believe in God as
Power was the first creed of the race.
But a better day dawned. The Omnipotent
was seen to be the Omniscient, and the God of
Power was believed to be the God of a Plan.
When men made that discovery or how no one
can tell; but sometime, the Bible seems to say it
was in Moses' time, the Hebrews got a new name
for God, the august name written in our English
Scriptures " Jehovah." " God spake unto Moses
and said unto him, I am Jehovah : and I appeared
unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as El
Shaddai; but by my name Jehovah I was not
known to them. And God said unto Moses, I Am
that I Am : and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto
the children of Israel, I Am that I Am hath sent me
unto you." This was the Hebrew's greatest name
for God ; they cherished it so, that by and by they
would not speak it aloud, and in course of time its
pronunciation was forgotten. The meaning of the
word " Jehovah " is probably " He who is and
causes to be," or " He who lives and causes life."
It implies personal will, irresistible and trust
worthy. It was a great day when " El," the
Strong, was found to be " Jehovah " the God with
the Purpose. Worship of force, even though it
were celestial force, brutalizes character ; and faith
in a glorified tyrant becomes apathetic or despair
ing acquiescence in fate. But if the Almighty

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 7
is also the All-knowing, if the Strong is also the
God with the Plan, then His sovereignty is not
whimsical, and His rule is not chance. Life
might still be a mystery, but it is not a chaos;
there may be a riddle of existence, but He holds
the key. Jehovah was to be feared, but more, He
was to be served with trembling hope. I believe
in God the Almighty Proposer and Disposer was
the second creed of the race.
Then great prophets came, and they unveiled
another great characteristic of deity. They said
the Almighty Jehovah is holy. Jehovah is the God
of righteousness, who requires of men that they
not only fear and serve, but with justice obey.
The All-powerful and the All-purposeful was seen
to be the All-perfect. Men like Hosea, Isaiah and
Micah discovered a conscience at the heart of the
universe, a conscience like man's conscience at its
best. God was the source of all justice, the sov
ereign adjuster of life's unjust and arbitrary dis
tinctions. This was the sublimest God-faith of
Israel. It meant that the world was steeped in
morality; that right is higher than might. This
idea laid its masterful hand on the spring of the
feelings and set men trying to live a life that like
Job's could see all that he had made and loved
swept away like dust before a whirlwind of divine
purpose and yet say, "Though He slay me yet
will I trust Him." It was a glorious day when

8 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Jehovah was seen to be just, and the plan was
known to be fair. It gave men the quiet feeling
that comes to those who once walked armed to
the teeth, but are now settled under a government
where there may be lawlessness but no anarchy.
I believe in the Almighty Jehovah, the Perfect; in
the God of the Power, the God of the Purpose, the
White God, this was the third creed of the race.
It was the best creed the world ever had. It was
a wonderful idea of God; its masculine vigor and
ethical grandeur reached down into the deeps of
life and quickened amaze, reverence and awe.
But at the same time, this idea of God swept up
ward like the peak of Teneriffe, majestic, dimly
outlined, mist-draped, inaccessible from the cold
surge of life which washed restlessly about its
base. This was the creed Jesus learned at His mother's
knee. For Jesus, God was real and living. He
did not argue that God is. He ignored atheism;
indeed it seems as if He took it for granted that
all men believed that God is. He accepted the
ancient creed. He contradicted no one of its
sublime conceptions. He confessed " the God of
Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob." His God
was sovereign, all-wise and just. The mountain
peak stood in the landscape of His belief, but He
lifted upon it the light of a bright new day, and
before that genial ray, the once mist-draped, in-

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 9
accessible peak rose clear and winsome, an upward
slope, but a gentle slope, from whose base to sum
mit ran a climbing path with many a rest-house
for the weary and heavy laden. God is all-power
ful, all-wise and all-perfect, said the ancients.
God is our Father, said Jesus, and power, wisdom
and perfectness are the attributes, the tools with
which the Father works. Fatherhood is the mind
and heart, the attributes are the hands and feet.
Fatherhood was the idea in which, for which and
by which Jesus lived.
It was not that Jesus made the name " Father"
brand new. Other men had used the term.
Homer called Zeus the father of gods and men.
The Cilician poet, Aratus, quoted by St. Paul,
wrote, " With Zeus are filled all paths we tread and all the marts
of men;
Filled, too, the sea and every creek and bay;
And all, in all things, need we help of Zeus;
For we too are His offspring."
Plato and Seneca used the word " father," and
with the Jews the metaphor was classic. Moses
employed it, and Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the
Psalmist and the unknown prophet of the exile.
Sometimes the name refers to God as the supreme
ruler, sustaining toward Israel the same relation
that a father sustained toward a Jewish family,
that is, the head of the house. Sometimes the

IO THE MIND OF CHRIST
name goes deeper and describes God's mystic fel
lowship with His people. Sometimes, as in the
apocryphal books, it is used to express God's
kindly attitude toward the pious individual. At
the time of Jesus the words " Heavenly Father,"
and " Our Father in Heaven " had become a popu
lar substitute for the old name of God, which had
fallen into disuse. So the mere name was not
original with Jesus. But granted that one cannot
claim for the Master's use of the name any verbal
originality, still is Jesus' God-faith brand new, His
idea original.
What God meant to Jesus, God had never meant
to any one who lived before Him. It was not
what He said that was new and original, but it
was how He said it : how his God idea and His
feeling and willing acted and reacted on each
other ; how this name " Father " became in Him
the inspiration of a new kind of living; how He
inspired others with His own secret, until they
believed their own souls and others worth while,
able to live an eternal kind of life in the midst of
time. Granted that Moses and Plato, Hosea and
Sirach called God father, no one of these men, nor
any of their followers responded to this father idea
as did Jesus. They said father, but they lived as
if they meant lord. Jesus said Father, and all men
felt that for Him it was the only divine name, the
working idea of life — God's and man's. For

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 1 1
others the Fatherhood of God meant creator ship,
redeemership, lordship, even mercy, forgiveness
and love ; for Jesus Fatherhood meant fatherhood,
that unique, intimate, reciprocal relationship which
exists between a father and his son. For others
Fatherhood was a possible characteristic of God;
for Jesus Fatherhood was the positive character of
God. Thus far the God-seekers had discovered
only certain qualities of deity, Jesus unveiled God
Himself, and men said, " God is love." It was
like this. Three men go into a room. Lying on
a table in that room is an object no one of them
has ever seen before. One says, this object is
hollow; another says, this object is wooden; an
other says, this object is brown. Each one speaks
truly; the object is hollow, and it is wooden, and
it is brown. But no one of the men nor all of them
together has told us what the object is in itself.
They have discovered only certain qualities which
the object possesses. The object is still unknown
to us. At last there comes into the room a fourth
man; he approaches the object on the table; with
out a word, he lifts the hollow, brown, wooden
thing and nestles it close to his throat, and then
across it, back and forth he draws a bow, and the
music leaps out and opens heaven, and we see the
angels ascending and descending. The first three
named three characteristics of this interesting
object, the fourth man let us hear the object sing

12 THE MIND OF CHRIST
of its inmost self, and we said to ourselves, it is a
violin. Men said, God is all-powerful and He may be
fatherly. Jesus made us know that our Father
is all-powerful. They meant God's character is
power, and one characteristic may be fatherliness.
He showed us that God's character is Fatherhood,
of which one characteristic is power. It all comes
out in that wonderful prayer which Jesus taught
to His disciples. "After this manner therefore
pray ye: Our Father who art in heaven, Hal
lowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy
will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us
this day our daily bread. And forgive us our
debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And
bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from
the evil one." The apostrophe, " Our Father,"
gives rise to all that follows. That name is the
most high and hallowed thing in the mind of the
man who utters it.
The Fatherhood is the source and satisfaction
of the soul who prays. Out of that Fatherhood
spring the divine kingship, the divine will, the
supply for daily living, the infinite functions of re
pair and redemption. The man who prays this
prayer believes not merely in a reign of law, but
in the reign of a Father through law; he believes
not in bare sovereignty to which all things must
yield because the sovereignty is irresistible; but

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 13
he believes in the sovereignty wherein there are
no subjects, only sons. He knows himself safe,
not because his king is fatherly, but because his
Father is kingly. Here is Jesus' idea of the divine
omnipotence. The Jew taught that God was first
king, then kind; Jesus has made us believe that
God is first kind, then kingly. The Jew believed
that fatherliness was an imperial favor which the
great king might dispense; Jesus believed that
Fatherhood was the mainspring of the divine
character, the beating heart of the Eternal.
Men said, the God of the plan may be fatherly.
Jesus made us know that our Father is the God
of the plan. They meant God's character is om
niscience, and one characteristic may be fatherli
ness; He showed us that God's character is
Fatherhood, of which one charateristic is wisdom.
We get His point of view in that beautiful saying,
" Are not two sparrows sold for a penny ? and
not one of them shall fall on the ground without
your Father: but the very hairs of your head are
all numbered." Here is an assurance that the
plan is no mere architect's design, once finished
and then left to hirelings to carry to completion,
while the designer sits in his sanctum far away
from the building's dust and noise. The plan is
the Father's purpose for His dear household, and
the architect's eye, and the architect's hand " go
as far as our fears go, nay, as far as life itself —

14 THE MIND OF CHRIST
life down even to its smallest manifestations in the
order of nature."
Here, indeed, was a new thought. The Jews
of Jesus' time had the idea that God's busi
ness with men was carried on by angelic messen
gers. God Himself might send, but God never
came. They saw no present deity, but they were
expecting one. Jesus saw the Father everywhere.
God had not stopped working, He was busy in
the field and the sky, the sea and the soul. God
had not ceased speaking; He Himself, and not
angels, spake in the lily and the bird, in conscience
and the human voice. Jesus found men thinking
of God as a consulting engineer, an absentee gov
ernor; He left men thinking of God as the ever-
present Father in whom " we live, and move, and
have our being."
Men said, God is holy, He is perfect, He may
be paternal. Jesus made us know that our Father
is holy, our Father is perfect. They meant God's
character is all-powerful, all-wise perfection, which
may be uttered in fatherliness; Jesus told us that
God's character is Fatherhood, which utters itself
perfectly. The idea of God's absolute whiteness
was the highest ideal the race had imagined; but
it left life cold and lonely. The thought of God's
perfection lifted God out of man's reach ; He was
high as heaven, what could one do? deep as hell,
what could one know? The idea of the divine

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 1 5
perfection awakened in the soul the sense of per
sonal unfitness, despicable meanness, which put
an impassable abyss between God and man. God
and man were more profoundly separated by the
moral antithesis of good and bad than they had
been before by the antithesis of strong and weak,
all-knowing and ignorant. Then Jesus came and
He had another definition of the divine perfect-
ness. " I say unto you, Love your enemies, and
pray for them that persecute you; that ye may
be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He
maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. Ye
therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Fa
ther is perfect." Here is a new definition of the
divine perfection; it is the habit the Father has
of making His sun to rise on the evil and the good,
the way He is used to sending His rain on the
just and the unjust. This is holiness, as the
Master understood it; not ethical separation, nor
moral transcendence, nor inimitableness of char
acter, but bountiful, impartial, ungrudging benefi
cence. To bless without stint, to bless thus, the
unjust as well as the just, to love the unlovely, to
pray for the persecutor, this is perfection, God's
perfection, and so man's. God is our Father of
unbounded, gratuitous, ungrudging love. This is
Jesus' idea of God.
It was this Father Jesus lived to unveil. This

16 THE MIND OF CHRIST
was His life's purpose, to get men to say, " Our
Father," and saying it, to believe that they were
talking directly to the Infinite and Eternal source
and satisfaction of nature and human nature, and
believing it, to live in the world as children in a
Father's house, free from care and full of love.
How strongly He Himself believed in His God-
idea, we feel when He says, " He that hath seen
me hath seen the Father." These words are not
strange except as we make them so. He and His
disciples were not talking about Himself. "Shew
us the Father," Philip had said. They wanted
something that they could see that would help
them to understand the Father whom they did not
see; and that is what Jesus gave them, the one
thing He knew which was most like God, Him
self; and so He said, " He that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father." No plain man hearing another
speak those words would interpret them to mean
that the speaker meant that He and His Father
were the same person. He would understand that
the speaker meant that He and His Father agreed,
that they had one thought, one feeling, one way
of acting. Here is a man; you never met his
father ; you admire the man and wonder what sort
of person his father is. I know the man's father,
and I tell you, " When you see the son you see the
father; he is the father's double; he has his accent,
his expression, his manner." You understand

JESUS' IDEA OF GOD 1 7
that I mean that the son is the living picture of his
father. That is what Jesus meant, when He said,
" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,"
that is, I am the Father's double, He thinks as I
think, He feels as I feel, He does as I do.
Nothing that God is contradicts what Jesus was.
Nothing that Jesus was belies what God is. Jesus
is so much like God that we have to find out only
what Jesus was to know what God is. Let us
take one action in His life. He had gone about
doing good. He had never claimed His rights,
He had never reckoned what he might get in re
turn for His service; He had never cherished an
insult; He had never nursed a grudge; He had
never seemed to see anything in the men about
Him but their need of the good things He had to
give away. They crowned His brow with a
wreath of thorns; they stripped Him of all His
earthly estate, that cloak that was pure white
woven without seam; they hung Him by four
wounds between two thieves; and while they
were doing it, He talked to His Father,
talked to His Father about the traitor friend
who had made his best friend a bargain,
about the churchmen who had by perjury secured
the verdict of death, about the Roman whose
cowardice had put the finishing touch upon the
ghastly parody of law, about the crucifiers who
were the tools in the red hands of those who

18 THE MIND OF CHRIST
wrought this crowning tragedy ; and this was what
He said to His Father, " Father, forgive them ;
for they know not what they do." He believed
that God was such an one as could be talked to
that way; that God felt as He felt; that God is
forgiving as He was forgiving; that God is the
Father of unbounded, gratuitous, ungrudging love.
That is why ever since, we have said, we see
God in Jesus, we find Christ in God. For all
practical purposes of living God is Jesus. Some
how on that belief the facts of life fall into order
and the soul breathes deep and slow a peace which
passeth understanding. We may live our lives
without care, they are in the Father's strong hand ;
we may live our lives without fear of the future
or any change, the way of the pilgrimage is
marked down on the Father's wise plan; we may
live our lives with cheer, the Father loves as Jesus
loved, to the uttermost.

II
JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF

"Knew ye not that I must be in my Father's house?"
"All things have been delivered unto me of my Father:
and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and
who the Father is, save the Son; and he to whomsoever
the Son willeth to reveal Him."
"As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus
commanded them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until
the Son of man be risen from the dead."
" Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness
to be tempted of tne devil. And when He had fasted forty
days and forty nights, He afterward hungered. And the
tempter came and said unto Him, If thou art the Son of
God, command that these stones become bread. But He
answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God. Then the devil taketh Him into the holy
city; and he set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and
saith unto Him, If thou art the son of God, cast thyself
down; for it is written, He shall give His angels charge
concerning thee: and, on their hands they shall bear thee
up, lest haply thou dash Thy foot against a stone. Jesus
said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not make
trial of the Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh Him
unto an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all
the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he
said unto Him, All these things will I give thee, if thou
wilt f^ll down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto
him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt
worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve."
" I ascend unto my Father and your Father."

II
JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF
The Gospel of Jesus was good news about God.
It was not Himself that the Master seemed inter
ested in, His theme was the Father. His desire
was not to get men to call Him Lord, but to get
them to do the will of His Father. But as one
cannot get the grain without the sower, so one
cannot know the Father without Jesus. He is in
dispensable, and what is more, He knows He is
indispensable ; " He that soweth the good seed,"
said He, " is the Son of Man." Buddha, Plato
and Socrates are contented -to be a mere factor in
their message; Jesus knows Himself to be His
Gospel's personal realization and dynamic; as one
says, " He knows no more sacred task than to
point men to His own person." Given the other
God-seeker's message and we can do without the
messenger; would we have Jesus' message we
must obey the call " Come unto me." So it is
we must ask, what place Jesus believed He Him
self had in His Gospel; what was Jesus' idea of
Himself? 21

22 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Across the water is a great cathedral. You
have seen pictures of it; you have read about it
in books of art and travel. You think you know
it. You shut your eyes and imagine the glori
ous fagade, the lacelike sculpturing, the fine east
window, the upward sweeping towers. One day,
you cross the water and visit the great cathedral.
As evening gathers you approach the minster.
There against the blue-black sky leans the beauti
ful pile. It is more than you dreamed. Sud
denly there is a glimmer within, long shafts of
light break through the windows, and figures of
saints and angels gather in the radiance. On
the still air the notes of an unseen organ float,
deep as the thunders from a purple cloud, sweet
as the trilling of birds at twilight. The cathe
dral speaks for itself. No one could tell you what
it tells. With its own light and harmony it re
veals its transcendent function. We have seen
pictures of Jesus, we have read the books of His
interpreters; now we come to Jesus Himself; like
cathedral light and harmony His own life and
words flowing from His soul speak to us of Him
self, tell us what He believed about His being and
function. There is a picture in the cathedral which hangs
just where it is the first thing we see as we enter.
Mary and Joseph had brought the boy down to
Jerusalem. While there they lost Him. They

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 2$
searched for Him everywhere. Hoping against
hope, Mary came to the temple. There only the
grey-beards and. the great were used to gather to
converse about God's high things and man's deep
things. But, there, at home in that company, His
face upturned to drink in their speech, His breath
drawing deep and slow was her little boy. He
wondered only that on missing Him, Mary had
not instantly inquired at the temple ; she must have
known about His absorbing interest in God's busi
ness ; " knew ye not that I must be in my
Father's house?" This picture of the boy who
cared more about God's things than anything, who
could not help wondering about the difference be
tween Himself and His mother is the key to the
cathedral of His consciousness. That absorption
in God's business which marked the lad became in
the man an absorption in God ; " all things " said
He " have been delivered unto me of my Father :
and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the
Father; and who the Father is, save the Son; and
he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him."
At first sight there may seem nothing es
pecially significant in this self-consciousness.
The thought of God as Father He shared with
others. He could say with them, He taught them
to say with Him, " Our Father." But as we
listen we catch a something about Jesus' " My
Father," a depth of meaning, a richness, a ring

24 THE MIND OF CHRIST
which no one else can put into the words. He
said no one can say " my Father " as He can, " no
one knoweth who the Father is, save the Son."
Though with His strong arm around them He gave
the saintliest and the shamefulest confidence to re
peat after Him, " Our Father ", yet He was con
scious of a relationship with the Father which
they did not share. There was a difference be
tween the best and Him. His sonship was more
than theirs, so much more that He knew Himself
to be taking only His proper name when He called
Himself " the Son."
Here is a paradox in Jesus' self-consciousness.
While He made humility well-nigh the grace out
of which everything good grows, yet He named
Himself, and Himself alone " the Son " ; others
were sons, but for Himself He must use the defi
nite article. His sonship was more than other's.
Jesus knew, because no one knew the Father save
the Son, and of course he to whom the Son would
reveal Him. That is, the Father idea was His
discovery, to others it must always be a revela
tion ; He knew it by instinct, they must be given it
by instruction; the Father He knew from the be
ginning, others were only beginning to know; the
Fatherhood which was so patent to> Him, to
others was brand new good news. While the rest
of the children were thinking of God just as
King, and of themselves as the King's subjects,

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 2$
He knew God as Father and Himself and all men
as sons, and so He could say " my Father " as
no one else could, and for this cause He knew
Flis sonship must be greater than theirs.
His sonship was greater than other's, be
cause the love of Father and son which for them
was one-sided, was perfectly reciprocated in Him.
As yet the love between the Father and men
was all on the Father's side. From the first
Jesus loved the Father as the Father loved Him.
Here is the wonder of Jesus' self-consciousness,
its august self-complacency. He whose presence
made the good say, " depart from me, for I am
sinful," challenged the good to convict Him of
sin. Was he separate from sinners, so was He sep
arate from saints. Saints reached goodness only
through fires of remorse and baths of penitence;
He said simply, " I do always the things which
are pleasing unto the Father." Once He laid
down the terms of true sonship, " love your ene
mies, and pray for them that persecute you; that
ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven " ;
all needed to be summoned to reach out to his re
lationship, all but He. Face to face with death,
in that hour when the conscience of the morally
quick man inexorably sums up his life, Jesus
seemed to feel only the moral need of His mur
derers, and then knowing that He had never edged
off from perfection's standard, conscious that He

26 THE MIND OF CHRIST
had realized the ideal, He said, " It is finished."
He was the Son; men were becoming sons; He
was full-grown; men were waiting to be born.
Jesus believed Himself to be " the Son of God."
But while He called Himself "the Son," He
seemed to know no difference in kind between
Himself and the other sons of the Father. If
He was " the Son of God," He was also " the
Son of Man." Indeed Son of God was not His
self-designation; His favorite name for Himself
was " Son of Man." There is one scene in His
life which brings this feeling about His human re
lationship to the surface. He and three of His
students were on a mountain somewhere in north
Palestine. Suddenly, the disciples see, or think
they see, their blessed Lord in the company of
Moses the great law-giver, and Elijah the great
prophet. And in a moment a light lighter than
the midway sun breaks forth from their Lord and
outshines the law-giver and the prophet as the
midday sun outshines the ever shining planets.
And a great voice is heard, " This is my beloved
Son." Then it is written that this divine Lord
said, " Tell the vision to no man, until the Son
of Man be risen from the dead." They had
recognized Him as divine; He cared more that
He should be known as human. "Son of Man"
is His own name for Himself; translated into our
speech its simplest meaning is a standard human
being.

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 27
Let us call Jesus what names we will, Christ,
Lord, Son of God ; these names fit the fact ; but He
calls Himself " Son of Man," the standard human
being. Exalt His difference as we will He ap
pears to care more that we shall exalt His hu
manity. We exalt the difference; He exalts the
identity. We cherish the divinity; He cherishes
the humanity. We call Jesus divine and we
know we are true ; He calls Himself human and we
know He is true. And then we put the two
ideas together and call Him the Divine Man.
Does that mean that part of Him is human, and
part divine? Nay, it means that humanity and
divinity are so alike that Jesus could be both in
one homogeneous life. We mean that humanity
and divinity overlap so that here is no telling
where one begins and the other leaves off. The
difference between humanity and divinity is a
difference of degree; divinity is humanity raised
to its highest power; humanity is divinity in the
germ. So the divine Christ makes no claim to
be a foreigner from some far off unnatural world,
a sort of spiritual wedge driven into the common
human nature. His divinity did not make Him
something other than human; our humanity does
no{ keep us something other than divine. The
path is open all the way to the summit. It is no
farther from the bottom to the top than it is from
the top to the bottom. Jesus believed Himself-

28 THE MIND OF CHRIST
to be "the Son of God," but He believed Him
self to be the brother of men.
Jesus believed Himself to be the Father's mes
senger Son sent to recover the lost children. In
our cathedral stands a two-leaved door. It is
between the vestibule where hangs the picture of
the little Galilean seeking His Father's business,
and the great fane where are the altar and the
sacrifice. The carving on one leaf of this door
way tells a story like this. For nearly a score
of years after that memorable visit to Jerusalem,
Jesus lived in the village of Nazareth. For us
those are hidden years; what went on in His in
ward life we may not know, but we may be sure
that those years brought to the growing man an
ever deepening passion for that business which
absorbed Him as a lad, " the Father's business."
At last, one day, news came from the southland
of a strange preacher who called himself " a
voice," and the message of this voice was " the
kingdom of heaven is at hand." It was the sort
of message Jesus had been listening for; it was
just the tocsin to stir the pulses of one who was
consumed with a passion for the Father's busi
ness. Spirit answered to spirit; the message of
the preacher claimed the soul of the Carpenter.
But the preacher did not only preach, John Bap
tist was forming a society; it was a community
of expectant souls pledged to this imminent king-

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 29
dom, and the ancient rite of baptism was the form
of initiation into its fellowship. With complete
humility, eager to leave nothing undone which
would work toward the great consummation,
Jesus sought initiation into this society of the
kingdom, He requested baptism. "And Jesus,
when he was baptized, went up straightway from
the water : and lo, the heavens were opened 'unto
Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending
as a dove, and coming upon Him; and lo, a voice
out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved
Son, in whom I am well pleased." Whatever the
dove and the voice were, they were the outward
symbols of a genuine inward experience, an ex
perience of which there can be only one interpre
tation, Jesus was conscious that He was what
His race called the Messiah.
That Jesus believed Himself to be the chosen
Messiah there can be no question. Toward
the end of His life, while in the neighbor
hood of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples
one day what opinions the people held about
Him. They told Him that some thought Him
to be John Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or one
of the prophets. And then He put to them this
question, "But who say ye that I am?" And
Simon Peter answered and said, " Thou art the
Christ, the Son of the living God." For a Jew
that confession could have only one meaning, thou

30 THE MIND OF CHRIST
art Messiah. The human voice identified what the
divine voice had discovered to Him at His baptism,
and " Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed
art thou, Simon Bar-Jonas, for flesh and
blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father
who is in heaven." Thus Jesus solemnly confirmed
the truth of what Simon had said and seriously ac
cepted the designation of Messiah with its im
plication that He stood in a closer relation to God
than do all other men. Five days before He died,
He rode into Jerusalem setting Himself into all
the symbols with which the prophetic imagination
had decorated the expected one, and thus in a
way that no one could doubt claimed the august
office for Himself.
Jesus believed Himself to be the Messiah, but
the question arises, what kind of a Messiah did
He believe Himself to be? The ideal of Messiah
in Jesus' day, though universal was very vague,
very elastic. But all the speculations about Mes
siah and what he should be and do were set into
one golden frame ; the Jews believed that a golden
age was coming. For centuries the land had
been heartbroken. One by one the nations of the
world had made sport of it, despoiled it, trampled
it as they trampled the grapes to make wine for
their royal banquets. But the Jews hugged the
hope of that golden age to their bruised breasts.
In Jesus' time the hope was a belief that God

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 3 1
Himself, or if not God, then some one like God,
would come down to champion Israel, overthrow
Caesar, make the ancient kingdom to be the ad
miration of the world and bring earthly plenty,
glory and ease to the children of Abraham. With
such a Messiah every Jew would sit in his own
vineyard, under his own figtree enjoying the
fruits of peace. A few of the people like John
Baptist earnestly believed that a revival of real
religion had to come before this golden age could
be, and as earnestly wrought to prepare them
selves and others for it. But withal the ideal
Messiah was just a Jewish Caesar, mightier than
Caesar even and certainly more moral. How
much of this popular ideal was a part of Jesus'
idea of His Messiahship? We find the answer to
this question in what is called the Temptation.
We turn to the second leaf of the golden doorway
of our cathedral.
Three of the gospels report an incident in Jesus'
life which followed immediately upon His bap
tism. St. Mark in the briefest way makes men
tion of the fact, but emphasizes its significance by
setting it as the starting point of his memorabilia.
St. Matthew and St. Luke describe the event with
warm Oriental language. Their narrative lifts
the curtain on a tragedy of the inward life. One
cannot get away from the feeling that what they
write about was something very real and very

32 THE MIND OF CHRIST
awful, something which actually took place, some
thing which involved tremendous consequences.
It was no dream, no figment of the imagination;
it was a crisis out of which Jesus came a changed
man. The movement is dramatic, the climax is
decisive, the details are picturesque. This is nec
essarily so; the story cannot be looked at as if it
were a photograph. You cannot photograph a
soul. It were impossible for us to have the record
of an eye-witness. In this supreme experience
Jesus was all alone. What the disciples knew
about the Temptation, they must have heard from
the lips of Jesus Himself.
It is told us that in His early teaching, Jesus
always spoke in figurative language, " without a
parable spake He not unto them." They were
like children. To make them appreciate the in
ward, the spiritual, He was used to employing the
kindergarten method, the story way of teaching.
And so the account of the Temptation is to be
read like a parable. Jesus had to " thing " it so
that they could think it. The picturesque de
tails, the realistic setting, the dramatic movement
are to be understood as an attempt through the
form of picture to make intelligible for simple
minds a high mystical experience. As Frederick
W. Robertson says, " The whole majesty of the
Temptation is destroyed if you understand it lit:
erally." The artist Tissot has the sense of it.

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 33
Interpreting the words, " Straightway the Spirit
driveth Him into the wilderness," Tissot pictures
Jesus as borne swiftly on the finger-tips of a gi
gantic spectre; but when you look closely you
see that this great spectre is just the shadow of
Jesus Himself.
The Temptation occupies a significant position
in Jesus' career. It stands like a door between
two rooms, the one a dim, small, meagrely fur
nished chamber; the other a stately, vaulted hall,
flooded with light, lined with great pictures and
furnished with exquisite care. On the one side of
this door is the simple Carpenter of Nazareth, the
dutiful son of Mary and Joseph busy with the
common duties of a mechanic's day. On the
other side of this door is the Teacher, the Christ,
the Victim, the light and life of men from whose
mystic spell the race would not if it could with
draw. On the one side of the Temptation is the
silence of the hidden years of childhood and youth.
On the other side of the Temptation is the au
gust claim to be the Son of God, the unveiler of
the Father, the opener of the eternal to the sons
of men. Before the Temptation, little that His
closest friends thought worth recording; after the
Temptation sayings and doings which were they
written about every one, " I suppose " says
the man who knew Him best, " that even the
world itself would not contain the books that

34 THE MIND OF CHRIST
should be written." Evidently this Temptation
is something very great, something that must be
understood to understand the life of Jesus.
And first we must find out what led up to it.
Jesus spent His boyhood and young manhood in
the little town of Nazareth. The village lay then
as it does now, in a cuplike hollow of the Galilean
hills. These hills which ring it round like a giant
breastwork defend it from the outside world and
made it a natural hermitage for one whose bent
is meditative. But just over the edge of this hol
low, at the summit of these hills upon the south,
there runs a great cleft across the country from
the sea-coast to the Jordan valley. And through
this cleft lies the chief highway between the East
and the West. A little climb from the heart of
the village brought one in sight of a. panorama of
" the kingdoms of the world and the glory of
them." For standing on the hills above Naza
reth and looking southward one could see wind
ing their way along this ancient trunkline the
caravans, whose unceasing movement mingled the
peoples of the earth. Moving like colored beads
upon a thread of gold there were travellers and
merchants, messengers and slaves, and citizens
and haughty officials and soldiers of that proud
Roman race which held the world enthrall.
Here was ample environment for the culture of
a soul. In the little hilltown was the solitude for

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 35
tne quickening of the spiritual sense, and just
a step away was the stirring atmosphere of the
thronging world, the unveiling of the race. In
this seedplot Jesus grew secretly and silently. No
eye may search out the subtle agents which in
the workshop of His soul wove those vast ideas
and ideals which made Him what He was. The
process we may not trace, the result we know.
Still this much we may know, He learned as all
Hebrew boys learned by heart the collection of
the sacred writings. They were not only the lit
erature of His nation, its history and poetry, but
they were its law-books, its religion's text-book.
He drank deep draughts of those dear dreams and
hopes which all Hebrew mothers kept clean and
bright in the cupboard of their faith. With the
home for a schoolroom Mary and Joseph were
His preceptors. He was no son of the schools,
no pupil of the Rabbinic teachers, no novitiate
of the priesthood. The years drew on, bringing
with them, we may not know what eagerness for
the fulfillment of His race's dream, of the golden
age, of its usher and king, the great Messiah.
And then of a sudden in the lifting of an eye
lid, out of the arching heavens into His inmost
soul came that astounding discovery, the golden
age had come, and He was the Messiah, God's
beloved Son through whom the other sons were
to participate in the Kingdom of God. He went

36 THE MIND OF CHRIST
down into the Jordan the Carpenter of Nazareth,
He came out of it the conscious Messiah. The
discovery overwhelmed Him. He the mechanic,
the son of Mary and Joseph was the Father's Son,
the expected Messiah! Could it be true? That
was the vital question. The settlement of that
question with all it involved was the Temptation
of Jesus. The soul in Him needed a loneliness
where He might think, where He might meet the
issue and define His function. It was an awe
some awakening, from mechanic to Messiah, and
straightway the Spirit in Him drove Him into
the wilderness, and He was there in hunger and
thirst of soul, there testing Himself and that stu
pendous self-discovery, there in sweat and blood
of spirit, until at last He had solved these prob
lems, — What was Messiah's work ? Under what
conditions must He do Messiah's work? What
methods must He as Messiah use?
In the Gospel story the scene shifts three times.
First we read, " And when He had fasted forty
days and forty nights, He afterward hun
gered. And the tempter came and said unto Him,
If thou art the Son of God, command that these
stones become bread. But He answered and
said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of
the mouth of God." He was the Son of God,
the question was, what was the Son to do?

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF T>7
Wholly absorbed in His thought Jesus forgot
food, till at last He faced stark need. Hungry
and with not a morsel to eat; hungry and yet
God's Messiah! What a contradiction! How
inadequate His life equipment to fit the dream of
His people. They were looking for, He Himself
had been expecting, a Messiah who should bring
with Him earthly plenty, prosperity and peace.
What was it Isaiah said, " The Spirit of the
Lord Jehovah is upon me; because Jehovah hath
anointed me to preach good tidings unto the
meek; He hath sent me to bind up the broken
hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and
the opening of the prison to them that are bound ;
to proclaim the year of Jehovah's favor, and the1
day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that
mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn
in Zion, to give unto them a garland for ashes,
the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise
for the spirit of heaviness ; that they may be called
trees of righteousness, the planting of Jehovah,
that He may be glorified. And they shall build
the old wastes, they shall raise up the former deso
lations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the
desolations of many generations. And strangers
shall stand and feed your flocks, and foreigners
shall be your ploughmen and your vine-dressers.
But ye shall be named the priests of Jehovah ; men
shall call you the ministers of our God; ye shall

38 THE MIND OF CHRIST
eat the wealth of the nations, and in their glory
shall ye boast yourselves."
That was Isaiah's ideal of Messiah and what
Jesus had been taught to look for. But what a
contrast! Could He be the bringer of earthly
prosperity and temporal ampleness while He Him
self was famished for food? Could He offer
Himself to His countrymen while He was dying
for the simplest necessity of life? Would they
believe in Him? Could He believe in Himself?
unless, there was in Him some strange new power
by which He could turn nothing into abundance!
How eagerly the thought would insinuate itself,
Messiah may be able to turn stones into bread;
such an ability would commend Him to Him
self, commend Him to His nation. But, as
eagerly came another thought, the remembrance
of an old word which Moses had spoken, a word
which He Himself had proved valid in His own
experience, " Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God." Now He saw clearly; the nation's
ideal was low ; they had let their hopes twine about
things earthly while their hopes should have been
spiritual. The deepest need of their life was God;
their insatiate hunger was for the spiritual; a
man was not a body; he had a body, he was a
soul; if the soul died the man died, even though
the body was glutted with plenty.

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 39
Should Messiah have power to make stones
bread, this would not prove Him Son of God;
though men needed bread, though houses and
lands, peace and industrial success were imminent
necessities, still men needed more, freedom from
sin, power for goodness, knowledge of God, knowl
edge of themselves as sons of the Eternal. And
He who would save men must have the richness to
fill these inward wants ; He must be ready to give
life to men's souls, the life which bread cannot
keep going, the life which is nourished by the
word of God. Not to feed bodies but to feed
souls, was Messiah's mission; not to the outward
but to the inward was the Son of God sent. The
question was, should He be the Messiah they
looked for, or the Messiah they needed? Should
He save the outward or the inward life ? Should
He be a mere bread-winner or a life-giver ? That
was the problem He solved for Himself with
those great words, " Man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of
the mouth of God." The time was expecting an
industrial reformation; Jesus saw that His was to
be a spiritual reformation ; they were asking easier
lives, Jesus was to give them holy lives; they
wanted to be saved from Rome; Jesus was to
save them from themselves.
The second scene in the Temptation is told in
these words, " Then the devil taketh Him into the

40 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Holy City ; and he set Him on the pinnacle of the
temple, and saith unto Him, If thou art the Son
of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He
shall give His angels charge concerning thee : and,
on their hands they shall bear thee up, lest haply
thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said
unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not make
trial of the Lord thy God." The question of the
nature of Messiah's work settled for Himself,
Jesus had to face another problem, under what
conditions was He to carry on this work of spirit
ual redemption. His ideal of Messiahship would
seem revolutionary; it would be exasperatingly
disappointing to His countrymen with their Mes
sianic idea of world-power. They would flock to
Him expecting to be fed, and He would have to
say, " Work not for the food which perisheth,
but for the food which abideth unto eternal life,
which the Son of Man shall give unto you: for
Him the Father, even God, hath sealed"; and
would He be able to prove to them that He was
sealed ? When they would demand, " what then
doest thou for a sign, that we may see, and be
lieve Thee ? " would He be able to prove His
eminence by making some unnatural draft on
Providence ?
He would go to the Holy City to claim the
men there for His Father's kingship; other men
had gone to Jerusalem to do this same spiritual

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 4 1
work, and in disappointment Jerusalem had killed
their prophets and stoned them that afore
time were sent unto her. Would he have
to work under their limitations, or could
He expect miraculous intervention? There,
for instance, was that high place at the south
eastern angle of Herod's temple. Suppose they
should in exasperation drag Him to that pinnacle
to fling Him down into the Kedron, flowing four
hundred fifty feet below, would the Father
intervene in His behalf? The Psalmist had sung
of Messiah, " He shall give His angels charge
concerning thee: and, on their hands they shall
bear thee up, lest haply thou dash thy foot against
a stone." He was God's Messiah; could He
claim that promise? Caught there between earth
and heaven, by the unseen hand of His Father
would He not verify His Messiahship beyond a
doubt? Such a spectacle would silence all ques
tion as to His power to give life; it would give
authority to His word when He bade men think
not of mere daily bread, but of the word that
proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
But in a flash there came to Jesus another
thought. He remembered how when the fore
fathers were coming out of Egypt, they lighted
upon a place where there was no water; and be
cause they could get no drink for themselves and
their herds, Israel cried out in doubt and anger,

42 THE MIND OF CHRIST
" Wherefore hast thou brought us up out of
Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle
with thirst ? Is Jehovah among us or not ? " He
saw those Hebrews testing God by their narrow
ideas of Providence, putting the idea of God's
care and purpose to the trial of a mouthful of
water; and in their ingratitude and faithfulness,
He saw the reflection of this suggestion which
had come to Him that He challenge the Father
for some demonstration that He was the Son of
God. And as if that thought were a serpent He
flung it from Him saying, " Thou shalt not make
trial of the Lord thy God." It was the great
word Moses had given Israel reminding them of
their distrust, and Jesus took it up and assimilated
it to His own experience. The issue stood be
fore Him naked, His work was spiritual, its con
ditions must be spiritual. He would seek no ex
ceptional privilege, He would expect to be saved
from none of life's hardship and peril, He would
ask for no supernatural endowment, He would
toil as a man, be a brother to want, sorrow and
blame; it would not be Himself He would seek
to save, His search would be for others. He was
the Son of God, the messenger Son sent to recover
the lost children.
These questions concerning the nature of Mes
siah's lifework and its conditions settled, was
He carried away with a rapture of impatience

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 43
to win the world for His Father? What a great
world it was to win! Standing on the hill-top
near Nazareth, on the edge of the Plain of Es-
draelon, He had seen the world in miniature pass
in review in those ceaseless caravans that used the
highway between the Mediterranean and the Far
East. From that point of vantage He had been
carried often on the wings of imagination to the
utmost limit of time and clime. Now looking
into the serious eyes of His Messiahship, He
could see again what He had seen from His native
hill-crest, " all the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them." And they were all needing Him,
needing this redemption of the inward life, need
ing this nourishing word of God, and
"His spirit leaped within Him to be gone before Him then,
Underneath the light He looks at, in among the throngs of
men."
But, how was He to win them? His Messi
anic work was to be spiritual, and as Messiah He
was to work as a man works. He had settled
those questions forever. But how was it that
men got influence over men? What were the
methods which the great used to win allegiance
for themselves? The ancient empires, Assyria,
Babylon, Persia, Egypt, His fatherland — what
was their glory, where was it? It had vanished
like smoke; the world had only one glory now,
the gleaming radiance of imperial Rome. Her

44 THE MIND OF CHRIST
bronze eagles screamed from the borders of the
mysterious northland to the farthest limits of the
Nile; the word of Caesar was the glory of the
nations which abode between the ancient river of
Eden and the Pillars of Hercules. This was the
world's glory, the arms of the Roman, whose red-
handed procurators sat in every province and
taught the people that power was life's one law,
man's one way to mastery with his fellows. And
should Messiah use this way ? Should He win his
spiritual kingship as Caesar had won his empire?
The narrative reads, " Again, the devil taketh
Him unto an exceeding high mountain, and show-
eth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the
glory of them; and he said unto Him, All these
things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and
worship me." The old method of the prophetic
appeal seemed so abortive; the prophets had come
and gone and still the kingdom was yet to come.
Had not the day of that appeal gone, may not
the day of force have dawned? "Then saith
Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is
written, Thou shalt worship the Lord, thy God,
and Him only shalt thou serve." And what is
God? He is my Father, the Father whose life
is love, whose law is love, whose way is love.
Worship force! Worship God, and God is love;
love is, love shall be my King and Lord. He
was the Son of God, He was the brother of men,

JESUS' IDEA OF. HIMSELF 45
He was the messenger Son sent to recover the
lost brothers.
The three pictures in the panels of the Temp
tation mean this, when Jesus came to Himself,
when He realized His Messiahship, when He tested
the grounds of His splendid new consciousness,
He was made sure that He was to violate the
orthodox ideal of Messiah; while they were ex
pecting God's vicegerent to make Israel a world
power, He as the Father's vicegerent was to bring
in a spiritual kingdom, an inward state in which
the Father was to be sovereign and the love-way
the law.
This is what it meant to Jesus to be Mes
siah, to give to other men, to his brothers the
final truth about God, that God was His Father
and theirs, and to help them to live in the world
as the Father's children, free from care and full
of love. As one has written, " If the story of the
Temptation means anything, it means He mas
tered the title (Messiah) instead of it mastering
Him. The Messianic dream had conquered all
others; He conquered it. He was the Life; it
was the tool of the Life — a tool which had been
constructed for the destruction of Israel's enemy,
but which it was His high mission to reconstruct
and retemper into an instrument of healing and
mercy for the nations. The idea did not make
the Life; the Life picked up the clumsy misfit

46 THE MIND OF CHRIST
idea, cleaned it, reorganized it, humanized it, and
assigned it a function to Himself and to others,
for which by nature it was disqualified — even as
that Life had ever regenerated the natural into
the spiritual, caused old things to pass away, and
made all things new."
His great account with Himself settled, when
next the world saw Him, Jesus was reading the
old prophet's dream of Messiah, how when He
came He would say, " The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, because He anointed me to preach
good tidings to the poor ; He hath sent me to pro
claim release to the captives, and recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the
Lord." And when He had finished (and it is
significant how He stopped reading just at those
words which made the darling thought of Israel
"and the day of vengeance of our God") "He
began to say unto them, To-day hath this Scrip
ture been fulfilled in your ears." This is the sig
nificant in Jesus' claim to be Messiah, while spirit
ualizing the thought of Messiah's work, He saved
for Himself the old messianic thought of Messiah
as God's vicegerent, the first-born of the Father.
He believed His message was the final one after
which there could be no other, that His idea of the
messianic kingdom was the Father's uttermost
possible revelation of religion, that His name for

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 47
God once received, the last word had been spoken
for faith. He knew nothing higher than Him
self save God ; He transcended the authority of the
past; He was more than Moses and David, than
the law or the prophets, than the temple and the
religious codes ; His " I say unto you " was con
scious of no possible revision. " No one," said He,
" knoweth who the Father is, save the Son, and he
to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him."
This was His own idea of Himself, He was so
sure of the finality of His spiritual idea, of His
function as the messenger Son that He staked
His life upon it. The price He paid argues that
He believed He was God's ultimate message to
men. But Jesus believed Himself to be not only the
Son of God, the brother of men, and the messen
ger Son sent to recover the lost brothers, He
also believed Himself to be empowered to impart
to men His ideal spirit of sonship. He thought
of Himself as no mere preacher, nor model, but
He was the Life and the life-giver. Here we
stand at the central shrine in our cathedral.
Everything leads up to this, the altar whose fires
are the glory of the minster. It is the night be
fore He died ; eleven of His friends are His guests
at the Passover meal. To-morrow the little circle
would be shattered. The dogs whom fear had
held in leash were unmuzzled and were snarling

48 THE MIND OF CHRIST
at the door. His friends were helpless to avert
the impending doom. Only one thing they could
do, only one thing He wished them to do and
with that He would go to death well content.
He could endure the cross, He could not endure
that He should be forgotten.
There were many things of which He had told
them of which they needed to be reminded ; but He
felt they needed His words not so much as they
needed Himself. So " as they were eating, Jesus
took bread, and gave to them saying, This is my
body which is given for you, this do in remem
brance of me." In this critical ante-mortem mo
ment He not only saw Himself without stain, but
felt in Himself the power to lift the stain from
hearts on which the crimson lay burning. He
thought of Himself as no mere truth-teller, but as
a life-giver. To those who sought life, He said
" follow me." To those who hungered for truth
He said, " I am the truth." To those who would
see God, He called " I am the way." And with
the word " I am the life " He claimed to live and
to be the dynamic by which men live. He felt
that the man who wanted to live abundantly could
not do without Him ; He was the bread, the water,
the door of life, the vine from which grow all the
branches. Through Him and through Him only
men go to God, not only by what He says, but
more by what He is. " No man knoweth who the

JESUS' IDEA OF HIMSELF 49
Father is, save the Son, and he to whomsoever
the Son willeth to reveal Him."
This is the awesome fact in His idea of Him
self, His calm claim to indispensableness. God's
messenger Son sent to recover the lost brothers,
His message at last is of Himself. Chosen to
point the way to the Father, He knows He best
fulfills His function by pointing men to Himself.
Having as His ideal God's kingship in the soul,
pie believes that the kingship is realized by mak
ing His love-way the life law. The Gospel He
carried was a Gospel of God, but for practical pur
poses it becomes a Gospel of Himself. Called to
tell men of the Father, He knows it enough to
show men Himself.
This is Jesus' idea of Himself, He was the Son
of God, He was the brother of men, He was the
Father's messenger Son sent to recover the lost
brothers, He was empowered to impart to the
brothers His perfect spirit of perfect sonship.
Questions of philosophy are beside the mark,
bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, something
in us votes with Thomas when he kneels and says,
" My Lord and my God."

Ill
JESUS' IDEA OF MAN

" I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.
Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear
fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can
ye except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the
branches." " He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he
do also ; and greater works than these shall he do ; because
I go unto the Father."
" Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect."
" How think ye ? If any man have a hundred sheep, and
one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety
and nine, and go unto the mountains, and seek that which
goeth astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say
unto you, he rejoiceth over it more than over the ninety
and nine which have not gone astray. Even so it is not
the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these
little ones should perish."
" He that believeth hath eternal life."
" Follow me."

Ill
JESUS' IDEA OF MAN
Jesus left no system of theology; He left Him
self as the final idea of God. So also, Jesus left
no system of philosophy; He left Himself as the
final idea of man. When His disciples wanted to
know about the Father, Jesus gave them no< defi
nition, He gave them a living picture, said He,
" He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."
When a young patrician wanted to know about
life, Jesus gave him no theory, He gave Him a
living picture, said He, " Follow me." Would
you know what God is you have to know only
what Jesus is. Would you know Jesus' idea of
man, you have to know only Jesus idea of Him
self. We have seen how Jesus believed Himself to
be the Son of God. He was conscious of a un
ique filial relationship with God. He knew His
sonship was more than other men's, as the in
ventor is more than the apprentice; He knew by
instinct what others had to learn by instruction;
He was the Son, others were becoming Sons. He
S3

54 THE MIND OF CHRIST
knew His sonship was more than other men's, as
the perfect is more than the imperfect; all but He
needed the summons, " ye therefore shall be per
fect, as your heavenly Father is perfect " ; He was
adult, others were adolescent. But He knew
Himself to be the brother of men; His sonship
was not of another kind than men's; it was only
more than men's; there was a difference, but it
was not in the nature, it was in the growth. He
was " the firstborn among many brethren."
Jesus called Himself the light of the world;
but He said to men, " ye are the light of the
world." He said, " he that receiveth me receiveth
Him that sent me " ; but He told men, " He that
receiveth you receiveth me." He claimed to do
divine works ; but He prophesied of men, " the
works that I do shall ye do also, and greater
works than these shall ye do." He believed in a
divine descent for Himself; but He believed
the same for His disciples, " They are not
of this world even as I am not of this
world." He said " the Father and I are one " ;
but He understood that this oneness is possible be
tween men and God, for He prayed, "that they
may be one even as we are." His sonship might
be more than other men's by His perfect knowl
edge of the Father, and His perfect likeness to the
Father, but in principle His sonship is homoge
neous with man's. " I am the vine," said He,

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 55
" ye are the branches ; abide in me, and I in you."
You in me, I in you, one in each other; there ap
pears to be no dividing line; it is a single bundle
of life; human or divine, either or both. Hu
manity opens at its topmost to take in Jesus; di
vinity opens at its lowest to take in man.
" Draw if thou canst the mystic line
Severing rightly His from thine,
Which is human, which divine."
Some day you go down to the shore. Your
dingy lies in a wee reed-fringed inlet of one of
the many bays that indent the coast of Long Is
land. You get into your boat and shove off the
yellow sand. You drop your oars in and then
pull away, away down the winding inlet, from
behind the fringe of reeds, across the little bar,
over the rocking waves of the bay, out into the
deep, green, long, low swell of the limitless ocean.
From the inlet into the ocean! And where did
the inlet end, and where did the ocean begin?
And what is the difference between the water of
the inlet and the water of the ocean ? The same
elements combine in both; the same winds that
blow in from the distances sweep over the sur
faces of both; the same tides which roll in from
the middle seas swell the waves of both. The
difference is shallow and unplumbed, land-locked
and unlimited. But the likeness is more than the

56 THE MIND OF CHRIST
difference, the likeness of water, wind and tides
which bring the ocean into the reed-fringed inlet,
and carry you out of the inlet upon the bosom of
the shoreless flood. Man and Jesus, the inlet and
the ocean; the divine nature becomes human in
Jesus, the human nature becomes divine in Jesus.
God has his human life and unveils it in Jesus;
man has his divine life and it is unveiled in Jesus.
You come immediately upon this idea of the
divinity of man when you hear Jesus teaching the
disciples to pray saying " Our Father who art in
heaven." There are certain scenes which quicken
the imagination. Abraham, his back upon the an
cient ancestral home, his camels bearing him and
his childless wife across the desert to an unknown
land, his eyes fastened upon the star-lit sky,
dreaming of himself as the patriarch of a new
people, like those stars innumerable and like them
separate from the world of men. Columbus,
standing bare-browed upon the deck of his little
caravel, with Spain a thousand leagues behind
across the desolate Atlantic, and gazing at a thin
blue line broadening above the western horizon
to become at last a new world full of life and
liberty and happiness for the old. Luther, the
rustic monk, in the hall of the bishop's palace at
Worms, face to face with his sovereign, the pope's
legate and a dazzling throng of august dignitaries,
responding as they adjure him to recant his new

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 57
religion, " Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,
God help me ; Amen." Such scenes, because they
mark crises in the life of the race inflame the im
agination. But that sight of Jesus and the fishermen pray
ing together transcends these and all other scenes
in awesomeness and immensity of issue. Here
we watch the discovery of a new people, a new
world, a new religion. A new people which shall
care to claim no forbear but God; a new world
which shall know no alien nor citizen, but only man
the brother of Christ; a new religion which shall
know no elect nor reprobate, but only man the
dear child of the Father who is in heaven.
Jesus is alone with His disciples. There are
Peter and Andrew his brother; they are rude,
unlearned Galilean fishermen. There are John
and James, both sons of Zebedee, the prosperous
ship-owner of Bethsaida. There is Matthew, the
citizen of populous Capernaum, one-time revenue
officer in the service of the accursed Roman.
There is Simon, the political mal-content, the
fanatic nationalist, the hater of publicans like
Matthew. There is Philip, a man whose motto
in life seems to be " seeing is believing." There
are Bartholemew the mystic, Judas the bigot,
Thomas the skeptic, and Thaddeus and the other
James. The gamut of human kind, character and
condition is here, the race in miniature. The rich

58 THE MIND OF CHRIST
man is here and the poor, the learned and the un
lettered, the good and the evil. They stand with
bowed heads praying; Jesus leads, they follow,
" Our Father who art in heaven." Our Father,
Jesus' and John's, Peter's and Matthew's, Bar
tholomew's and Judas'; the Father of the rich
man and the poor, the Father of the learned and
the unlettered, the Father of the good and the
evil. All are brothers in one family; differences
of culture, condition, capacity and character are
like the differences in their varied colored dress,
important for other relationships, but for this re
lationship mere accidents.
Beneath the dress breathes the soul, that human
life which is born " not of blood, nor of the will
of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God,"
and this soul knits the twelve and Him into one
common brotherhood. Evidently if He is a Son
of God they, too, are sons ; obviously if His origin
makes Him divine, they have the same origin and
must be divine. For that is the meaning of Fa
therhood and sonship. For a human to call God
" Father " what is that but to humanize God ; for
a man to claim deity as his forbear what is that
but to divinize man? A father and his children
are shareholders in the same stock; if the father's
shares are divine, the children's must be, no mat
ter what may be their holdings; were the chil
dren's shares human, the father's are the same,

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 59
though his holdings are infinite. Once grant
Fatherhood, and there can be only one conclusion,
" now are we children of God," and we must be
"like Him," as St. John puts it. The Lord's
Prayer raises humanity to the eternal peerage.
And nowhere did Jesus intimate that there was any
man excepted from this high birthright.
The parable of the prodigal son puts the case
explicitly. That story was told just to prove that
a sinner never ceases to be a son, that the Son of
God is warranted in being friends with publicans
because that sort of folk can say as well as He,
" Father." " Both the Pharisees and scribes mur
mured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and
eateth with them. And He spake unto them this
parable, saying, A certain man had two sons," and
the younger wearying of the home restraints went
far away, and squandered his patrimony in riotous
living. One morning he awoke to find himself
stripped and outcast, something the world had no
use for, except to make a swineherd. Then in the
fresh light of this new experience, there surged
again the far-ebbed memory of his home and his
childhood, and this inward tide swept back his
penitent heart within hearing of the father's voice
and a revelation of the father's love, by which
love he was reborn and reinstated. And this is
how Jesus described the moment when the tide
turned, " he came to himself." Up to that mo-

60 THE MIND OF CHRIST
ment the boy had been beside himself, but when
he came back to himself, he found that inward
self crying " father." And Jesus went on to say
that the father saw the boy while he was yet a
great way off, and that he ran and fell upon his
neck and kissed hiiro; kissed this soiled, shrunken,
shame-faced man, and said " my son."
And the way Jesus told that parable gives us the
right to infer that no human being can ever lose
the right to say " Father," that all men every
where, no matter how far gone, are God's sons.
Appearances may be against it; but Jesus talked
as if it were self-evident; it was self-evident to
Him, because He knew " what was in man." He
knew " we are sons," as one apostle put it, " par
takers of the divine nature," as another expressed
it. " The Image of the invisible God," as St.
Paul called Jesus, knew that men are " the image
and glory of God," as the same apostle wrote.
With this idea of man's divine descent, Jesus
appraised life as of incalculable value. No word
is oftener on His lips than " life." But one feels
that He is embarrassed by the word, that He
means more by it than men mean. For Him the
word does not stand for vitality, existence. Life
is more than meat; it cannot subsist on bread; it
consisteth not of abundance of things ; no thing is
its equivalent ; " what shall a man be profited,
if he shall gain the whole world and forfeit his

IESUS' IDEA OF MAN 6l
life? or what shall a man give in exchange for
his life ? " To leave no doubt in men's mind that
life is not this squalid thing they think of when
they talk about life, Jesus had another word which
He was accustomed to use with it; He talked of
" eternal life," meaning not mere everlasting life,
life that lasts beyond time, but life that has the
quality of eternity, the timeless quality, the divine
quality; the eternal life is the kind of life God
has ; God is its source and nourishment. And this
eternal life He claimed for Himself and said men
shared with Him and God; only they needed it
" more abundantly." So one soul had infinite
worth to the Father; He could not afford to lose
one life, no matter how small, how far fore-
wandered ; " See," said He, " that ye despise not
one of these little ones ; for I say unto you, that in
heaven their angels do always behold the face of
my Father who is in heaven."
Rich as the shepherd is with his safe folded
ninety and nine, he must seek the solitary lamb
which has strayed away. Wealthy as the woman
is with her nine coins, she cannot afford to lose
one, but must sweep the house and do hei* utmost
to recover the one that rolled away and was lost.
Maybe the father has another boy at home, and a
house full of servants, but if there is one away, he
must watch and wait and keep scanning the hori
zon for a sight of him coming back, and then

62 THE MIND OF CHRIST
when this one has returned there is the banquet
for which the calf has been fatted. Nothing lets
you into Jesus' value judgment of life like that
saying that at first sight looks so unfair, " There
shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that re
penteth, more than over ninety and nine righteous
persons, who need no repentance;" that is because
from His way of looking at God and man, the
man has no equivalent, he is of infinite worth.
But along with His appreciation of man's in
trinsic value, his essential "sonship, his infinite
worth, Jesus combines a sane estimate of man's
actual condition. Men are God's children, but
they are " evil " children ; all of them must pray,
" forgive us our debts," and in all of them lurk
" evil thoughts " and sensual inclinations which
defile. Jesus believes Himself to be the messen
ger Son sent to the brothers, because the brothers
are " lost " ; they are lost like sheep that have heard
the call of the wild ; they are lost like a coin that
has dropped out of circulation and so ceased of
its true purpose; they are lost like a boy who
has gone away, ignoring his Father's rights to
his service and affection. And so, according to
Jesus, man's sonship is a fact, but it is also a
task ; man is not only a son, but he has to become
a son; and even when he comes to himself and
says " Father," realizes his sonship, he is " yet
afar off." But (and this is the impressive thing

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 63
in Jesus' appraisement of human nature) He be
lieved that man is able for the task.
• Jesus dared to believe that man could incarnate
the moral values which He Himself realized ; they
could be sons, perfect as their heavenly Father is
perfect. As a recent writer says, " If there was
anything new in the thought of Jesus it was this."
Jesus believed in man, in man's essential affinity
with God, in man's ability to repeat His life. If
He did not, then one must despair of His sanity,
if not His honesty. Only on the belief that He
believed Himself imitable can we explain His treat
ment of the woman of Samaria and Mary of Mag-
dala, Simon Peter and Zacchaeus. Only on the
belief that He had unqualified faith in humanity's
unbounded possibilities can the Beatitudes and the
" new commandment " be saved from the charge
of insincerity. Only on the belief that He meant
it literally when he said, " follow me," can we con
tinue to trust Him as the one who " did no sin,
neither was guile found in His mouth." " Follow
me," He said to fishmongers and aristocrats, to
publicans and skeptics, nay, it was the word He
had for every man ; " if any man would come
after me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me " ; and that word had only one
meaning, " where I am there shall also my servant
be." This fishmonger, this aristocrat, this pub
lican, this skeptic, any man who can follow an-

64 THE MIND OF CHRIST
other must have the same capacity in him. A
fish cannot follow a bird; a bird cannot follow a
man; only like can follow like. If Jesus is per
fect, then His " follow me " means that any man
can be perfect; it is the same as saying, you can
be what I am, you can do what I do, you were
made for this, you are most yourself when you
are most like me.
In one of his essays, Emerson has a striking
passage in which he calls attention to the way in
which the machinery of society adapts itself auto
matically to the failures of human nature. A man
in the heat of passion strikes off a crime, a thing
which in his youth he would have shuddered at
the thought of. But once guilty, and though
guilty for the first time, society is ready for him,
the criminal; there are the police, the courtroom,
the judges, the prisoner's dock, the sentence, the
jail; they all deal with his case just as though
they had been expecting this man to do this par
ticular crime. It is a sad commentary upon the
way in which we think of human nature. We
expect the break, we look for the crash, we take
it for granted that the fall will come, we believe
that the fall is the natural thing, the thing this
man was made for. We feel that the worst we
do is the natural thing for us to do, the best is out
of our line. We must go on at this low level,
leaping upward once in a while in some uncom-

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 65
mon act of purity or love, leaping upward like
some single wave tossed above sea level by the
churning of some vessel's screw, but falling back
again into the same old, dark, cold surge. The
upward leap is an accident, the bitter level is the
real thing.
But the very opposite of all this is the belief
of Jesus. He is not surprised at man's best
moments; He expects the act of purity or love; He
counts the best the thing we were made for,
the worst the unnatural thing; He looks for man
to be not the thing He has been, but the better he
can be ; He says " be perfect," and He knows it is
possible. Man is God's son, without Jesus God's
lost son, but withal able to come to himself and to
say, " I can do all things in Christ which strength-
eneth me." That is Jesus' idea of man.
He that hath seen Jesus hath seen the Father;
he that hath seen Jesus hath seen himself. The
first essential element in the religion of Jesus is
the humanity of God, and the second is like unto
it, and it is this the divinity of man. Two rivers
that rise thousands of miles apart and drain the
watershed of a nation, meet and mingle in the
Mississippi. From the west the Missouri comes.
Far up in the Rockies' virgin snows and amid the
Paradise-like beauties of the Yellowstone Park it
is born. For three thousand miles it flows
through mountain and prairie, an unconfined,

66 THE MIND OF CHRIST
fresh and refreshing stream, to blend itself at last
with the Mississippi, and with it find the parent
sea. From the east the Ohio comes. At the foot
of a sooty city it rises; for nine hundred miles it
drags its way through a score of cities, each of
which pours its decay into its already overbur
dened waters. At last, weary of its weight of sedi
ment, the Ohio empties its waters into the Mis
sissippi, to find therein another destiny. Thus the
river from the west fulfills itself, and the river
from the east rediscovers itself in the one central
flood, whose waters are the source of an inex
haustible fertility and bear great ships which de
termine the destinies of peoples.
Two rivers that rise on opposite sides of hu
man experience drain the race's feeling about
religion. From the one side, rising in the fresh,
simple beginnings of human life, flows the stream
of faith, the sure feeling that God is and that He
is the source and satisfaction of life. From the
other side of experience, from our wretched fail
ures and our moral defeats, flows the stream of
fact, the fact of depravity and utter hopelessness.
The stream of faith refreshes and sweetens life;
but the stream of fact has the stain of evil in it,
and the poison of despair ; and both of these rivers
unite in one imperial Manhood, whose life is the
race's living water, and whose Spirit holds the
secret of humanity's destiny. In Jesus Christ

JESUS' IDEA OF MAN 67
human nature's faith in God and human nature's
fact of despair conflow. In Him the age-long
feeling after God is taken up, verified, enriched,
and at last united with its eternal source. In
Him the fact of human nature's despair is taken
up, dissolved, and then rediscovered by the
counter-fact of human nature's divinity. In the
mighty flood of Jesus' teaching, and His life, man
finds his God a Father of boundless, gratuitous,
ungrudging love, and finds himself a son destined
to be like his Father, when he shall see Him even
as He is.

IV
JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION

" Consider the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap ;
which have no store-chamber nor barn; and God feedeth
them : of how much more value are ye than the birds ! And
which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto the
measure of his life? If then ye are not able to do even that
which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest?
Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, neither
do they spin ; yet I say unto you, Even Solomon in all
his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God
doth so clothe the grass in the field, which to-day is, and
to-morrow is cast into the oven; how much more shall He
clothe you, O ye of little faith? And seek not ye what ye
shall eat, and what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful
mind. For all these things do the nations of the world seek
after; but your Father knoweth that ye have need of these
things. Yet seek ye His kingdom, and these things shall
be added unto you. Fear not, little flock; for it is your
Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom."
" Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should
depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His
own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end.
And Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things
into His hands, and that He came forth from God and
goeth unto God, riseth from supper, and layeth aside His
garments ; and He took a towel, and girded Himself. Then
He poureth water into the basin, and began to wash the
disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith
He was girded. So when He had washed their feet, and
taken His garments, and sat down again, He said unto
them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me,
Teacher, and, Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I
then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet,
ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have
given you an example, that ye also should do as I have done
to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, A servant is not
greater than his lord; neither one that is sent greater than
he that hath sent him."

IV
JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION
Religion no longer is called an invention; it is
classed with the elemental instincts.
" As the hart panteth after the water brooks,
So panteth my soul after Thee, O God,"
is not only sublime poetry, but exact science.
And religion is allowed to be not only a primary
but a universal instinct. History proves that " all
men yearn after the gods " ; " humanity is incur
ably religious," as a great Frenchman expresses it.
One defines religion at his own risk. In this it
is a case of " many men, many minds." But this
may be said to be the common denominator of all
the definitions, religion is a conscious relation to
God. To know a man's religion you have to
know only the man's idea of his relation to God.
To know Jesus' religion you have to know only
Jesus' idea of God as " our Father." But for
practical operation every relationship is at once a
feeling and an action. A relationship is worth as
much as the feelings it evokes, and the actions
which these feelings impel. A relationship which
71

72 THE MIND OF CHRIST
made one neither hot nor cold, which never made
him say " yes " or " no," or move hand or foot
is not worth while. To be real and vital a rela
tionship must quicken love or hate, trust or fear,
must set a-going speech or silence, conduct and
character. What practical difference did the idea
of God's Fatherhood make in Jesus' inward and
outward life; how did it make Him feel, what
did it make Him do? When we answer those
questions we get Jesus' idea of religion.
The night before Jesus died will be cherished
always for two equally beautiful and tender inci
dents which occurred therein. The one was the
Last Supper, the other was the washing of the
disciples' feet. Of the two disciples who were
with Him that night and kept a record of what
He did, St. Matthew saved the picture of the
Christ bending forward with the platter and the
cup; and St. John chose the picture of the Christ
bending down with the basin and the towel.
Either picture is characteristic of the Master. All
His life He was bending over other men's empti
ness and pain. So either the Christ bending for^
ward with the broken bread, saying, " take, eat," or
the Christ bending over the travel-pinched feet of
the disciples, show Him as He was and loved to be.
St. John's picture is especially interesting be
cause he wrote his gospel with the confessed pur
pose of proving that Jesus is the Son of God,

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 73
and in this incident the apostle shows us how this
filial sense makes Jesus feel and what it makes
Him do. He begins the story with these striking
words, " Jesus, knowing that the Father had given
all things into His hands, and that He came forth
from God, and goeth unto God;" in other words,
the Father-Son relationship was the cause of what
followed. It was this conscious sonship which
bent Jesus down till He knelt at the feet of men,
who, in the fitness of things, ought to have been
kneeling before Him and washing His feet with
their tears. We have said that a man's religion
is the feelings and then the acts which result from
the relationship between himself and God as he
knows Him. What, then, was the feeling of this
Man who knew that God was His Father, that
He came forth from God and was going unto
God? It is Good Friday eve. He and eleven of His
friends are gathered in another friend's guest-room
for a last tryst. He had left them a keepsake,
something to remember Him by. The hour is
late. Already by the light of their fitful torches
the whips have gathered their pack for the ugly
deed in the Garden of Gethsemene. He knows
this ; He knew " that His hour was come that He
should depart out of this world unto the Father."
He has watched the dark shadow creeping always
nearer, now He can feel its chill sweep His cheek.

74 THE MIND OF CHRIST
He has come to the moment- when conscience
searches the heart of the average man with fingers
tipped with fire. He is a very young man, with
all a young man's love of living; but He has to
give it up. He had set His heart upon one thing,
and that one thing seemed to human vision to be
a will-o'-the-wisp. And what is He doing? Bathing the feet of a
few fishermen. What ineffable calmness! What
unbroken serenity! Unconscious of any need in
Himself, He seems conscious only of the need of
the friends He is to leave so soon. With no
feeling of personal indebtedness to God or man,
He is concerned only to make His comrades feel
that He knew about their debt and was going to
help them make up their deficit. With the su
preme court ready to vote Him a failure and give
Him a felon's death, He knew Himself bound to
succeed, and reckoned His death to be the birth-
pangs of a new humanity. He knows no inward
unrest; He feels Himself living a kind of life on
which death has no lien; let death come, when or
how, the Father's hand will be on everything in it,
as it has been on everything in life. The world
rests in the Father ; it is His house ; and He is the
Father's Son; and the Father cares, why should
He ? "I go unto the Father. Peace I leave with
you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 75
giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be
troubled, neither let it be fearful."
Such quiet, such peace, the world has seen
nothing just like it. He is in the world as a child
in a Father's house, free from care, full of trust.
And that night is all of a piece with the way He
had always lived. He never worried, never
fretted, never feared the future or any change.
Long ago He had told the disciples, " Consider
the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap ; which
have no store-chamber nor barn ; and God feedeth
them: of how much more value are ye than the
birds! And which of you by being anxious can
add a cubit unto the measure of his life? If then
ye are not able to do even that which is least, why
are ye anxious concerning the rest ? Consider the
lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not,
neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, Even
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one
of these. But if God doth so clothe the grass in
the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast
into the oven ; how much more shall He clothe you,
O ye of little faith?"
Here meets us one of the surprising traits of the
gospel. Jesus seems so merciful toward sins that
we excoriate. He makes friends with a penitent
adulteress; He can hardly abandon the treacher
ous Judas. But there are two sins He paints jet

76 THE MIND OF CHRIST
black; the first is the sin of conceit; the second is
the sin of anxiety. Not the adulteress nor the be
trayer seems so hopelessly far gone as the man
who knows it all and the man who lives as if God
were dead. He talks about worry as if it were
a person, a soldier in armor, a tyrant, nay, as if it
were Satan himself, something to be fought to the
finish. When a man sets his heart upon a mere
thing, something to eat, or wear or live in, when
he trembles at the thought of losing it, when he
kills himself to keep it, Jesus says that man is a
heathen, " for after all these things do the Gen
tiles seek," these alien races who know not God.
To fret about a dinner, or a bit of lace or fur
nishing is an outrage against God ; God, who dines
the raven, weaves the gossamer for the lilies and
shelters the sparrow of the street.
Care is a denial of God; it is blank atheism.
From Jesus' point of view the opposite of faith is
not skepticism, which is doubt of the prevailing
orthodoxy; but faith's antinomy is fear of the
future, fret about the vicissitudes of living.
" Why are ye fearful ? " He called to the despairing
disciples, as they anticipated shipwreck on the Sea
of Galilee, " Have ye not yet faith? " " O ye of
little faith, why reason ye among yourselves?"
said He one day, when He found them fretting
over an empty bread-basket. Faith to Jesus meant
the quiet assurance that a man rests for now and

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 77
forever in the hollow of the Father's hand. So
He talked and so He died. The dying was all
new to Him, but it was the Father's will ; the Fa^
ther was here as He had been in every circum
stance of His career, and so " Father, into Thy
hands I commend my spirit."
We marvel at His tranquillity, His steadfast
ness, His unruffled acceptance of the world's hot
and cold, sweet and bitter, smooth and rough.
He knew " that He came forth from God and was
going unto God," the world was but the Father's
house, and He a child in it, a child free from care,
a child full of trust. This was the feeling Jesus
got from His idea of God's Fatherhood.
And now what were the actions of this Man, who
knew that He came forth from God and was go
ing to God, what did this filial relationship make
Him do? "Jesus, knowing that the Father had
given all things into His hands, and that He came
forth from God and goeth unto God, riseth from
supper, and layeth aside His garments; and He
took a towel and girded Himself. Then He pour-
eth water into the basin and began to wash the
disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel
wherewith He was girded." Did they know what
He had done unto them? They called Him
Teacher, and, Lord ; and He was ; and the Teacher
and Lord was washing their feet. They could
never forget that; service was the crown and

78 THE MIND OF CHRIST
glory of sonship; the way to get up was to get
down; one must stoop to conquer; belief in God's
Fatherhood involved belief in man's brotherhood.
Nothing that He could have said about it could
have cut that truth so deep in their hearts as the
feeling of the Lord's hands on their feet. They
must live in the world as children in a Father's
house; but they must remember that the Father's
house is full of children. That was the one truth
He had set most store by.
Fresh from His self-discovery as the Father's
messenger Son sent to the lost children, He began
His search with the promise of good news for the
poor, release for the captives, recovering of sight
for the blind, and liberty for them that are bruised.
And how well He fulfilled His promise is shown
by the fact that He got the nickname of the
" friend of publicans and sinners." In the Ser
mon on the Mount He defined the perfect life as
loving one's enemies and praying for those who
persecute, and He kept pace with that ideal down
to the end. One once asked Him the way to the
perfect life, and He gave two rules, love of God,
and love of neighbor as one's self, and then He
told the story of the Good Samaritan to make it
clear that the second rule was as important as the
first. And everybody knows that the Good Sa
maritan is only another name for Jesus.
It gives one pause to see how little Jesus says

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 79
about loving God. He does indeed say that the
first commandment is " Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."
But apart from this there is no recorded discourse
upon the theme of love to God, and there is not
one parable to illustrate it. When He talks about
love it seems that it is love toward men He thinks
most about, desires most to produce. Of the
Beatitudes, two concern our attitude toward God,
humility and pureness of heart; one concerns our
attitude toward Himself, when we are reviled for
His sake ; but five concern our attitude toward our
fellow men. Love toward God expressed in a
temple offering is not to be thought of until a
man is on loving terms with his neighbor, " If
therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar,
and there rememberest that thy brother hath
aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the
altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy
brother, and then come and offer thy gift."
The redeeming power of charity, He teaches in
the parable of the unjust steward; inhumanity is
the unpardonable sin is the lesson of the story of
Dives and Lazarus; and the parables of the lost
sheep, the lost coin and the lost boy, spoken in de
fence of His own great love for the sinners,
prove that love is of God, for God is love. The
proof of friendship with Jesus is love one to an-

80 THE MIND OF CHRIST
other. Indeed, if one loves his fellows Jesus ac
cepts it as an equivalent for the love of Himself.
So He taught in the parable of the last judg
ment. He said at that great assize men would
be divided as when a shepherd puts his sheep on
one side and his goats on another. Some would
have this said to them, " Come, ye blessed of my
Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from
the foundation of the world;" others would hear
the awful words, " Depart from me, ye cursed,
into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil
and his angels." And the reason for this separa
tion is a remarkable one; the question asked is
not, Did you love God? but, Did you love me?
Those represented as entering into eternal felicity
are told that they are so favored because they gave
Jesus food when He was hungry, drink when He
was thirsty, clothes when He was naked, they
healed Him when He was sick, visited Him when
He was in prison. The righteous astonished to
hear this, tell Jesus that they had never seen Him,
never heard of Him, to which He responds, "No,
you may not have seen me personally, may not
have heard of me, but in doing these things for
the little ones, the weak ones, the obscure men
and women, you were really doing them for me."
Those who are represented as shut out from God's
presence are told that they are condemned because
they never fed Jesus, never gave Him to drink,

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 8 1
never clothed Him, healed Him, visited Him in
prison. To which these reply that these are the
very things they did do for Jesus Himself.
" Nay," the Christ answers, " to me personally
you may have showed mercy, but inasmuch as ye
did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not
unto me." The obvious lesson of this parable is
that Jesus set more store by loving others than by
loving Him, that pure religion is for practical
purposes the daily exercise of neighborly love and
pity. One may object that such a view makes religion
just mere morality, a thing which can do without
God; that Buddhism can produce it, or Islam or
Confucianism. The answer to this contention is
that for centuries these religions have had wor
shippers, but they have failed to generate this love-
spirit. When the Chinese Commissioners visited
Chicago they were shown its railways, its ware
houses, its factories, its hospitals, Hull House and
the Young Men's Christian Association. " What
impressed you most ? "someone asked these Con-
fucianists. "The hospitals, Hull House and the
Young Men's Christian Association," was the an
swer. Railways, factories and warehouses were
common things in China; they were not so large
nor so many as those in Chicago, to be sure; but
these things China did not have, hospitals where
sick folks were healed without pay, Hull House

82 THE MIND OF CHRIST
where the overborne were befriended for love's
sake, the Young Men's Christian Association
where young men of culture and social standing
gave their time and strength to be big brothers
to fellows who were lonely and forlorn. These
things Confucianism had not given China; these
things Jesus' idea of God's fatherhood had given
Chicago; these things were only where the son-
ship which informed the soul of Jesus informed
the souls of men who were called by His adorable
name. And so Jesus' kind of love and pity cannot
do without God, it grows out of the idea that God
is our Father; but "the love of one's neighbor is
the only practical proof on earth of that love of
God which is strong in humility."
Believing that so strongly, one does not wonder
that Jesus should have spent His last evening with
the disciples in making them feel that He counted
service the one thing worth while. He had many
things to say unto them, many truths of God and
destiny which He might unveil before their vision,
many riddles of existence which he might have
solved while they waited ; but there was little time
for talk ; there was time for one act ; words might
be forgotten, such an act would live while memory
hung together. Very deliberately He rose from
the table, folded up the seamless cloak, girded Him
self with the towel, filled a basin with water, and
before any one realized what He was doing He was

JESUS' IDEA OF RELIGION 83
down on His knees bathing their feet. Then
there was a brief prayer in the same theme, the
Jesus theme as musicians might say, the theme of
brotherly service, and He opened the door and
went out to write the same theme in His own
blood and hang it on a cross.
Jesus lived in the world as in a Father's house ;
but He remembered that the house was full of
children. The sense of His Father as our Father
made Him not only the trustful child, but also the
loving brother. The feeling His idea of God bred
in Him was childlike trust; the acts His idea of
God brought out were deeds of brotherly love.
To trust God as the Father who is doing and will
do the best for one, to do the best for men as the
children of the Father that is Jesus' idea of re
ligion. To believe that God is one's Father and
to live in the world as in the Father's house, that
is free from care, to believe that God is the Fa
ther of all men and to live in the world as in the
Father's house full of children, that is full of love,
that is the religion of Jesus.

V
JESUS' IDEA OF SIN

" I have found my sheep which was lost"
" I have found the piece which I had lost."
" This my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost,
and is found."
"The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which
was lost."

V
JESUS' IDEA OF SIN
In his studies of the " Varieties of Religious
Experience," Prof. William James says, " There
is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions
all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: —
first, an uneasiness ; and second, its solution. The
uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a
sense that there is something wrong about us as
we naturally stand. The solution is a sense that
we are saved from the wrongness by making
proper connection with the higher powers."
There is a universal feeling that there is something
wrong with us; so then a real religion must take
account of this wrongness; and since it is the men
who are most right who most feel the wrongness,
we may expect that the matter will bulk large in
the teaching of Jesus.
Jesus does not talk much about life's wrong
ness in the abstract. His practise is that of the
physician, diagnosis and cure. But when He does
stop in the midst of His practise to talk about it,
He has one name for this wrongness; He calls it
87

88 THE MIND OF CHRIST
being " lost." " The Son of Man is come to
seek and to save that which was lost," He says.
And when the ethical aristocrats of His day com
plained about His friendship with the " sinners,"
He described these " sinners " as " lost " things,
telling three stories, one of a lost sheep, another
of a lost coin, a third of a lost boy. If we want
to find out what is wrong with life, what was
Jesus' idea of sin, we have to understand what He
meant by being " lost." The more we study the
fifteenth chapter of what somebody calls " the
most beautiful book in the world," in which Jesus
gives His definition of being lost, the clearer we
see that the three parables are not three separate
stories, but three little chapters of one story of
the soul of man. They are related like the three
primary colors which mingle in white light. The
story of the lost sheep is like the red, the story of
the lost coin like the blue, and the story of the lost
boy most luminous, nearest the white truth, is the
yellow. The three stories read together, red,
blue and yellow, throw the white light on the great
fact of sin.
A shepherd had a flock of an hundred sheep;
one wandered away; and the shepherd left the
ninety and nine in the fold and went hunting for
the one that was lost. And when he had found
it, he laid it across his shoulders and trudging
home called to his friends, " Rejoice with me, for

JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 89
I have found my sheep which was lost." A
woman had ten pieces of money; she lost one;
forthwith she lighted a lamp, swept the house,
took no rest until the coin lay once again in her
hand, and then she had a celebration with her
friends, because, as she put it, " I have found the
piece which I had lost." A man had two sons.
One day the younger of them said to his father,
" Father, give me the portion of thy substance
that falleth to me," and getting it, he went far
away from home and squandered his fortune in
folly. At last, stripped and starving, he was
compelled to hire out as a swineherd. So situ
ated, the boy came to his senses, and memory con
jured up the picture of the old home, with its
abundance even for the servants. And he re
solved to go back home, fling himself upon his
father's pity, and beg just for a servant's berth.
And all the time of his absence his father must
have been scanning the horizon for a sight of the
boy, for one day, after the son started home, the
father spied him afar off, and he ran and fell on
his neck and kissed him, and before the prodigal
could get to the point of asking to be hired as a
servant, the servants at the father's bidding were
serving him, doing everything to make the boy
feel that he belonged in the home as a son and
nothing less. And they had a banquet that night,
and great joy, and this was the reason the father

90 THE MIND OF CHRIST
gave for it, " for this, my son was dead, and is
alive again; he was lost, and is found."
There can be no question as to the meaning
Jesus meant to convey by these parables. Each
one of them moves between two poles, human life
as it is, and human life as it ought to be. Human
life as it is is the sheep in the wilderness, the coin
in the corner, the boy in the pig-stye. And hu
man life as it ought to be is the sheep restored to
the fold, the coin in the housewife's hand, the boy
enriched with his father's favor. " Lost " is the
word that describes life as it is ; " found " is the
word that describes life as it ought to be.
What is a lost thing? We never call the big
horn sheep of the Rockies lost sheep, because they
are wild sheep, and the mountains are the place
where wild sheep belong. But if one lamb strays
away from the ranch and up into the fastnesses
of the mountains, we call him a lost sheep, because
he has heard and obeyed the call of the wild, has
gone back to the lower life of the wilderness. We
never speak of the gold and silver in the quartz
of Alaska as lost money, because it is not money,
but just raw metal which no one has used. But
if you should lose your purse full of gold or silver,
you would advertise for the money you had lost;
lost, because it is stamped metal made to be a
medium of exchange, and now fallen out of use.
Among the gang of street gamins who gathered

JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 91
around the great newspaper houses about mid
night last night there were a lot of little chaps
whom no one ever thinks of as lost boys, because
they have no home, no other relations than their
ragged comrades. But if in some way your little
boy had been among them last night, the police
would have taken notice of a lost boy; lost, be
cause he was away from his relations. And so a
lost thing is a thing which has become wild,
dropped out of use, got out of its natural relations.
And Jesus says men are lost, living in their lower
life, not fulfilling their true purpose, self-assertive,
out of their true relationships.
What has experience taught us about human
nature ? " It is an easy thing to make up one's
mind," said Grizel. " It's easy," said Tommy,
" to you that have just one mind, but if you had
as many minds as I have, — " The most of us
feel with Tommy. We have two minds, the one
thinks one way, the other thinks the other. One
part of us says " yes," the other part says " no."
The good man feels coiled up in his heart the
same springs which, unwinding, stain the crim
inal's hand red. The criminal has moments when
he is impelled to do the same things which have
become a habit in the white soul. Good and bad
feel these same opposing compulsions in their
bosom, watching each other. Dr. Jekyl and Mr.
Hyde each has a first cousin living with each one

92 THE MIND OF CHRIST
of us. Every one has this double life, the higher
and lower. St. Paul's words need no explanation
for experience, " The good which I would I do
not; but the evil which I would not, that I prac
tise. For I delight in the law of God after the in
ward man ; but I see a different law in my members,
warring against the law of my mind, and bringing
me into captivity under the law of sin which is in
my members."
And what experience knows, science certifies.
It says that human nature is double. We have an
animal life and another life, an outward self and
an inward. " The brain of the chimpanzee," says
Dr. W. H. Thompson, " as far as structure goes,
presents us with not only every lobe, but with
every convolution of the human brain." " When
fully grown," says another scientist, " there is al
most nothing in man's anatomy to distinguish
him from his nearest allies among other animals.
Almost bone for bone, nerve for nerve, muscle for
muscle, he is the same." A human's appetites are
the same as a pig's, only more aesthetic; what he
calls competition is just a bull-dog's combative-
ness refined; and his acquisitiveness is the bee's
instinct at work in a steel, fire-proof hive of in
dustry. A human is a perfect animal, and more.
There is in man an inward self which science says
puts a gulf between man and the animals, an in
ward self which makes the most ignorant savage

JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 93
more different from a horse, than a horse is from
an oyster. Sir Oliver Lodge writes about the
" soul " as something different from the " body,"
something different, too, from the thing which
keeps an animal alive; he says man has a body,
and man is a soul. A horse is bred for body;
weight, pace and cleanness of limb count in him;
but a man is valued not for the body, the muscle,
form and features. This is what we desire in a
man, the man who is to be our comrade, our legis
lator, our teacher, our physician, a keen sense of
"ought" and "ought not," a great will, a deep
reverence for law, a consciousness of a relation
ship which reaches outward as far as humanity
goes, upward as far as infinity. It is character we
seek to culture in man; the inward, not the out
ward we set store by in human nature. As Amiel
suggests, " man begins his career as a tamer of
wild beasts and these wild beasts are his passions."
And now, see how the parables fit. Given a
man who lives all his life for the lusts of the
minute, for fine food, a rich wardrobe, a great
house ; in mere getting and spending he lays waste
his powers ; his ideal is to come to a time when he
can say to himself, thou hast much goods laid up
for many years, take thine ease, eat, drink and be
merry. What is this man doing but living for the
herbs and the grass of things, the things which
to-day are and to-morrow are cast into the oven?

94 THE MIND OF CHRIST
What figure fits him so well as a sheep which has
heard the call of the wild, gone back into the
wilderness life with its primal compulsions and
its animal instincts? Given a man whose aim
in life is to win public applause, and so to have
power; to be masterful, to be called influential, to
have people nudge one another when he passes
in the street. This man wants to sit at a desk,
touch a button and see men jump at his ring; all
he cares for is to say " go," and have the satis
faction of being obeyed, to have his way, to make
his will law. To him the world is just a shop full
of tools cunningly constructed to serve his ends,
to minister to him, to be used by him. What
figure fits this man better than a coin which has
ceased to be of use, a thing which has dropped
from its true purpose; he is taking others' time
and strength instead of using his time and
strength in the service of others ; he is costing the
world labor instead of spending himself that the
world may have what it needs. Given a man who
never comes up out of the basement of his being,
who never takes a thought for the furnishing of
the upper stories of life where lives his soul, who
is busy with his own affairs, so busy that he never
hears the call of an Unseen Central giving him con
nection with a great outside world-need of him
and his. What is this man but a son squandering
his divine share of life, wasting his real self,

JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 95
playing the fool with his birthright, and depriving
the family of the help of his companionship. It
is this reversion to the animalism in us, this use
lessness in the world struggle to develop soul, this
denial of our divine heredity which is the tap-root
of the wrongness in human nature. Self-absorp
tion, lovelessness, the higher-self suicide, that is
Jesus' idea of what is the matter with man. To
live like a higher kind of animal and nothing
more; to live to be served rather than to serve;
to live as if God were dead, that, according to
Jesus, is sin.
Jesus says our wrongness has a three-fold
cause; He says we go wrong from heredity, from
circumstance, from our own volition. He allows
that human nature starts with a handicap, a
legacy of self-absorption which we get at birth.
We are like sheep that go astray; like sheep in
whose very blood is the wander-lust. We are not
simply individuals, we are children of parents,
and behind the parents, far back in the dim dis
tance, is the brute ancestry, whose low bequest is
not yet sloughed off. The lower life had a long
start before the higher was awakened, and it is
strong yet; it is not all domesticated, not all
tamed. All this the Master seems to appreciate.
And He sees another fact; how, even with a fair
start, things and men around us sometimes help
us to badness, give us a shove off, make the down-

96 THE MIND OF CHRIST
hill road all the easier. We are like a coin which
gets lost by no act of its own ; it falls from a care
less hand, and is given the start which sends it
rolling off into the dust. Not always is the crown
jewel deliberately thrown away, sometimes it is
snatched from the head by the hand of some moral
brigand. This baneful possibility of circum
stances the fair Christ seems to allow as one of
the causes of the wrongness in human nature.
But He does not stop with making man a
sheep; had Jesus told us only the parable of the
lost sheep, we might have questioned His optim
ism. He does not finish with the parable of the
lost piece of money; had Jesus stopped there we
would have called Him a fatalist.
"If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than
their own,
I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be
mute ? "
You cannot jam back into heredity and en
vironment all the impulses which brought about
the moral failure. Something more needs to be
said. There is a personal will at the center of
life, and our very sense of fairness challenges
every reference of life's wrongness to any source
which does not take account of this personal ini
tiative. The Principal of Birmingham says,
" The distinctive character of man is that he has
a sense of responsibility for his acts, having ac-

JESUS' IDEA OF SIN 97
quired the power of choosing between good and
evil, with freedom to obey one motive rather than
another." There is something in the wrongness
which man himself makes up out of whole cloth.
Maybe we are an organ, and the pipes and action
were set up without our choosing; maybe the reg
isters were limited by a builder whom we did not
employ. But we sit on the organ bench, and our
fingers touch the keys, and there is enough in the
instrument to make sweet music, aye, great music.
Palestrina wrote " The Strife is O'er " long be
fore the days of electric actions, tilting couplers
and echo attachments. With our eyes wide open,
we have listened to the call of the wild, we have
misused our manhood, we have used our wills.
A young man decides to be a better man ; he be
gins the effort from the outside and works inward.
First, there are the long habits to be wrestled with ;
he will not drink; he will not swear; he will not
be unchaste. And hard that fight is, for his fa
ther before him drank, it was his father he first
heard swear, it is the father's passion which runs
like fire through his veins. Almost he despairs;
it looks like a losing battle, but he keeps on. He
finds the same enemies in his circumstances; the
business he is in is full of temptations, he gives
up his business; his associations keep him in the
bad atmosphere, he breaks away from the old
comrades ; the reading he has loved fans the flame

98 THE MIND OF CHRIST
of the red passion, the old books are burned. So
far, so good; he has met his hereditation, he has
faced his conditions, still the old habit stays by
him, the old impulse has steam, the old appetite's
fires will not be put out. Then it is the young
fighter in this moral arena sees the fact of life;
he sees that at the mysterious center of his being
there is he himself, he himself who not only thinks,
and feels and does the wrong, but is wrong. Fa
cing that fact solemnly, seriously, the young man
has come up to the point where real victory be
gins. " / have sinned," he cries ; " the fault lies
with myself." And with this sight of self, this
resolution to be his higher self, he makes the dis
covery that Jesus meant every lost life to make in
these parables, that God will take care of the
heredity, God will take care of the circumstances;
the shepherd will find the sheep, the woman will
find the coin, the son must come to himself, must
cry, " Father, I have sinned." This self-discov
ery, this sense of unworthy sonship brings peace
and strength and safety.
This is sin as Jesus sees it, to live the lower
life, to live to be served rather than to serve, to
live as if God were dead. And this is safety, to
come to one's self and own one's sonship, saying,
" Father, I have sinned."

VI
JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION

" He entered and was passing through Jericho. And be
hold, a man called by name Zacchaeus; and he was a chief
publican, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who
He was; and could not for the crowd, because he was little
of stature. And he ran on before, and climbed up into a
sycamore tree to see him: for He was to pass that way.
And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up, and said
unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to
day I must abide at thy house. And he made haste, and
came down, and received Him joyfully. And when they saw
it, they all murmured, saying, He is gone in to lodge with
a man that is a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood, and said
unto the Lord, Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give
to the poor; and if I have wrongfully exacted aught of
any man, I restore fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, To
day is salvation come to this house, forasmuch as he also
is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek
and to save that which was lost."

VI
JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION
If there is any word of religion we ought to
know about it is the word " salvation." In the
vocabulary of religion no word bulks so large.
Christianity has no patent on it. Professor James
has shown us how it is part of the " uniform de
liverance in which religions all appear to meet."
No sect of Christianity can claim it as peculiar to
its dialect. Paul preached it and Peter, Augus
tine and Pelagius, Luther and Loyola, Calvin and
Arminius, Spurgeon and Martineau, Brooks and
Channing. The monks and parish clergy of the
Greek Church, the popes and priests of the Roman
Church, and the pastors and teachers of the
Protestant Church have proclaimed it in all times
and in all places. All religions, all sects acknowl
edge the need and fact of salvation; the thing
needs no argument; it is taken for granted. We
differ as to that from which or for which we are
saved, but the saving — about this the vote is
unanimous. In Christian preaching there has been a singular
IOI

102 THE MIND OF CHRIST
unity about the message of salvation. This may
not seem obvious at first sight. In the faint light
of early morning the Priscilla threads her way
down the East River. The young man on his
first visit to the city, rising betimes, quits his
stateroom to go out on deck. There, like a great
cobweb spun between the two boroughs, he sees
the beautiful Brooklyn Bridge. He admires the
graceful superstructure hanging between earth
and sky; he wonders at the great ships which,
sailing underneath, are dwarfed into insignifi
cance; he tries to imagine the vast throng which
in a single day is poured back and forth between
the two islands; but he overlooks the most won
derful fact of all — the enduring foundations
which the Bridge itself feels as it throbs and
sways beneath its awful responsibility. To find
these one must trace the span to the water's edge
and pierce the flood. There, out of sight, under
the seething waters, resting on the bosom of the
earth, are mighty tiers of basal masonry, cemented
by human skill and sacrifice, which hold aloft the
giant columns that make possible so much of use
fulness and imposing beauty. So it is the Church's
superstructure, the high beauty of its worship, the
shifting panorama of doctrine and creed which
have held the eye, amazed the mind or caused
vague sensations of fear for its future; but the
Church itself has felt beneath all this the un-

JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 103
shaken fundamental, the need and fact of salva
tion through Jesus Christ the Lord.
This unit of truth may be divided into four
parts. The first is the reality of sin. Every
where we find sin. No man is all that he ought to
be; every one follows the call of the wild; every
one likes to be served rather than to serve; every
one sometimes lives as if God were dead. There
is a feeling of moral nausea; if one does not feel
it, he knows it ought to be there. Kipling's Mac
intosh had burned his brain up with the drink, had
fallen so low that it seemed as if just a whiff
would bowl him over the line that separates the
human from the brute; yet here is what he said
when he was dying, " I was drunk, filthily drunk.
I, who am the son of a man with whom you have
no concern, I, who was once fellow of a college
whose buttery hatch you have not seen, I was
loathesomely drunk. But consider how lightly I
am touched. It is nothing to me, less than noth
ing. For I do not even feel the headache which
should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bit
ter my repentance. On the soul which I have lost
and on the conscience which I have killed, I tell
you that I cannot feel." He could not feel, but
he knew. This is the first bitter fact, we know*
there " is something wrong with us as we naturally
stand." This is the first part of the unit of sal-

104 THE MIND OF CHRIST
vation. And this is the second part, the universe
is not all bad. God is in His world and God is
good, and God owns the world; not a sparrow
falls on the ground without Him. The wrong
ness makes it no less God's world than if it were
perfect. He still owns it and claims it and seeks
to perfect it. This is the second fact, " God so
loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not
perish, but have eternal life." This is the second
equal part of the fact of salvation. And this is
the third part, Jesus came, and Jesus lived so
much like God that since then men could imagine
no better God than He and so called Him God.
And Jesus died; and by His death men saw that
all His life had been a sacrifice, a self-giving, a
giving of His godlike strength to men to take the
place of their weakness, a giving of His purity to
them to take the place of their sin. And wherever
the story of this life-long sacrifice went, men put
out the fires on the altars where they had been of
fering blood sacrifices, thinking thus to appease an
angry Deity; and they said God asks only to be
loved and obeyed as Christ loved and obeyed. This
is the third fact, Jesus came God's messenger Son
sent to find the lost children. This is the third
equal part of the fact of salvation. And this is
the fourth part, by coming to God as we under
stand Him in Jesus, the mind of Jesus becomes

JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 105
our mind, His spirit becomes our spirit and we
are born anew; we are made like men without a
past, men with only a present and a future, a
future radiant with an- immortal hope. This is
the fourth fact, men become Christlike lovers and
doers of the right. This is the fourth equal part
of the fact of salvation.
These are the four equal parts of the unit of the
Christian evangel of salvation — Sin ; the God
of the loving heart; the Christ, God's messenger
Son sent to recover the lost children; the re-birth
of Christlike lovers and doers of the right. No
one of these parts is the whole evangel ; the whole
is the sum of the four equal parts. And it is the
whole evangel which the Church has preached and
is preaching, the evangel which the priests and
prophets when they are at their best, when they
forget themselves, when they remember their liv
ing Lord, when they face the men who need to
be saved, lift themselves up and sing and preach.
This is the Christian faith in salvation, the faith
not of one part but of the whole; this is the fact
of salvation, the fact not of some sect but of
Christendom; this is the practical belief not of
Catholicism alone, nor of Protestantism, not of
Trinitarianism nor of Unitarianism ; not of Cal
vinism nor of Wesleyanism; not of conservative
nor of liberal; not of old theology nor of new
theology; but it is the practical ecumenical belief,

106 THE MIND OF CHRIST
for " Faithful is the saying and worthy of all
acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world
to save sinners."
So much for the unit of belief; it is not obvious
because men will forget that the parts are equal,
and only the sum of the parts makes the whole.
The priest or the prophet has taken one part and
multiplied it by his personal preference till it seems
to him as if the part were as big as the whole.
One takes the fact of sin, another the fact of God,
another the fact of Christ, another the fact of
the re-birth, and he emphasizes this part until by
the over-emphasis it grows in his estimation and
others' beyond its fair proportion and seems to
equal the unit. It is easy to make one-fourth
look bigger that it is. You have only to multiply
numerator and denominator by two. Ask any
child which he would rather have, one quarter or
two eighths and he will select the latter fraction.
And we, children that we are about truth, double
our part till we think it twice as big as it is, cer
tainly larger than the same equal part given to
another. This, indeed, is what makes the seeming dif
ferences between us. One part or another of
the unit truth appeals to us; it is the part we
see clearest, the part that suits our mental make
up, temperament, experience. And suiting best
our individual need or taste we cherish it, fill our

JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 1 07
thought with it, see all other things in terms of
it, stake our life upon it, and try to force our
brothers with different mentalities, other tem
peraments, other experiences to see and think and
feel as we. And when they will not, what is there
to do — such children we are — we call one an
other " heretic " and go off and pray by our
selves. It is not the big unit reality of salvation
we differ about, it is about the equal parts into
which the unit is divided. We may deny this un
ity when we are in our controversial moods; but
when we are most deeply religious, when we re
call how men have been and are being saved
everywhere Jesus is lifted up, our denials are
dumb, and we know ourselves one in the gospel of
salvation through Jesus Christ.
But what is the thing itself? What did Jesus
mean when He said He had come to seek and to
save the lost? What for instance was in His
mind when he said to Zacchaeus, " To-day is
salvation come to this house."
In Jericho there was no such social leper as
Zacchaeus. He was head of the Roman revenue
office. The Roman tax-collectors were not sal
aried men. The office was farmed out to the high
est bidder. Then the man who got the job set
the tax-rate. Of course his rate covered his price
plus his profits; he had to make something. It
was not that that hurt Jericho half so much as to

108 THE MIND OF CHRIST
think that Zacchaeus was a " son of Abraham."
A Jew serving as henchman for Rome! That
proved that Zacchaeus had the yeast of treason
in him. So Jericho treated him as a contagious
person; when he entered the temple some Phari
see would say, " God I thank Thee that I am not
as this publican." And here were Jericho's arch-
Shylock and Jesus hand in hand. Of course peo
ple talked. It was a public scandal. It came
about this way. Zacchaeus heard how the great
Rabbi had made another publican one of his dis
ciples. The action was so out of the common
that Zacchaeus was set on getting a sight of this
friend of his friends. There was a great crowd
in the street waiting for Jesus. Zacchaeus being
a little man was hustled to one side and could not
see a thing. But up street there was a tree, and
in a twinkling he had climbed it, and from his
leafy perch he was taking a long look at that
wonderful face. Suddenly Jesus looked up, spied
the man, saw the meaning of the situation and
called out, " Zacchaeus, make haste, and come
down; for to-day I must abide at thy house."
Zacchaeus came down and the two men went
home together. Only one incident of the Mas
ter's visit to that home has been kept for us. No
one thought it worth while to tell what led up to
it. Here is the whole story; when the two were
indoors, sometime, Zacchaeus said, " Behold,

JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 109
Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor;
and if I have wrongfully exacted aught of any
man, I restore fourfold. And Jesus said unto
him, To-day is salvation come to this house, for
asmuch as he also is a son of Abraham. For
the Son of Man came to seek and to save that
which was lost."
It must be evident that whatever Jesus meant
by salvation He meant something which may come
to a man to-day, in this world. " To-day is sal
vation come." The tense is present. Salvation
is here ; it is not something to be received there.
It is ante-mortem; not post-mortem. The thing
comes immediately; it is a possession for this
world not to be waited for until one has reached
another world. Jesus put the matter in the same
way to the unfortunate girl who came to Him
in Simon's house, and to the blind beggar, " thy
faith hath saved thee," the Master said to both
of them. So Jesus' idea of this unit of re
ligious experience is that it begins to-day, not the
day after a man dies. It is not the same as being
insured for heaven, not the same as being insured
against hell. It is not just assurance of future
reward, it is recovery from something, restora
tion to something here and now. Whatever hap
pened to Zacchaeus, happened that day in Jericho.
What did happen to Zacchaeus? He was con-
missioner of taxes for the Roman government.

I IO THE MIND OF CHRIST
That stamped that Jew as a reprobate; the world
was against him; when his countrymen passed
him in the streets they drew their skirts about
themselves as if he had the plague ; they made him
live for himself. Excommunication he answered
with extortion, social ostracism he matched with
official brigandage. His work centered in graft;
his heart centered in hate; his life centered in
self. This man of self was the one who " stood
and said"; there is a touch in the original lan
guage which does not come out in the English.
The word translated " stood " shows a man with
tense muscles, and set jaws, taking a deep breath
as he turns over a new leaf. He stood thus and
said, " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods, my
capital, I give to the poor ; and if, as I know to be
the case, I have wrongfully exacted aught of any
man I restore fourfold."
A bigger thing was happening here than shows
on the surface. The extreme penalty the Hebrew
law provided for theft was fourfold restitution;
that is, the criminal was compelled to restore to
the plaintiff four times the value of the stolen
goods ; but this extreme penalty was imposed only
upon that most detestable of all thieves, the mali
cious depredator who out of spite wantonly de
stroys what he has burglarized. For the thief who
was caught with the goods on his person the pen
alty was double the value of the loot. But if the

JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION III
guilty man confessed and voluntarily offered to
make amends, the law let him off with a refund of
the principal and twenty per cent. Now it was the
last penalty which fitted Zacchaeus' case. No
one had accused him of theft; upon his own mo
tion he pleaded guilty; he was his own judge and
imposed his own sentence, and the sentence was,
four hundred per cent, the extreme penalty re
served for the worst sort of villain; and more
than this, after he had made amends, the half of
the residue would go to the poor. The law, had
he confessed to the Sanhedrin would have been
satisfied had Zacchaeus said, " If I have wrong
fully exacted aught of any man I restore what I
took and a fifth more " ; but said the publican,
" Lord, four hundred per cent I will give to every
man I have plundered, and the rest shall be used
for the needy."
Here was a great confession. In the strict in
terpretation of the law he had plundered no one;
Rome gave Zacchaeus the right to make all he
could. But, standing in the presence of the great
Rabbi whose life was full of utter kindness, look
ing into the candid eyes of the Friend of publicans
and sinners, he saw himself against that white
background and he saw himself dead black. The
petty thieving and graft in contrast with the pa
tient pity and boundless self-forgetfulness of Jesus
burned into his soul a loathing of self. He saw

112 THE MIND OF CHRIST
himself with Christ's eyes, He judged himself
with Christ's conscience, he hated himself with
Christ's hatred of sin. No mere principal and
a fifth could fit his case as Zacchaeus now judged
it; nothing but the extremest penalty could sat
isfy his conscience. This is what happened to
Zacchaeus; he saw himself, what he was and
what he ought to be; he called his old self by its
proper name, and facing right about he reached
out for the self he had not been, but in the pres
ence of the Christ knew that he must be. He was
saved, saved, from the wrath of God? saved from
the fear of future punishment? maybe; but cer
tainly, obviously he was saved from himself; from
his old lust of getting, from his old vengeful feel
ings of hate, from the guilt of the selfishness which
cut him off from his fellows and his God. And
so salvation is not rescue from a future hell, it is
rescue from a present self.
More than all this; the man is not only
saved from self, but he is saved for service.
" Fourfold restitution," said Zacchaeus, " for
every one I have plundered; and the half of my
capital I give to the poor." And Jesus said, " To
day is salvation come to this house." The change
in the man is radical, absolute. He is thrown off
his center. An hour ago his work centered in
graft, now it centered in giving; his heart cen
tered in hate, now it centered in charity; his life

JESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 113
centered in self, now it centered in others. From
living to wrong, he began living to right, to right
not only those he had wronged but those whom
others had wronged. His lower nature surren
dered to his higher, the grinder of the face of the
poor became the care-taker of the life of the op
pressed; the moral anarchist became the loyal
subject of the kingdom of God, where the law
is boundless, ungrudging, gratuitous love. This
is what salvation meant to Zacchaeus, something
immediate, something which concerned character,
something which concerned his fellow men. It
meant immediate rescue from the slavery of the
self, immediate subjection to the mastery of love.
In a word salvation for this publican was son-
ship, simple trust in a Father's forgiveness, child
like solicitude for the welfare of the other chil
dren. It is interesting to discover that the word " sal
vation " as first used by Jesus did not have a dis
tinctly religious meaning. He was used to us
ing it about the folks He healed of bodily sick
ness. "Daughter" said the Master to the in
valid woman who pressed through the throng
to touch the hem of His garment, "be of good
comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole." And
it is written in St. Mark's gospel " They laid the
sick in the marketplaces, and besought Him that
they might touch if it were but the border of His

114 THE MIND OF CHRIST
garment ; and as many as touched Him were made
whole." " Made whole " in these verses translates
the same Greek word as " saved." Saved folks
were folks who were made whole, filled full of
health, fulfillng their purpose. Up to this day,
Zacchaeus had been like a sick man, just a frag
ment of a man, a man who was able to use only
a part of himself; just as a sick man is a man who
cannot use his eyes, or his limbs, or his head, or
whatever part of him is afflicted. When the sick
man is made whole he lives through all his being;
he no longer uses only a portion of his body;
every organ functions perfectly. Zacchaeus' con
science was diseased; his love organ had never
functioned. When Jesus touched him that
day, his conscience began to work, his love
organ began to function, and with the con
science in perfect health, and the love in him
claiming those who had need of him, the pub
lican began to live through and through all
his manhood ; henceforth no part was diseased, no
organ was atrophied; he was a whole man.
This then is Jesus' idea of salvation : — it is not
a matter of the future, it concerns the present ; it is
not rescue from a future hell, but rescue from a
present self; it is not rescue for a future heaven,
it is rescue for a present service. Salvation is liv
ing as a son through all one's being; salvation is
living as a soul for other souls.

IESUS' IDEA OF SALVATION 115
There remains but one question and the answer
to it is very simple. What saved Zacchaeus?
Jesus and he got together, and Zacchaeus sur
rendered to Jesus' mastery. The picture of how
Jesus saves is always with us in the way men save
one another. The physician saves a life; that is,
he comes to the sick one day after day; day after
day he gives the sick one hope, courage, knowl
edge, skill, medicine, in short he gives the sick
one himself, for the hope and the courage, the
knowledge and the skill and the medicine are really
the physician's spirit; then in turn the sick one
gives the physician obedience, and through the
patient's obedience, the physician's spirit passes
over into the patient and he is made whole. Obe
dience is the organ of life. Through obedience
all the life we have comes to us. It was obedi
ence to the physician which saved the physical life
when he found you the day of the accident unable
to use yourself; it was obedience to the teacher
which saved your intellectual life when school
found you as a child using only a part of your
intellectuality. It is obedience to the Master
which saves the soul life from dying down with
animalism, mis-use and indifference. This is how
Jesus saves a man. On the white screen of His
life a man sees his real life — what he is and what
he can be. By His pitying love for man He
makes the man hate what he is and reach out to

Il6 THE MIND OF CHRIST
what he can be. By a man's obedience to Him,
Jesus goes into the man's inward life and the man
is saved from what he is for what he can be.

VII
JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER

" Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on
earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us
our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And bring
us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For
Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for
ever. Amen."

VII
JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER
Every man prays sometime; he cannot help it.
" Out of the deeps " do we cry " O God." In one
of the Psalms there are four cartoons; four men
are seen, each one of them has been driven into
a pocket from which there is no escape. The first
is a man bewildered by the riddle of existence;
he beats about in the dust of doubt like a caravan
gripped in a sand-storm; there is no way nor
water ; " his soul faints in him, then he cries unto
Jehovah in his trouble." The next is a man in the
clutch of disease; he lies helpless as if his limbs
were bound round with hoops of steel ; " there is
none to help, then he cries unto Jehovah in his
trouble." The third is a man who has played the
fool with his manhood ; the tide of poison is ris
ing over his heart ; " he draws near unto the gates
of death, then he cries unto Jehovah in his
trouble." The last is a captain of industry; he is
doing business in great waters ; but the waters have
seized his ship, and there is no voice from the
shore, no vessel to stand by ; " he is at his wits'
119

120 THE MIND OF CHRIST
end, then he cries unto Jehovah in his trouble."
Four men, one facing doubt, another disease, an
other death, another disaster, and each time it is
the same story, out of the deeps he cries " O
God " ; in other words he prays. The easy-going
skeptic swinging along the familiar way of the
usual suddenly steps off into the unexpected, and
in spite of himself, the soul in him lays hold of
the Soul of the universe. When we are most our
selves we pray; it is the humanest act of life.
" What are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer."
Religion might be defined as morality plus
prayer. Morality is the recognition of a relation
ship between man and man. Religion is the rec
ognition of a relationship between man and God.
Prayer is the expression of the Godward practice
of religion ; morality is the expression of the man-
ward practice of religion. Religion is sheer mor
ality until there is a vital act in which a man comes
into touch with the " Power not ourselves which
makes for righteousness." Morality becomes re
ligion when it feels that the relation between man
and man draws its reason out of the relation be
tween man and God. Of no function of the spirit
ual life does Jesus speak more simply than of
prayer; no movement of the inward life does
He Himself illustrate more beautifully than that

JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 121
" mystery
Where God-in-man is one with man-in-God."
The silences of a great teacher are as significant
as His speech. When we review Jesus' words
about prayer we are struck with a singular omis
sion, He says little or nothing about prayer as a
duty. He does not argue, He proceeds. The
physical director wastes time if he makes a dis
sertation on the duty of breathing. The breath
ing will be done and it will be done more
and better without being made one of the require
ments for gymnastic work. And so the great
spiritual director takes something for granted.
If His class is to grow souls, the spiritual dia
phragms may be expected to move without a
" must." This omission of a rule requiring
prayer is all the more significant because a rule
would have been the first thing a rabbi of Jesus'
day would have given his disciples. The subject
of prayer was a profound study with the religious
specialists. Praying was an art to be acquired
by long practice; and efficiency could be acquired
only by nice and punctilious performance of ste
reotyped forms. The number of prayers for each
day, and the times and the verbiage were exactly
prescribed; variation was prohibited and the ex
tempore v/as proscribed. The notion of the age
was that God required prayers as a king requires
taxes. If one defaulted in prayers he ran a risk

122 THE MIND OF CHRIST
with heaven analogous to the risk he would run
with the publican if he defaulted with his taxes.
When a man said his prayers his accounts with
God were squared; if he said more than was re
quired he became a favorite at the divine court.
To bribe God was as good form and as expedient
as to bribe the government. But Jesus could not
say prayers ; " do not babble as the heathen do,"
said He, " for they think they shall be heard for
their much speaking." He deliberately ignored,
sometimes even purposely violated the systematic.
For Him prayer was something natural, spon
taneous, filial ; it was in the category with a child's
kiss; to make rules for the one were as absurd as
to make rules for the other.
Everything that the Master said about prayer
is implied in that great prayer He gave His
friends when they asked Him to teach them how
to pray. " Our Father who art in heaven,"
its foreword holds His total idea of prayer,
prayer's motive, method and matter. Of His
prayers which have been saved for us all begin in
the same way, " Father." And so prayer reduced
to its simpest terms is just the Father and a son
getting together to confer about mutual interests.
Mutual interests, for it goes without the say
ing that the Father is interested in what concerns
the son, and the son is or should be interested in
what concerns the Father. But there is the rub;

JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 123
the son is apt to forget that the Father cares,
needs to feel that the " heavenly Father knoweth
that ye have need of all these things," needs the
deep sunk sense of trust that if the Father feeds
the birds and clothes the grass of the field He
will provide what we shall eat and wherewithal
we shall be clothed. And not only so but the son
is prone to forget the Father's way, needs to be
reminded of His kingdom and His righteousness,
needs to have the son spirit in him plenished by
the Holy Spirit which the Father gives to them
that ask Him.
And so the great thing, the ultimate spiritual
achievement is to be able to say " Father " and
saying it to feel it as the realest fact of time and
eternity. And prayer becomes the effort of the
son to deepen, enrich, strengthen the sense of
union which the name " Father" implies. " Hal
lowed be Thy name," that Name which makes the
world just a parent's home and all the folks in
it one's brothers; hallowed be that Name which
makes the law of the home love. And " Thy
will be done, as in heaven, so on earth,"- let that
law of love be our law; let all the details of liv
ing, the daily bread, the daily trespass, the daily
hurt, the daily struggle feel its permanence and
its power. " Our Father who art in heaven, Hal
lowed be Thy name," with that- word the son re
alizes his sonship and overcomes all inward anxi-

124 THE MIND OF CHRIST
ety. " Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on
earth," with that word the son defeats his egoism
and knows himself one with the Father in His
sublime purpose of love. And this is prayer, first
a restful trust in, and second a positive devote-
ment to the royal will of the Father.
That is the unique in Jesus' idea of prayer.
Men had thought of prayer as a means to get the
deity to do their will. Jesus thought of prayer as
the means by which He got Himself to do the
Father's will. By it man sought to master the
gods. By it Jesus sought to have the Father
master Him. Jacob with prayer thinks to make
a bargain wherein God's service will be procured
for his side. Jesus with prayer trustfully com
mits Himself to the service of God. Jacob's
prayer is " human selfishness addressing itself
naively to the selfishness of Jehovah." Jesus'
prayer is the disinterested abandonment of self
and devotement to a God of love. The one would
have heaven go his way; the other would make
Himself go heaven's way. The one says, " not
Thy will but mine be done." The other says,
" not my will but Thine be done."
This then is Jesus' teaching about prayer : — it
is not a sort of etiquette to be paid to God; a
child has no need of many words or great words
to get His Father's ear, or make His Father under
stand. " If ye then, being evil, know how to give

JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 125
good gifts unto your children, how much more
shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit
to them that ask Him ? " Prayer is not an at
tempt to wrestle something from God which He
will give only after struggle; a father knows his
child's needs before the child asks. " Your heav
enly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things." Prayer is not a struggle to win
the favor of a god who is against us ; " seek ye
first His kingdom and His righteousness; and all
these things shall be added unto you." But
prayer is the search for a realer appreciation of
God's Fatherhood; it is the loss of egoism in
trustful -sonship ; it is the surrender- of self to a
loving power whose kingship we would have pene
trate thought, feeling and will. Prayer is the
son coming to the Father with whom he knows
himself to be in business, to get the Father's
orders for the doing of the business.
A clear sight of this idea of prayer ought to
clean up with quiet evaporation all the perplex^
ing questions which befog and mildew our thoughts
about prayer. There is the idea that it is use
less to pray because the universe is everywhere
bound by laws to which the Almighty God must
be true. There is the other notion that since God
is good and makes all things work together for
good, it is an impertinence to ask Him for any
thing. But get Jesus' idea settled firmly among

126 THE MIND OF CHRIST
our religious hypotheses — prayer is not an ef
fort to get God to do our will, but a positive com
mitment of ourselves to His will and the whole
atmosphere lights up. The man who follows
Jesus' way of praying does not regard prayer as
chiefly for specific things ; he does not believe that
God will give him everything he asks for, nor does
he even desire this. He recalls that his Master
prayed, " Father, if it be possible let this cup pass
from me," and the cup did not pass from Him.
For the Christian prayer seeks not a change in
things, but a change in character, such a reform
ing of the inward life as shall make it conform to
the Father's Image. The thing he seeks in prayer
is not outward, but inward, the peace which pas-
seth understanding as St. Paul puts it in that
masterly description of prayer and what comes
of it, " In nothing be anxious ; but in everything
by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let
your requests be made known unto God. And
the peace of God, which passeth all understand
ing, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in
Christ Jesus."
Prayer thought of in Jesus' way will not be
tested by so-called " answers," that is by the num
ber of things received as a direct result of peti
tion. But this will be its value judgment — does
prayer uplift life, does it take the whine out of
ns, does it fit the life into the " omnipresent ethi-

JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 1 27
cal trend " of things, does it give a push to the
uprise of the world by adjusting the finite desire
to the infinite design? That is the only prayer-
test. Years ago Professor Tyndall challenged the
religious world to a trial of prayer. A selected
number of patients in a hospital were to be prayed
for, and the efficacy of prayer was to be deter
mined by the results. When that challenge was
declined the ungodly mocked, and some among
the godly felt as if faith had been eclipsed. But
the whole thing was as foolish as it was ignorant.
And now from those very London hospitals comes
a medical estimate of prayer. At a recent meeting
of the British Medical Association, the Superin
tendent of the Bethlem Royal Hospital said, " As
an alienist and one whose whole life has been con
cerned with the sufferings of the mind, I would
state that of all hygienic measures to counteract
disturbed sleep, depressed spirits, and all the mis
erable sequels of a distressed mind, I would un
doubtedly give the first place to the simple habit
of prayer. Let there be but a habit of nightly
communion, not as a mendicant or repeater of
words more adapted to the tongue of a sage, but
as a humble individual who submerges or asserts
his individuality as an integral part of a greater
whole. Such a habit does more to clean the spirit
and strengthen the soul to overcome mere inci
dental emotionalism than any other therapeutic

128 THE MIND OF CHRIST
agent known to me." Tyndall thought prayer
was petition for things, he had Jacob's idea. Dr.
Hyslop defines prayer as self-adjustment to the in
finite, " assertion of individuality as an integral
part of a greater whole," he has Jesus' idea. In
a word according to Jesus' teaching prayer is the
practice of the presence of our Father.
What that practice means comes out clearest
in the way the Master Himself prayed. It gives
one pause to discover, as a great Scotch preacher
suggests, that when Jesus prayed something
serious happened ; " His praying was not the mere
preparation or discipline for the battle, but the
battlefield and the battle itself." Dr. George
Adam Smith points out that our Lord's praying
times were the times fullest of effort, strain and
struggle. At first thought it might seem other
wise, that the restfulest hours for Him were those
when He was in communion with God, that the
strain and drain on Him came with His ministry
to diseased bodies and dull minds. But the gospels
leave another impression. He who could work a
miracle with a word, refute His enemies with a
sentence, and confront the majesty of Rome with
composure, could not pray for Himself without
effort, exhaustion, even anguish. We see Him
on the day of His baptism, that day when He
made His august self -discovery and retired into the
wilderness to be alone with His God, to talk with

JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 129
His Father about His mission, its meaning and its
methods. And along the lines of the narrative
we catch the sounds of a stupendous struggle
wherein light and darkness fought their eternal
battle in His soul for days and days. The place
of prayer became His arena. We see Him again
at the tomb of Lazarus, lifting His soul in prayer
and the record is " he groaned in the spirit and
was troubled." A few days before His death
as He heard the approaching footfalls of the mes
sengers who were to rob him of life He prayed,
" Now is my soul troubled ; and what shall I
say? Father, save me from this hour. But for
this cause came I unto this hour, Father, glorify
Thy name." And on the night before He died,
the night when the friends who had stood beside
Him all along, could follow Him no farther, He
stepped aside under the kindly loneliness of the
olive trees to meet His Father, and kneeling there
He prayed, " Father, if Thou be willing, remove
this cup from me; nevertheless not my will but
Thine be done. And being in an agony He
prayed more earnestly; and His sweat became as
it were great drops of blood falling down upon the
ground." To Jesus praying meant fighting. He made it
the field on which He settled the problems of life;
it was His arena where He grappled hand-to-hand
with temptation; there He won His victories over

130 THE MIND OF CHRIST
self ; there He achieved that sublime serenity which
upbore Him through the days of enervating toil
and gave Him that magnificent carriage which
made His crucifixion an enthronement and not a
failure. The Christ's practise matched His pre
cept. He taught that prayer meant self-revision,
defeat of the ego, surrender to the Father's will.
By parable, sermon and model prayer He showed
how all prayer began and ended in a wish for the
kingdom's coming; and so His own prayers are
covered with the dust of the battlefield, they are
wet with sweat and blood. Beside that tragedy
in the wilderness where for a month and more
He faced one by one the traditional ideals, and
made His own ideals of the Messiahship sub
ject to the great new vision of God's Son He had
gained; beside that lonely fight under the olive
trees in the night when the lifting of His will
Godward brought the blood-drops to His brow,
how tame, flat, insipid and powerless are the
things we call prayers wherein with easy assur
ance we snatch at any glittering blessing that
catches the eye, or make requisition upon Al-
mightiness for the satisfaction of our insignificant
desires. Prayer means the daily defeat of one's own
will by the will of the divine Father. And
that costs, and the need of that is constant. For
life is a running fight for the Christian. Not

JESUS' IDEA OF PRAYER 131
even He who from childhood had been about His
Father's business could face death without saying
again, and the saying it meant sweat and blood,
" Not my will but Thine be done." Three hun
dred years ago John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's,
wrote, and each one of us may say it for himself,
Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done,
I fear no more.

VIII
JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY

" I am the resurrection and the life : he that believeth
on me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever
liveth and believeth on me shall never die."
" In my Father's house are many mansions ; if it were
not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place
for you."
" To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise."
" There ran one to Him, and kneeled to Him, and asked
Him, Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit
eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou
me good? none is good save one, even God. Thou knowest
the commandments, Do not kill, Do not commit adultery,
Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud,
Honor thy father and mother. And he said unto Him,
Teacher, all these things have I observed from my youth.
And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said unto him,
One thing thou lackest : go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven :
and come, follow me. But his countenance fell at the
saying, and he went away sorrowful: for he was one that
had great possessions."

VIII
JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY
In 1883, when he stood upon the edge of three
score years, a noted scientist wrote to a friend,
" It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to
the thought of extinction increasing as I get older
and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all
sorts of times with a sort of horror that in 1900
I shall probably know no more than I did in 1800.
I had sooner be in hell." The words are Hux
ley's; they might be any man's. For of all the
black-winged doubts which seek to breed in the
human mind, there is none so ugly, so persistent,
so unwelcome as the doubt of immortality. It is
an ancient, ill-omened bird, this doubt of immor
tality; good men in all times have reported seeing
it. But somehow these recent years its brood has
grown in numbers and pugnacity, until there is
hardly a mind in which the doubt has not tried to
nest; while from many a soul it has driven the
song-birds of faith and hope, and though often
beaten off, it has persisted in' hatching out its
brood until all the blue above is noisy with its
135

136 THE MIND OF CHRIST
woeful clamor and shadowed with its sable pin
ions. Even among the faithful there is much
restless uncertainty crying, " Lord, I believe, help
thou my unbelief," and many who sincerely be
lieve in God and Christ do not know surely
whether they have faith in the immortality of the
soul. The new habit of science with its thirst for facts,
its hunger for truth, and its insatiable demand for
evidence, has done much to bring about this doubt.
Those who used the test-tube and the microscope
reported that they could find in life no immortality,
and over the heart of man there came a great
despair, and the feeling that there had come an
end to faith. But what men ought to know is that
this science which bred unfaith, though so new,
is already out of date; the loud-mouthed dogma
tism which trusted only what it could see with the
eyes of flesh, has been repudiated, and now science
talks of an unseen world which, as Prof. Shaler
puts it, is " a realm of unending and infinitely
varied originations." Beginning like the Italian
peasant, who, spading his field, suddenly saw his
spade sink through the familiar earth and drop
out of sight, to be found again among the glori
ous buried ruins of Herculaneum, science has
broken through into a world behind the minutest
visible thing its microscope can see. Not yet may
science say, " I know the fact of immortality,"

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 1 37
because its code forbids it to speak confidently of
what it may not demonstrate ; not yet is it able to
prove that our dead are, because its field of ob
servation is bounded by the little mounds " where
angels walk and seraphs are the wardens " ; but
the men of science are bold to say as John Fiske,
" For my own part I believe in the immortality
of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept
demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme
act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work;"
or as Sir Oliver Lodge, " I believe we may enter
into the life eternal ; by which I mean that whereas
our terrestrial existence is temporary, our real
existence continues without ceasing." So then
when to-day the Church repeats its belief in the
life everlasting, from the laboratories a voice
seems to answer in antiphon, " the life everlast
ing," a voice, not like religion's to be sure, un
questioning, unhesitating, but a voice still tremu
lous and restrained, a voice of unspeakable depth
and richness, hoping for more than it dare yet to
prove. Science says, you may believe in immortality.
You may believe because the universe shows an
eternal purpose; man is the terminal station in
the stupendous age-long process which we call
evolution; man is the chief end and glory, the tip
and top of this developing scheme. Says a great
evolutionist, "the more thoroughly we compre-

138 THE MIND OF CHRIST
hend the process of evolution, the more we are
likely to feel that to deny the everlasting per
sistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob
the whole process of its meaning." To say that a
soul died would be to give the lie to evolution.
To suppose that a bacillus or a brain-clot could
kill a soul were to think a bean could dam Ni
agara. You may believe, says science, because
nature knows no annihilation only change of form ;
every end in matter is only a new beginning, an
other embodiment. The coal-stuff decomposed by
fire is recomposed as light and heat; the irides
cent globule of dew vanishes to find itself again
in the floating cloud. Can mind be less than coal
or dew ? To think so were to stand nature on its
head; the law of conservation cries out that the
soul we " loved long since and lost awhile " still
is and is with us,
"Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is."
History says, you may believe in immortality.
We take her hand and she leads us through the
ages as through the long drawn out aisles and
gloomy crypts of some ancient cathedral. Strange
are the fires we see burning on many altars; un
savory is the incense we smell arising from many
censers; repellent to us are many of the rites we
discover practised in many corners of the vast

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 139
pile. But from every chapel and chancel, from
every stall and transept, from cloister, crypt and
clerestory re-echoes one consenting phrase in the
speech of every nation and tribe and people, like
the sound of many waters, " I believe in the life
everlasting." Everywhere with all men there has
been a quarrel with death. Six thousand years
ago the Egyptian wrote his " Book of the Dead,"
and based his whole theory of life on the idea
of another world. " Mistaken " reads the
Bhavagad Gita, " is he who thinks the soul can
be destroyed." Confucianism's whole creed is a
belief in the life everlasting, its worship a revering
of its ancestors. Vague and unsatisfactory the
Christian finds the Old Testament when he seeks
for expression of confidence in the life eternal,
but that the Jew believed that death was not ex
tinction, any one may see who reads such stories
as the Witch of Endor, the translation of Enoch
and the radiant ascension of Elijah, or studies
those stanzas in the Psalms and portions of the
prophets which, breaking upward like springs of
sweet water in the bitter surge, deny the possi
bility that God can relinquish to the grave those
who put their trust in Him. Here is an idea so
universal that John Fiske calls it " one of the dif
ferential attributes of humanity," and history says,
it is rational to believe that so human, so universal
a faith has its eternal complement in fact. If the

140 THE MIND OF CHRIST
eye argues light, and the ear music, and the con
science right, if every function means a corre
sponding environment, then this quarrel with
death, this belief in an endless life must have its
antiphonal fact. To doubt immortality were to
doubt the universe.
History says, you may believe in immortality
because the movement of society has been uniform
in the development of the individual and the in
creasing appraisement of his value. Man the
species exists for man the person. The higher
the race ascends the more the single individual
is worth to it. For the man exist all those asy
lums and institutions, hospitals and sanatoria,
associations and settlements which are the crown
and characteristic of civilization. Men do not
invest capital in the building of a Lusitania to
carry saw-dust dolls from continent to continent.
Such magnificence of equipment is not furnished
to convey garbage to a dumping ground. Such
luxury of service, such expenditure of means is
meant to transport freight, get men whose time
is precious to destinations across the seas. And
shall the Supreme Master-Builder that planned
this floating world, that spent millions of years
building it, that furnished it with races and na
tions, and all for individual souls, shall this Ship
wright Himself standing on the bridge and guiding
His ship full of souls it was launched for, only

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 141
fling overboard these priceless lives and hurl them
headlong into nothingness in the midcourse of
their voyage to His continent ? To say the poison
cup could rot Socrates, the stake burn Savonarola,
the bullet finish Lincoln, to suppose death brought
the same thing to Paul and Nero, to Leo and
Luther, to Judas and Jesus were to tear from
history what it has found through all its course,
" A Power not ourselves which makes for right
eousness." Science says, you may believe in immortality
because the individual soul is the chief end of the
working of " The Infinite and Eternal Energy
from which all things proceed." History says,
you may believe in immortality because the in
dividual soul is the darling care of that " Power
not ourselves which makes for righteousness."
And what science and history says you may be
lieve, Jesus says " I know," and the reason science
and history give for their tentative faith, Jesus
also gives for His assurance, " Not a sparrow
falls on the ground without your Father; fear not
therefore; ye are of more value than many spar
rows." This is Jesus' assurance of the life ever
lasting, the inestimable worth of the individual
soul to our Father who is in heaven.
Jesus has very little to say directly about im
mortality. Here again He does not argue, but
assumes. There is the great word He gave

142 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Martha when He went to see her after Lazarus'
death, "I am the Resurrection and the Life; he
that believeth on Me, though he die, yet shall he
live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on Me
shall never die." There is the explicit statement
about the Father's house in which there are many
mansions, and the assurance that if there were no
life on the other side of death, He would have
told them, awful as it would have been to declare
the sad fact. Then there is that tender and gra
cious assurance given to His comrade in cruci
fixion; death is not an end, not a dreamless sleep,
not even an interruption of self-consciousness,
" To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise."
These are the most explicit utterances which Jesus
made of His conviction of immortality. It was
one of the things which, from His point of view,
went without the saying. In the course of a day's
conversation we talk little about the sun, and in
the course of a lifetime we never waste a minute
arguing for the light, we just go on living in the
light, thinking, speaking, doing in terms of the
sunshine. It was that way with Jesus and the
future life. The teaching of the Master is simply
inexplicable on the supposition that death ends
all. The Beatitudes would mean nothing . and the
parables unless there was a conscious life after the
body was folded away. That assumption under-

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 143
lies the story of the guest without the wedding
garment; the builders, one of whom built on the
sand, the other on the rock; the rich man who
fared sumptuously every day, oblivious of the poor
man who lay at his gate; the virgins who were
ready for the bridegroom's coming, and the virgins
who were caught napping and without oil in their
lamps; and the sublime scene of the judgment, at
which souls should be separated as a shepherd
divides his sheep from his goats. According to
the trend of Jestis' teaching, the whole spiritual
content of this present life, its knowledge, its skill,
its achievements, its character will be carried over,
and hereafter will be just a continuation of here.
This comes to the surface in the parable of the
capitalist who entrusted his estate to three men.
The agent who got five shares eventually doubled
them, and on his master's return gave him ten.
And what did the master do ? Simply compliment
him and then dismiss him ? " Thou hast been
faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler
over many things, enter thou into the joy of thy
lord ;" this man's life was raised, not retired, con
tinued, not closed.
But you come at Jesus' idea of the future life
through His architectonic idea of God as " Our
Father," and its corollary, His idea of life itself.
God said Jesus is "Our Father." What it
means for a human to call the Divine Being " Our

144 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Father " we have already seen ; it renders the
human divine; it lifts man out of the category of
things which death claims into another order on
which death has no lien. A father and his chil
dren are shareholders in the same stock; if the
father's shares are eternal, the children's must be,
Ho matter how small may be their holdings; were
the children's shares rubbish, the father's were no
better, though his holdings were infinite. Once
grant Fatherhood in the deity and there can be
only one conclusion, " Now are we children of
God; we shall be like Him." Does death whiff
us out, then death has a claim on deity; does He
live, then death is " swallowed up in victory."
This man claiming the divine ancestry is of in
estimable worth to his Father. God is like a
shepherd; even though he have ninety-nine sheep,
he cannot afford to lose one; God is like a house
wife with nine pieces of silver, restless because
one has rolled away ; God is like a father who has
a home and servants and one trusting son, but
there is one son in the far country, and the father
watches, always watches for that boy's coming
back. What once interlocks with the divine, re
mains forever interlocked; what is morally worth
while for God once, remains worth while forever.
As gravitation binds into one our entire solar
system, not only planet to planet in light, and
electron to electron in the dark, so that the fate

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 145
of the smallest electron were the fate of the sun;
so with Fatherhood Jesus joins in one the universe
of persons; not only great spirit to great spirit in
bliss, but soul to soul in woe, so that a soul's
death were divine death. The power of His con
ception is elemental ; from Fatherhood immortality
leaps inevitable.
Then there is that corollary idea, Jesus' idea of
life itself. By " life " He meant always more
than men mean; "The life," He said, "is more
than meat ; it consisteth not in the abundance of the
things a man possesseth," the whole world would
not be a fair equivalent for one life. He called it
" eternal," which means no such colorless thing as
mere longevity, it means a certain kind of lon
gevity. It is not quantity of life, but quality of
life. On the face of the Palisades you can make
out a series of horizontal lines running parallel to
the river; on these lines you read the story of in
numerable winters when the waters were fastened
to the banks with bands of ice, of numberless
spring freshets which sent the waters tumbling
along under the burden of melted snows. You
read in these lines how the river once flowed on
a level with the cliff, how through the centuries it
has been cutting its way down the trap-rock till
it reached the lower level at which it now runs;
and the river makes you think of years and cen
turies; you compute time; you are aware of sea-

146 THE MIND OF CHRIST
sons. But farther up stream you swing in under
Storm King, its base laved by the Hudson's flood,
its august summit sweeping upward in silent un-
changeableness. You forget the waters for the
solemn peak; you cease thinking of the years and
centuries, the time and the seasons. Storm King
is indifferent to all these ; the snows and suns have
left no line on it, the seasons appear to have
slipped across it like the mists through which it
lifts its grim head. The river makes you think
of time; the mountain makes you forget time.
The one is of such an age, the other is ageless.
And that is something of the difference between
" everlasting " and " eternal." An everlasting
life is a life which lasts so many years ; an eternal
life is a life with which years have nothing to do.
Eternal life is the kind of life God has, the kind
of life which makes things, is not made, the kind
of life which uses the material, but is not used
by it. It is the kind of life which may associate
itself with a body which changes and decays,
while it goes on from glory to glory. Its origin
is God, its nourishment is not bread, but every
word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God,
its attributes are love and goodness, mercy and
self-sacrifice, things which neither come with the
years nor age with them, things which would be
though time stopped, things which are the vic
torious contradiction of change and death. This

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 147
is what Jesus means by life; it was in the begin
ning with God before things were or death; it
shall be with God when the things which death
decompose recompose according to that mighty
working whereby He is able to subdue all things
unto Himself. And this divine thing, this time
less thing, Christ says men have, " verily, verily,
I say unto you, He that heareth my word and be
lieveth Him that sent me, hath eternal life."
Sensuous existence is not human life, human life
is eternal, and what is eternal is divine, and on the
divine death has no claim, the grave no lien.
This, then, is Jesus' assurance of immortality,
the inestimable worth of the individual to our Fa
ther who is in heaven. Grant His premise and
the conclusion follows, " as we have borne the
image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image
of the heavenly."
But Jesus seems to say that this Christian im
mortality is not only a fact, but a task. Every
man has it potentially, but every man has it not
practically. There is no question that life is ever
lasting; He seems to say that every one will live
on and on through infinite time; but a study of
His teaching leaves one with the impression that.
every one has not yet reached that God-like quality
of longevity which is implied in the word
" eternal." I have examined every reported say
ing of Jesus about eternal life, and I think I am

148 THE MIND OF CHRIST
right in saying that there is not one which does
not make its possession contingent upon the ful
fillment of certain conditions. " He that be
lieveth in me hath eternal life" is His character
istic way of putting it.
Scripture seems to make it positive that every
soul has everlastingness, but Scripture also seems
to make it positive that for Jesus' kind of everlast
ingness every soul has got to qualify. The gospels
record a striking instance in which this is set out
very clearly. They tell the story of a young man
who came to Jesus asking, " Good Teacher, what
shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" The
man was young, well-born and bred, winsome and
reverent. At sight of him, it is said Jesus loved
him. When Jesus inquired into his private life
he could look straight into the face of the Master
and say without stammering that he had kept the
moral law from his youth up. Then it is said
Jesus looked upon him, and the word translated
" looked " denotes the searching glance of one
who sees through and through. And Jesus said
to the young patrician, " One thing thou lackest."
Up to a certain point the young man's life was
complete. It had all it needed ; its machinery was
in perfect order ; there was no screw loose, no cog
slipped. If eternal life was only an indefinite
continuance of existence, all this young man
needed was to go on as he had been going, keeping

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 149
himself nicely adjusted to his daily surroundings.
But the young man felt that eternal life was
something more than keeping on forever. And
Jesus told him what was needed for him to qualify
for the kind of life he was looking for. " Go,"
said the Master, " sell whatsoever thou hast and
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven; and come, follow me."
Did Jesus mean that by turning philanthropist
the young man would inherit the eternal kind of
everlastingness? It is said that when he heard
Jesus' method for the practise of immortality he
went away sorrowful, and Jesus, looking after him,
said, " How hard is it for them that trust in
riches to enter into the kingdom of God." It was
not the habit of almsgiving that he lacked ; it was
the " treasure in heaven." With that look the
Master fixed on him, He saw that the man's whole
life centered in the things with which time deals,
in money, investments, interest and dividends. He
saw that the man must be lifted away from this
time relationship, he must be put into touch with
timeless things. He must live on and for and
with the things which are above time, the things
Jesus Himself stood for, a world of imperishable
truth, a world of eternal thought, a world of god
like holiness and love.
It was not something the man had which dis
qualified him for eternal life; the condition of it

150 THE MIND OF CHRIST
which Jesus imposed was not poverty. It was
something the man lacked which kept his ever
lastingness from being eternal living. It was not
the wealth, but it was the trust in the wealth in
hibiting all attention to anything higher which
was keeping him just a sheer scrap of longevity.
To qualify for Christ's kind of immortality he
must liberate his interest, and the only way this
could be done was to put the possessions where
they could not interest him. Could he have held
his wealth so loosely that it would not have ab
sorbed him, he might have kept the wealth and at
the same time made good his right to the higher
life. But the trouble was he was the sort of man
who could not follow eternal life and follow
wealth at the same time, and so the one or the
other had to be given up, and Jesus said, let the
wealth go, then come, follow me.
So this is Jesus' regimen for eternal life — get
into the unseen relationships, put yourself into
your higher environment. Would you become
eternal, you must trust the eternal, confide in the
eternal, correspond with the eternal, " This is life
eternal that they should know Thee the only true
God." Christian immortality being a kind of life,
it must be subject to the laws of life, and life, says
one who studied the thing, is " the continuous ad
justment of internal relations to external rela
tions." That is to say, the oak-germ that is

JESUS' IDEA OF IMMORTALITY 151
wrapped up in an acorn does not become oak until
that oak-germ adjusts itself to, appropriates to it
self from its surroundings the material which is
fitted to make oaken fibre. You get life wherever
the organism in which the life is keeps itself in
correspondence with its surroundings.
If we want physical life we must appropriate,
" have treasure in," physical things — air, light,
bread, water, shelter. If we want intellectual
life, we must appropriate, " have treasure in " in
tellectual things, truths, facts. If we want ar
tistic life we must appropriate, " have treasure
in" artistic things, the beautiful in nature and hu
man nature. Physical environment gives life its
physical quality ; intellectual environment gives life
its intellectual quality. But what shall give life
its eternal quality? The eternal environment
is the only thing which can give life its
eternal quality. Science, history and Scripture
seem to vote for the everlasting survival of the
soul; but neither science, history nor Scripture
can prove that the soul will survive in the Christly
way unless it be adjusted to the Christly condi
tions. And these conditions, surely they are not
mere things that time rusts and rots; they are the
things time cannot touch — God. To this Eternal
Father the soul must be related in childlike trust
and brotherly love.
The fundamental . question is not — is there a

152 THE MIND OF CHRIST
life everlasting? It looks as if that mere fact
would soon be demonstrated; but this is the ques
tion — if my soul survives everlastingly will it
share in the " eternal life," the life that is in God ?
To him who will say " Our Father who art in
heaven," and saying it, mean it, and live it in
wardly and outwardly, comes the great assurance,
" This corruptible must put on incorruption, and
this mortal must put on immortality ; so when this
corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this
mortal shall have, put on immortality, then shall
be brought to pass the saying that is written,
Death is swallowed up in victory."

IX
THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA OF GOD

" Now when John heard in prison the works of the
Christ, he sent by his disciples and said unto Him, Art
Thou he that cometh, or look we for another? And Jesus
answered and said unto them, Go and tell John the things
which ye hear and see : the blind receive their sight, and
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear,
and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings
preached to them."
" Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in
me : or else believe me for the very works' sake."

IX
THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA OF GOD
Jesus' idea of God is the essence of the gospel.
It is the simple tincture which impregnates every
doctrine of the Christian faith. It " is the heart
of Christianity, its most central and esoteric
truth," Charles Cuthbert Hall told his Indian
audiences, to whom he had gone to " set forth
the innermost essence of the religion of Jesus
Christ." In the Lord's idea of God as " Our Fa
ther" His thought and feeling and will live and
move and have their being. His whole life and
religion grow out of this sense of the Divine
Fatherhood. Out of this assurance, at once hum
ble and proud, Christianity draws its vitality and
inspiration. The reality of our religion depends
upon the reality of Jesus' idea of God.
But the thing is a paradox. At first glance, it
does not look as if it were true. Measured by the
experience of the senses it seems to fly in the face
of congenital dislocations, shipwrecks, the exist
ence of human sharks, and the fact of moral ulcers
which, draped in satin, are rolled along on rubber
i5S

156 THE MIND OF CHRIST
tires. The Fatherhood of God is not a self-evi
dent fact; and no one knew that better than the
Master. That is the point of the parable, " There
was in a city a judge, who feared not God, and
regarded not man : and there was a widow in that
city, and she came oft unto him, saying, Avenge
me of mine adversary. And he would not for a
while: but afterward he said within himself,
though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet be
cause this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her,
lest she wear me out by her continual coming."
Jesus suggests that there is a good deal in life
which reminds one of those law-courts in the
Roman provinces, where the judge was unprinci
pled. There are times when it seems as if the right
was in a condition of widowhood, abandoned to
its fate by a God who, far from behaving to it as
a loving husband, does not even maintain the
character of a just judge in its behalf. He who
knew that God does care dared to suggest that
sometimes God looks as if He did not care; He
allowed that there are circumstances in which it
seems as if God had gone over to the enemies'
side. The day came when the great Christ knew
what it is to feel that way ; on Calvary there was a
black moment when He reached for the Father's
hand and missed it, and cried, " My God, my God,
why hast Thou forsaken me ? " And it is not
only the wrong which round us lies which seems

THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 1 57
to quarrel with Jesus' idea of the Divine Father
hood, there is the guilt within. When a crimson
sin or a black moral failure has jolted a man's
conceit of himself, it is not easy to believe that the
All-mighty, All-wise, All-perfect One is the Fa
ther of such a being. The best of men and the
sanest realize that they are of the same clay with
the felons and the defectives; and though it may
no longer be sung in public worship Watt's old
hymn rather than rapturous repetition of the creed
sometimes fits our mood,
Alas, and did my Saviour bleed,
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I ? "
It is not obvious that God is a Father of bound
less, gratuitous, ungrudging love. So, as Dr.
Harnack says, " Either it is nonsense, or it is the
utmost development of which religion is capable."
But whether it is nonsense or reality, it is Jesus'
idea of God. The question is, then, how do we
know that Jesus' idea of God is true?
We know that Jesus' idea of God is true in the
same way that we know that anything is true. A
dish of food is set before us. We are told that it
is nourishing. Maybe it is ; we do not know ; the
only way we can prove it is to eat it. If good
digestion follows tastiness, and health follows
both, then we know that the cook spoke truly ; the

158 THE MIND OF CHRIST
proof of the pudding is the eating of it. You are
taught that the square on the hypothenuse of a
right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the
squares on the other two sides; maybe it is; you
do not know ; the only way you can prove it is to
work it out. You lay out your triangle on paper ;
the base is four inches, the perpendicular is three,
the hypothenuse is five; the square of four is six
teen; the square of three is nine, and sixteen and
nine are twenty-five, which is the square on the
hypothenuse. You know the theorem is true be
cause it works. The plain man counts anything
true that makes good in experience; the common
test of truth is practicalness.
And science has the identical method. First
science collects specimens, then it draws an infer
ence, then it makes an hypothesis and at last it veri
fies the hypothesis by experiment; if the theory
works, science settles it among its accepted laws.
It was in 1666 in the town of Woolsthorpe that
Isaac Newton noticed an apple fall from a tree.
That set him thinking why it was that bodies in
falling always fell toward the earth's center. He
developed a theory that particles of matter attract
one another according to S a certain mathematical
rule. Then arose the question, is this true? If
it was true it would account for the fact that the
moon was retained in its orbit around the earth.
So Newton began a series of experiments. But the

THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 159
first of these experiments went to prove that gravi
tation did not work; and, as he himself says, "I
laid aside at that time any further thoughts of this
matter." But in 1679 Newton was involved in a
discussion which led him to think again about his
discarded theory. Sir Christopher Wren tested
it, and Halley and Hooke, and at last it was seen
to be the law by which nature always worked.
The theory had been true all along, just as New
ton had formulated it at first; the hitch in the
beginning had been due to an error in data given
to him by an assistant. In 1686 the Royal So
ciety adopted the truth of the law of gravitation
as " past dispute." Why had Newton first thrown
it aside? Because it appeared not to work. Why
did the Royal Society finally give it a place among
the recognized laws of nature? Because it worked.
And so the plain man's proof and the scientist's,
the highest proof which can be offered for any
idea, is that it works.
And religion uses the same proof, welcomes
the same test. " Come and see," said Philip,
when the critical Nathanael said, " Can any good
thing come out of Nazareth?" When John
Baptist first met Jesus he believed in Him at first
sight. But not long after that first meeting, John
Baptist was cast into prison, and the gloom of that
experience bred in him doubts of his first im
pression. So he sent friends to Jesus asking, is

160 THE MIND OF CHRIST
it true ? " Art Thou He that cometh or look we
for another ? " When the messengers came to
Jesus He was standing where the village folk had
gathered against His coming their deaf and dumb,
their palsied and lunatic. Pausing in His gra
cious labor, the Master replied, " Go and tell John
the things which ye hear and see ; the blind receive
their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are
cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are
raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached
to them." The Lord met the challenge with the
highest proof; if He claimed anything, He made
good. We apply this test of truth to Jesus' idea of
God. What will it do with the man who believes
it? Will it make any practical difference to a
man to believe that God is his Father and all
men's? Let him really commit himself to the
idea as he commits himself to the idea that two
and two are four, what will happen ? Two things
will happen, the man will become more a man
than ever, and the man will become more a
brother than ever.
The man who believes in God's Fatherhood
will be more a man than ever. That is, he
will me less animal, more human; he will
live less for the things that rot and wear out,
and more for the things which abide, the timeless
realities of faith and hope and love; he will think

THE PROOF OF IESUS' IDEA l6l
less of the outward life, and more of the inward
life, less of comfort, convenience, prudence, and
profit, more of character and conduct, duty, purity
and righteousness. Calling God his Father will
make him realize that God cannot live without him
any better than he can live with God. In God
as his Eternal kinsman he will rediscover his in
dividuality and revalue his personality. In the
deep sense of this divine relationship he will find a
new meaning for his thought, affection and will.
For the first time he will really know himself,
what he is, what he is made for, what he ought to
be. The sense of this eternal kinship will not mean
mystic absorption in the Infinite, loss of self in an
Eternal All; but it will mean the finding of self
as a son distinct, individual, personal and of in
estimable worth to a God who is as distinct, in
dividual, personal as himself. With the self-
knowledge will come a self-appreciation; there
will be a deepening sensitiveness to sin as a self-
hurt, as a perversion of his high purpose, and as
a violation of his exalted relationship. With the
deepening sense of sin will come a richer humility,
an ever-growing dependence upon the Eternal
Love, a strengthening of the sense of union with
the Unseen, a feeling of trust that makes him live
without whining, greet the unknown with calm
ness, accept the universe with a song. He will

1 62 THE MIND OF CHRIST
adapt himself graciously to whatever condition his
Father calls him to occupy ; he will go abroad fear
less, unfretful, unanxious; he will leave the future
to take care of itself, knowing that he and it are
in the hands of a love which is able to do ex
ceeding abundantly above what he can ask or
think. Childlike his heart will upsoar, his
thoughts outreach for a closer union with the Fa
ther's Spirit. In a word, the believer in God's
Fatherhood will become less body, more soul, less
material, more spiritual; he will live as a man
who knows he has a body, but is a soul.
But to live in this way, to live to be really
spiritual, all through and through, is to be in the
current of the universe's upward movement.
Man, says science, is the consummate efflorescence
of the age-long process of evolution. True, this
manhood seems yet in its rudiments; it is not yet
unqualified master of the world in which it was
born to reign ; but if the soul be not destined to be
nature's enthroned king, science knows nothing
more worthy. " To the keenest powers of mind
and microscope, to the keenest powers of labora
tory and telescope there appears no sign of any
higher work than this in the universe — the grow
ing of a soul." All the effort of the world-
building forces is concentrated on the culture of
the spiritual element in man. Then, to live as the
believer in God's Fatherhood should live, that is,

THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 163
to master self, to make the soul drive the body, is
to add something to the sum of the soul life of the
world; it is to be true to the omnipresent spiritual
trend of nature and human nature; it is to be in
line with the highest work we can find being done
in the universe. It works, then, this idea of God's
Fatherhood ; if Jesus' idea of God is the source of
the individual's self-discovery and the individual's
self-mastery, if it makes him true to the noblest
intention of the world as we know it, then Jesus'
idea of God is true.
The man who believes in God's Fatherhood
will be more a brother than ever. Assume what
position one may in regard to Jesus' gospel, one
thing is forever true, that a new appreciation of
humanity grows up out of the practical acceptance
of the idea that God is " Our Father." He who
says " Our Father," really meaning that all men
are as nearly related to the Eternal as himself,
finds a deepening reverence for his fellows, a re-
appraisement of their value in terms of the fif
teenth chapter of St. Luke. Because God is all-
related, the believer is all-related. The disciple
becomes unclassified. He can know no rich and
poor, no class and mass, no society and submerged.
Every man is only man, the imperishable seed of
the Eternal. A disciple becomes universal. He
can know no foreigner nor native, no black man
nor yellow man, no white man nor red man ; every

1 64 THE MIND OF CHRIST
man is only man, the brother worth dying for.
The disciple becomes catholic. He can know no
churchman nor heathen, nor orthodox nor heretic,
no saint nor prodigal ; every man is only man, the
child of " Our Father." To say " Our Father "
means to be a friend, a friend of every man, a
friend of all men, without regard to race, condi
tion or religion. Love becomes the master pas
sion; personal sacrifice to make others happier or
better, the daily meat and drink.
The believer in Jesus' God identifies himself
with the world sorrow and joy, allies himself
with the world struggle and victory. The sin of
the world he will hate because it means loss to the
brothers, and loss to the Father who loves all im
partially ; but hating the sin he will love the sinner
and be ready to lay his life down for his saving
because the sinner is of infinite value to the Di
vine parent. He will bless those who curse him,
pray for those who despitefully use him, and give
to rich and poor, to sick and well, to ignorant and
learned, to thankless and grateful, his time, his
power, his strength, his friendship because it is
the family way, the way of the Father who sends
His rain to just and unjust and shines His sun on
good and evil. He will reckon every degenerate,
defective and dependent life a pearl of great price ;
he will think the best of the worst, hope the best
for the worst, do the best with the worst, give

THE PROOF OF JESUS' IDEA 1 65
the best to the worst. His family crest will be a
rude Roman Cross stained red and bearing in
pure white the legend " Our Father."
But to live in this way, to be a brother all
through and through is to put one's self in line
with humanity's upward progress. Man the spe
cies, says history, exists for man the individual.
Sir Henry Maine long ago made it clear that the
development of society has been uniform in the
enrichment of the individual's value. The happi
ness of society now depends upon the happiness
of its constituent persons. The slum is a horror
to the avenue, and the best is restless until the
worst is better. Then, to live as the believer in
Jesus' God should live, to increase the worth of
mankind, to feel brotherhood with the lowliest as
well as the highest, is to align one's self with the
evident purpose of this scheme of things. To
make a soul grow where it looks as if there were
only a body of brute passions, to make another
life know its divinity and claim its higher life is
to fit into the sublimest work history can discover
among men. It works, then, this idea of God's
Fatherhood; if Jesus' idea of God is the central
spring of inclusive love and world brotherhood,
if it makes one a sharer in the most beautiful
work human nature can do, then Jesus' idea of
God is true.
Teach the God of Jesus until it grows into be-

166 THE MIND OF CHRIST
lief that begets acts, and the soul attains self-
mastery, and men become brothers. Impregnate
a man's will with the idea " Our Father," and the
man becomes more spiritual, more neighborly.
By the logic of science, by the logic of common
sense, God is our Father of boundless, gratuitous,
ungrudging love. The Christian life is the final
proof of the Christian truth. If the world has
not reached the proof it is because the world has
never lived the life. But the life has been lived.
What made that one pure Soul, that one Per
fect Brother must be real ; the source of the man
hood of the Master, the brotherhood of the Christ
could not be untrue. The ultimate test of the
Divine Fatherhood as the highest idea of God
is the divine character incarnate in a human life.
That Incarnation has been achieved once; that
Incarnation having been achieved once, the proof
of the idea is in every man's hand. He who
doubts the Fatherhood of God must explain the
character of Jesus Christ. He who would know
God as " Our Father," has the deep assurance
of personal certainty, has the test within reach —
he is to live in the world as a child in a Father's
house, he is to live in the world as a child in a
Father's house full of children. "If any man
willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teach
ing, whether it is of God."

HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE GOD AND
FATHER OF JESUS

"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."
"If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my
Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and
make our abode with him."

X

HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE GOD AND
FATHER OF JESUS
It is one thing to know about an object; it is
another thing to know the object. In the one
case you go round about the object, but never
get into touch with it. In the other case you
touch the object and become one with it. In the
first instance you see the thing as a fact; in the
second instance you feel the thing as a force.
To know about God is theology. To know God
is religion. Theology knows about God as a
fact. Religion knows God as a Father. Evi
dently it is a greater thing to have a religion than
a theology. Science has a theology, and philoso
phy and history; every man has a theology; but
not ievery man has a religion.
"A fire-mist and a planet,
A jelly-fish and a saurian,
A crystal and a cell,
And caves where the cavemen dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod, —
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
169

170 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Like tides on a crescent sea-beach
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in, —
Come from the mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod, —
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.
A picket frozen on duty,--
A mother starved for her brood,—
Socrates drinking the hemlock,
And Jesus on the rood;
And millions who, humble and nameless,
The straight, hard pathway trod, —
Some call it Consecration,
And others call it God."
Here is a difference, the difference between the
knowledge an educated born-blind man has about
light, and the knowledge a plain man with two
good eyes has of the sun. The question is how
can the man who only knows about God come
to know God ; how can he who has said only " O
God" learn to say "O God thou art my God";
how can one become conscious of that ineffable
relationship of personal peace and splendid use
fulness which Jesus feels in calling God, " Our
Father"? Knowledge of God proceeds along the beaten
path of all knowing. If one desires to make God
his own, he must go about it in the same way as
he would to make electricity his own, or a dia-

HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 171
mond, or a dinner, or health, or friendship. The
God-seeker appropriates the supreme value in the
same manner as he appropriates any life value.
There are three simple steps to be taken in know
ing anything: — first, the one who would know
must trust the expert who knows ; second, he must
apply himself to the laws of the object as the ex
pert makes them clear; third, he must experiment
with the object along lines which the expert sug
gests. The man who would know must trust the ex
pert who knows. This is the first step in ac
quiring any knowledge. All life begins in trust.
The life of the forest begins in trust. Any
woodsman knows how a fawn will follow, and
even feed out of one's hand where the old doe
would flee in fear. The life of the waters be
gins in trust. When at the fish-hatchery I have
held my finger gently over the tray containing
the three months old trout and seen the wee wrig
glers cluster about that spot on the surface. Trust
is sheer instinct; it does not wait for reason;
it precedes affection; it is born with us full
grown; to trust is to act naturally, it is to move
along the line of least resistance. So the first
step in all knowing is trust.
A lad determines to know electricity; that is
he wants to feel that electricity exists for him,
that he can use it, light homes with it, send it

172 THE MIND OF CHRIST
over the sea with messages, harness it to wheels
and make it haul loads across continents. So the
lad consults an expert. He knows the expert
because the expert makes electricity work, he does
with electricity what the lad wants to do. The
expert lights homes with it, he sends it running
round the world with men's messages; he bids
it carry freight and passengers from city to city.
And the lad goes to this expert and takes him at
his word, trusts him completely and so begins
to know electricity. And in this same simple
way by which every value of life is appropriated
a man begins to know God. He determines to
trust the expert in God, that is the one who knows
God as he would know Him, who can do with
God the things that he would do. The proof
that Jesus is the expert in God is in the begin
ner's hands. To Jesus God was more real than
mother. Once when she chided Him for for
getting her, He answered wonderingly, " Wist ye
not that I must be in my Father's house ? "
He believed that God and He were related as
Father and Son, that the Father's business was
His business, that His message was the Father's
word. And His idea worked. By that idea of
the divine Fatherhood He lived as one who knew
no inward unrest; He had no hesitation in the
face of life's pain, no quarrel with life's hard
ship. The outward life seemed to Him only an ac-

HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 1 73
cident, a temporary incident in the career of the
inward, the inward was the real thing, not time
but eternity was its sphere of activity. And so
the thought of the Infinite Father brought Him
a deep peace which passed understanding and
made Him more manly than any man who had
ever lived.
And this idea of God's Fatherly care made
Him more a brother than any other man.
He worked for no wage, for no thanks even, but
only because every last prodigal was worth while
as the Father's child and His brother; He be
came known as the man who " went about doing
good " ; He was nicknamed the " friend of pub
licans and sinners." So Jesus' knowledge of God
made a difference, a difference in His own life
and others'; and it is that practical difference
His knowledge made which proves Him to be
the soul's expert in God. The beginning of re
ligion is taking the Master at His word about
God. The first step in knowing the Father is
trusting the Son.
But after trust comes attention, application.
We appropriate what we attend to ; we know what
we apply ourselves to. Here is the student of
electricity. He has gone to the expert to take
his word for granted. But that is only the be
ginning. Now he must attend to the teaching
about electricity; he must apply his mind to the

174 THE MIND OF CHRIST
study of its habits, laws and ways of working
as these are elucidated by the expert; he must
familiarize himself with the instructor's idea.
Only so much of his teacher's knowledge will be
come his as he attends to. If the student spends
all his time in outside work, if he is all the time
thinking how he will dress, or what he will
eat, if he uses up all his energy on the athletic
field he will not know electricity; he must dili
gently concentrate his thought upon the lectures
and text-books. Application is the everlasting
price of knowledge. A man loves music to-day;
he can understand what Handel meant when he
said that as he wrote the Hallelujah Chorus he
saw the heavens opened and the angels and the
great God Himself. But this man can remember
the first time he heard " The Messiah." He went
to the music hall because a friend told him that
he ought to go. As he listened to the oratorio
for the first time, he wondered whether the stu
pidity was chargeable to the friend who enjoyed
it so deeply or to himself to whom it was just so
much meaningless sound. And yet here and
there some strain came out and stayed with him
after he had gone away, and that strain kept
singing itself over and over to him. Then be
cause he wanted to love music, and to under
stand it, he went again and again, and the thing
grew on him, and one night as he sat in the hall,

HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 175
it seemed as if the walls fell away, and the air
was full of a drift of white-winged angels, and
the sound of voices which no man could number
was coming down out of the skies and singing
in his soul, " The Lord God Omnipotent reign
eth." And in this same way a man must go on to
know the Father of Jesus Christ. One must stay
with Him until His idea of God becomes familiar
to him, thought of his thought, master of his
affection. He cannot get that idea and keep it if
he spends all his time in the mere making of a
living, if he uses the world as a mere kitchen,
or office, or work-shop, or play-ground and never
pulls down the screens and closes the doors and
uses life for a school-room where he shall see no
man save Jesus only. The God-seeker must
dwell in the student atmosphere; he must take
some time every day to think, to let his undis
tracted eye rest on the Master till He fills his
vision stern as the Judgment Day yet infinitely
gentle, solemn as Gethsemane and yet transfig
ured with Easter glory, his Master, Victim, Eter
nal Judge. Once Wordsworth chided England
for losing her love of nature —
"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours,
We have given our hearts away a sordid boon."

176 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Change " nature " in the third line to " Jesus " and
it is just as true. He who would know Jesus' God
as the Master knew Him must not only trust the
Master, but he must study the Master as He works
with God.
Then after trust and attention comes experi
ment. He who would know must work with the
object along the lines which the expert has made
clear. This is the climax, the ultimate step by
which the student becomes the worker. It is the
experimenter to whom knowledge about becomes
knowledge of; it is the man who works with the
fact who feels its force. The student has trusted
the electrician; he has studied his idea until it
has become thought of his thought ; he has learned
the habits of electricity so that he knows what to
expect of it, what it will expect of him. Now
it remains only for him to work with the mys
terious fluid, to obey what he has been taught to
believe. He goes out into life; he gives this
electricity wires, insulators, dynamos, batteries,
and lo, he knows it, he uses it, it is his; it is part
of himself; he is part of it. With it he can make
for men another eye to see what their two eyes
could not possibly discover ; with it he can give to
men another voice with which they speak farther
than their own voice could possibly reach ; with it
he can give to men other limbs so that they can
go where their own limbs can not possibly carry

HOW A MAN MAY KNOW THE FATHER 177
them. For this experimenter, this man who
works with electricity, it is no longer a mere fact
known about, it is a force known and felt. It
is his obedience, his willing and active commitment
to it which has made the change between him
and it.
What can that mean for the God-seeker but
that he must work with God as Jesus gives us
to understand God, that he shall use God as his
Father and the Father of all men. It means that
he shall live in the world as a child and not as
an orphan; he shall live as if God lived and cared
how he did, where he went and what he had; he
shall live without fret or fear; he shall live as a
share-holder in the eternal and not as a slave
of time. It means too that he shall live in the
world as a brother of all men; the honor of the
family shall be his ideal, the glory of the Father
his joy, the happiness and holiness of the brothers
his untiring care and service; he shall feel the
world's claim on him, the world's right to his
wealth, his health, his learning, his faith; he shall
be a lifter not a leaner, a giver not a getter.
It is the persistent experimenter who gets the
proof. Sixty years ago no human eye had seen
Neptune, that blazing orb which unobserved stands
sentry on the frontier of our solar system.
Men thought, maybe something like it might be
there, but no one knew, no one dared say, because

178 THE MIND OF CHRIST
no one had seen. On the evening of August 31,
1846, Le Verrier the French mathematician sat in
his library deep in calculations along the line of
the law of gravitation. Before he quit his room,
he bent over a map of the skies and making a
mark where now we know Neptune to be he told
the world that they would find a planet there;
but no eye saw it, no glass discovered it. Some
time after a German astronomer with a new tel
escope pointed it at the exact spot indicated on
Le Verrier's map, and there flew down the brass
tube the first ray from the great planet which ever
pricked human vision. Experimentation proved
what sight seemed to declare untrue.
So for the man who will take Jesus' idea of
God and work with it, live in the world as in a
Father's house, live in the world as in a Father's
house full of children, live in trust and love there
will come the vision of the Father's, hand on
everything in life and death. To know Jesus'
peace and Jesus' power, one must know Jesus'
God; for this knowledge there are three steps,
trust, attention, obedience, and of these three the
greatest is obedience, for it is by loving and only
by loving that a man can know that God is love.

XI

THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING IN
THE GOD AND FATHER OF JESUS

"Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect."

XI
THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING IN
THE GOD AND FATHER OF JESUS
There is no Christian doctrine for which you
could get so many men to vote as the Father
hood of God. Nothing can exhaust the name
" Father." It is the gladdest, but the greatest,
the dearest, but the deepest, the sweetest, but the
solemnest, name men can frame to fit God. We
cannot put too much into the word, but we can
put too little into it.
There are two kinds of men who put too little
into the idea of God's Fatherhood. The first
man is he who prefers to think of God as judge.
To call God a Father, he thinks, is to enthrone
indulgence. He views the doctrine with suspi
cion lest it rob God of authority, draw the red
out of sin, and relieve the cautery of conscience.
This man deplores the universal note in the
preaching of Jesus' idea of God. If he preached
it, he would make it an esoteric doctrine to be
mentioned only to those who had been initiated
by conversion into the secrets of grace.
181

1 82 THE MIND OF CHRIST
The second man who puts too little into the
name " Father " is he who sees nothing in Father
hood but sentiment. He thinks God too* soft
hearted to rule, a doting grandfather too weak
to punish. This man has the idea that love is
too tender to blame a man for edging off when
goodness hurts, costs, or is unprofitable. For this
second man the thought of God as a Father
makes life a game, the world a playground and
the infinite pity ground for infinite excuse. To
these two it needs to be said, this article of the
creed, " I believe in God the Father Almighty "
is the most precious and the most perilous for us
to repeat, and for three reasons.
First — it is a serious thing to believe in Jesus'
idea of God's Fatherhood, because he who claims
God as Father must be ready to answer the ques
tion, What kind of a son are you?
Fatherhood is something that we never think
of when we talk about animals. The parent of a
boy we call a father. The parent of a foal we
call a sire. Here is a difference. The idea
" father " suggests care, affection and fore
thought. The idea " sire " suggests only pro
creation. We do not expect the colt's sire to care
for him, to exhibit affection or to take thought
for his future. But if a man treated his son as
a horse treats his young we would say of that
man, he has never been a father to the boy. He

THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 1 83
had done all that the animal did for his offspring,
but he had left undone those things which make
fatherhood. And those things involve character,
they imply faith, hope and love, they are not
physical, but spiritual activities.
By the same sign you never call a young horse
a " son "; he is a " foal." The idea " son " sug
gests gratitude, loyalty and obedience. The idea
of " foal " suggests only animal descent. We
do not expect the colt to exhibit gratitude to his
sire, to abide in the same stable or to evidence
obedience to him. But if a youth treated his
father as a young horse treats his parents we
would say of that youth, he is inhuman. He
might do all that the animal did for his progeni
tor, but he would have left undone those things
which make human sonship. And those things
involve character, they imply trust, affection and
filial submission, and these things are not physical,
but spiritual activities.
So then, fatherhood involves a relationship and
that relationship involves something owed on both
sides. If I have a father, there is due me from
that father all that fatherhood implies. If I am
a son there is due my father all that sonship im
plies. This relationship involves mutual care,
affection and taste. It claims reciprocity in char
acter. Can the relationship with God expect less ?
The idea of fatherhood is like the general rule

1 84 THE MIND OF CHRIST
about the square of the hypothenuse of a right-
angled triangle. Whether it be a right-angled
triangle drawn on a child's blackboard or a right-
angled triangle formed by three stars in the Milky
Way the rule works — the square on the hypoth
enuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the
sum of the squares of the other two sides. This
father and son relationship, like mathematics,
works everywhere, on the earth, in the heavens.
I cannot say " Father," until I have begun to
answer his call " son " ; His Fatherhood does not
exist for me until I have made my sonship exist for
Him, until I have shared in His character. He
is spirit and I must be spirit too ; something more
than a body to be warmed, clothed and fed ; some
thing more than an animal to fight like a dog,
root like a pig, sing like a bird, or hive like a
bee. I must be the child of the Eternal Spirit,
the son of Infinite Faith, Infinite Hope, Infinite
Love. A father's rights are unquestioned, abso
lute, ungiven. He has the right to expect every
thing to be reciprocated that He has given to us.
The old fundamental need of personal struggle,
personal consecration, personal holiness is doubled.
Life is more critical than ever. I have no loop
hole to crawl out of; the lines are tightly drawn,
I must be in my world what He is in His uni
verse. From Sinai, it is said, the smoke ascended as

THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 185
from a furnace, and the mountain quaked greatly
when out of a thick cloud with thunderings and
lightnings the King gave His command to Israel.
On a hillside sweet with the peaceful odors of
plowed field, quiet save for the pipings of the
birds, under a blue Syrian sky which mirrored its
fair sun in Galilee's lake, the Father spoke through
His great Son His will for the family. Yet, I
think Sinai's " thou shalt not kill " were easier to
listen to than Jesus' " blessed are the merciful,"
the King's words, " thou shalt not commit adul
tery," less than the Father's " the pure in heart
shall see God," the Sovereign's word, " thou shalt
have no other gods before me " as an ant-hill to
the snow-capped Alpine summit, " Ye shall be
perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."
It is a serious thing to believe in Jesus' idea of
God's Fatherhood, because he who claims God as
his Father must be ready to answer this question :
What kind of a son are you?
Second — It is a serious thing to believe in
Jesus' idea of God's Fatherhood, because it com
mits a man to living his life in absolute unself
ishness. Given a father, and what follows?
What an alchemist is a new-born babe. The
touch of those tiny fingers transmutes the base
metal of thought of self into the pure gold of
thought of the unself. From the moment when
his first babe's first cry summons the instinct of

1 86 THE MIND OF CHRIST
fatherhood in a man's bosom that man must
deny himself, he must henceforth lose himself in
another. Love, once a mere passion of posses
sion, is re-born a passion for self-sacrifice. This
father has a family, and it is the family, the home,
the health of the whole which become his chiefest
concern. Given a son, and what follows? What
must be the true son's concern? Surely it is the
same as his father's. The father no more than the
son, the son no less than the father, exists for that
home. He must feel how every thought, word
and act, though made in secret, is adding to or
subtracting something from the honor of the
home. It is this mutual instinct of being sup
ported and supporting which makes us sing
" There is no place like home."
So here, again, the axiom of the earthly re
lationship we call home is true for the celestial
relationship we call religion. This is the exten
sion of the old fifth commandment in religion —
" Love your enemies and pray for them that per
secute you; that ye may be sons of your Father
who is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise
on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the
just and the unjust."
Like God the Father, the Son must have a love
that is boundless, gratuitous and ungrudging.
The family, not one favorite here and another
there, but all the members must receive without

THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 187
bias, be blessed without prejudice, be cared for
without favoritism. The son must live so that
no man can be poorer, no woman sadder, no child
more wretched for aught he has done or left un
done. He must live so that through his words
and deeds men may see truth, reverence purity,
and possess the means of happiness, and he must
so live not for profit, prudence nor popularity; he
must so live though it means a curse, a crown of
thorns and a cross.
And if we seek to know what that means, what
sonship involves, we go to Him who taught us
to say " Our Father." His life is just spent in
going about doing good ; He does so much for the
imperfect, the defective, the degenerate, that they
call Him " friend of publicans and sinners." He
spends His life giving, giving until when He
comes to die He has nothing worth gambling for
but His cloak. That day He died, the men He
had lived for led Him away like a lamb to the
slaughter. And while they were making the
wounds for Him to hang by He prayed, " Father
forgive them, for they know not what they do."
And that is the living picture of sonship, and
what it means to say, " I believe in God the
Father Almighty."
Those who fear this broad truth lest it make
men morally slothful, those who greet the Sermon
on the Mount boisterously as " religion enough

1 88 THE MIND OF CHRIST
for me," must see what the sonship is to which
this idea of God summons us. Standing with
His arms around poverty, uncleanness and social
leprosy, the Father's great Son calls : " Follow
me. It is a serious thing to believe in Jesus' idea of
God's Fatherhood, because he who claims God as
his Father is committed to living his life in abso
lute unselfishness.
In the last place — it is a serious thing to be
lieve in Jesus' idea of God's Fatherhood, because
it means that God's perfectness consists in His
impartial love and love is the most awful thing
in the world. It has been said " Be afraid of the
love that loves you; it is either your heaven or
your hell. The lives of men are never the same
after they have let themselves be loved; if they
are not better they are worse. For this is the
mystery of love, its paradox — while it is the
greatest thing in the world it is the most help
less." For the love of her child, without thought of
the cost, a mother would give her own life in ex
change; and yet she must stand at its death bed
with helpless hands when the heart spring un
winds and the little life runs down. A father
would give his fortune, his blood to keep his son's
heart clean and white, but all his paternal passion
cannot check that son's mad pace, if the boy's

THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 189'
lusts take the bit between their teeth and drag
him along the edge of the moral precipice. A
son may leave home; a despot can drag him back;
a father can only wait and watch and keep the
door ajar. We shrink to apply all we know of the
weakness of human love to the divine. Yet
it was through a man the Father made His love
plain to us. He came, the Christ, to His own
and they received Him not. He loved His
own, loved them to the end, and yet at the end
they deserted Him, betrayed Him, hung Him on
a cross. The Tuesday before the Friday when they
nailed Him between two thieves, He was stand
ing in the temple at Jerusalem. Did He love that
fair, rebellious city? We may never know how
great was that love. Could He save that imper
illed city? Jerusalem had bound Love's hands
with indifference so that He could not reach out
to rescue her ; she had tethered His feet with hate
so that He cduld only stand still and watch her
singing into the gulf that Titus was to dig.
Stand close to the Christ as He speaks — you see
He is draining love's bitterest cup ; He. is realiz
ing love's helplessness, " it is the wail of a heart
wounded because its love has been despised " and
it cannot avert the doom which impends over those
it loves. "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! how often

190 THE MIND OF CHRIST
would I have gathered thy children as a hen
gathered her chickens, and ye would not. Be
hold, your house is left unto you desolate."
Men say they cannot believe in a hell, because
a father never could send a child to dwell there.
The inference is true. The Father never has sent
and never will send men to misery, but that makes
a hell no less real. When the sun shines on a
thing and it does not grow, we know that thing
is dead. When love breathes on a life and that
life does not respond, we know that the soul in it
is stone. " Believe, then," as a great liberal theo
logian puts it, " in hell, because you believe in the
love of God — not in a hell to which God con
demns men of His will and pleasure, but a hell into
which men cast themselves from the very face
of His love in Jesus Christ. The place has been
painted as a place of fires. But when we con
template that men come to it with the holiest
flames in their nature quenched, we shall justly
feel that it is rather a dreary waste of ash and
cinder, strewn with snow — some ribbed and
frosted arctic zone, silent in death for there is no
life there, and there is no life there because there
is no love, and no love because men in rejecting
or abusing her have slain their own power ever
again to feel her presence."
It is a serious thing to believe in the Father
hood of God, because this belief involves sonship,

THE SERIOUSNESS OF BELIEVING 191
and sonship involves brotherhood, and brother
hood involves living for the spirit behind things,
for the higher life, the eternal kind on which
death lays no hand, on which the grave has no
claim. Oh, the exactingness of this service. If a man
would have an easy religion let him not take this
article with which to begin his creed — "I be
lieve in God the Father Almighty." For if he
give himself to a Father God, a God who loves as
did the Man of Nazareth, his " yeses " and " noes "
his ideas of right and wrong will be searched with
fingers of fire, he will hear a voice calling to his
thoughts, his wishes, his will, " higher," " higher,"
he will see a vision of an ideal and he will feel
that ideal draw him with hooks of steel to make
himself perfect with God's perfectness.
" And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Mas
ter shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work
for fame;
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his
separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things
as They are."

XII
THE RELIGION OF JESUS THE ABSO
LUTE RELIGION

"Our Father who art in heaven."
" Go ye, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing
them into the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things
whatsoever I commanded you: and Lo, I am with you
always, even unto the consummation of the age."
" Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in
me : or else believe me for the very works' sake."
" I have given you an example, that ye also should do as
I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, A
servant is not greater than his lord; neither one that is
sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things,
blessed are ye if ye do them."

XII
THE RELIGION OF JESUS THE ABSO
LUTE RELIGION
Obvious as the supremacy of the religion of
Jesus may be for some, it must be frankly admitted
that it is not so obvious to all men. Outside of
the church not only but within its communion the
question is being asked, can Christianity's claim
to be the absolute religion justify itself to intelli
gence, in plain language, is Christianity played
out? And there is not a little in appearances
which makes a brief for pessimism. There is the
fact that after nearly two thousand years certain
non-Christian faiths have a larger membership,
and their collective following overwhelms ours.
Among the Western people where its influence has
been greatest controversy has beaten upon Chris
tianity, sectarian discord has wounded it, govern
ments which profess to be its defenders tear into
tatters its elementary principles, and men and
women who have publicly confessed its faith dis
credit it with lives which mock its Master's ideals.
And, as if this were not enough to cast sus
picion upon the finality of the Christian religion,
195

196 THE MIND OF CHRIST
a challenge comes from the Far East. Above that
horizon has risen a heathen nation. And as she
stands in the glory of her youth as a world-power,
lo, she compares favorably with and rises superior
to certain so-called Christian nations which have
from time to time aspired to conquer her, even to
convert her. The extraordinary development of
Japan with its alien faith may not be explained
by mere intellectual causes. It has been inspired
by an unsurpassed patriotism, sustained by the
noblest self-sacrifice and glorified by a humani
tarianism which almost reaches up to America's
unprecedented attitude toward Cuba and the
Philippines. Such facts make even Christians ask
if after all their religion be not only a passing
phase of civilization, if it be not a provisional
though a Providential revelation.
This is the question which the disciple must an
swer, is the religion of Jesus the absolute religion
or is the world to expect a new religion? For
effective service there is need not only of arms and
men but the force must be vitalized by an unques
tioning confidence in the unique ability of the com
mander. Doubt of. the general's qualifications cuts
the nerve of daring. When the army believes that
its commanding officer is not only brave but that
he is the only man who can lead them on to victory
something gets done. Faith/has a way of making

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 197
the result come true. Doubt and though you are
right you do not dare. Unqualified commitment
to the mind of Christ as the ultimate standard and
spiritual dynamic is the sole condition of Christ
like character and efficient evangelization. If they
themselves are to come into " the measure of the
stature of His fulness," if they are to win the
world for allegiance to their Lord, Christians have
got to believe that His religion is the one absolute
faith for mankind.
They must believe that the religion of Jesus is
absolute as opposed to provisional; that is, that
Christianity is not a phase of developing civiliza
tion, a faith for a temporary emergency of the
race. They must see it as the indispensable re
ligion for which in the future there will be no
substitute as there has been none in the past.
Christians must believe that the religion of Jesus
is absolute as opposed to provincial; that is, that
Christianity is not a racial cult, a faith for a certain
type of mind and class of feeling. They must see
it as the universal religion whose field has no
boundary but the earth's round ring. Christians
must believe that the religion of Jesus is absolute
as opposed to partial; that is, that Christianity is
not a mere forerunner of a larger religion, a faith
only for beginners in spiritual evolution. They
must see it as the consummate religion having

198 THE MIND OF CHRIST
within its keeping the answer to the ultimate prob
lems of the inward life, the promise of the per
fecting of mankind.
Of course the religion which aspires to this ex
alted function must measure up to certain require
ments. The faith that claims to be absolute must
stand a fourfold test. First, the absolute religion
must have a God, for the race is " incurably re
ligious." No mere moral code nor social pro
gramme however altruistic can become an absolute
religion if it is godless. In its center it must en
throne an Infinite Power and Pity to whom the
human heart can aspire and pray. It is not neces
sary to prove that no tribe of men has ever been
found who had not some sense of a relationship
to an awful Unseen. It is necessary only to know
that there are some men who will cry, " thou hast
made us for Thyself and we are restless till we
rest in Thee." Given one human soul who de
mands God and the absolute religion must supply
the goods. And this God of the absolute religion
must be an Infinite and Eternal Presence who may
be known by and who knows every last child of
man, a Person in whom, by whom and through
whom are all things, a Being the secret of whose
purpose includes every living soul. The absolute
religion must have a God for all men to love and
obey. Second, the absolute religion must have a world-

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 1 99
wide message, founded upon the conception of the
infinite value of the individual. For in the erec
tion of a world-wide ideal the unit of the building
is not the state, nor a class, nor even the family,
but the individual, the man without distinction
of race, color, or condition. A world-wide ideal
can be no higher than its estimate of a single soul.
Any social programme which values one class more
than another, which lifts one kind of men at the
expense of the rest, which depreciates the individ
ual however conditioned is disqualified from being
the absolute religion. The absolute religion must
have a world-wide message founded upon a con
ception of the infinite value of the individual.
Third, the absolute religion must be consistent
with reality, it must be founded on fact which may
be tested by the plain man's test of truth. It must
be consistent with the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth. Piety without intelligence
is fanatic and divisive. Criticism is normal and
it is as inevitable as the sea. Like the sea its tide
will search the outlines of creeds as the tide sub
merges the sand forts of children playing war upon
the beach. It will rise against and at last close
over every authority which is not rock-ribbed and
lifted high into the blinding light of the eternal
sun. Before its swelling flood only that remains
intact which concurs with reality. The absolute
religion must be founded on fact.

200 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Fourth, the absolute religion must have an un
sparing ethical ideal. In a word faith in it must
make the best men. This, as we have seen, is the
ultimate test of any religion. Whatever argument
may be adduced for a doctrine, it would instantly
lose its force if it appeared that the moral result
of denying that doctrine was superior to that which
resulted from its acceptance. Unless men are mor
ally better for their faith, they will not long be
lieve in that faith, and they will not get others to
repeat its creed. Only the highest character-mak
ing creed can survive. The race will eventually
tire of appeasings the gods and begin to demand
that religionists be simply good. The absolute re
ligion must have an unsparing ethical ideal.
These four things the absolute religion must
fulfil. If it is pregnable in any one of these four
dimensions it will be forced eventually to capitu
late. No amount of strength massed on three
sides will save it from the invasion of ultimate
oblivion on its weak side. To be absolute a re
ligion must be four-square to every wind that
blows. At the bar of this quadrilateral at least
five great religions stand and each claims to be
the religion for mankind.
Islam is one. Its definition of God would make
little change in the definition given in the West
minster Shorter Catechism. But the violent re
pulsion which the Western heart experiences at

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 201
the mention of Mohammedanism is sufficient to
disqualify Islam as a universal faith were it not
already rendered unfit by the third and fourth re
quirements for an absolute religion. The absolute
religion must be consistent with reality, but Islam's
Koran is a tissue of absurdities. The absolute
religion must have an unsparing ethical ideal, but
Islam permits polygamy, and its only salvation is
escape from future punishment by the appeasing
of a supreme despot.
Hinduism which has basked for centuries in
the aromatic airs of India brings its devotees a
peace which passeth understanding; its prayers
Christians might repeat, and its religious experi
ences are fervent and profound; its method of
contemplation satisfies a deep desire and need of
the human soul. But the very fact that with a
history half as long again as Christianity's Hindu
ism has failed to save its own land disables it as
the absolute religion, if it were not inherently dis
qualified by the second requirement of an absolute
religion. The absolute religion must have a
world-wide message founded on a conception of
the infinite value of the individual, but Hinduism
seeks no converts; it is essentially aristocratic; its
favored initiates leave the world about them to
wallow in brute passion, to be enslaved by caste
and to wander hopelessly in the utter darkness of
superstition.

202 THE MIND OF CHRIST
Buddhism, the eclectic faith, the amorphous re
ligion, the sad comfort of the disillusioned, whose
end is extinction and whose method is renuncia
tion, fosters something which looks like the Chris
tian grace of charity. But that Japan after cen
turies of Buddhism is proverbially unchaste is
enough to rule out Buddhism as a universal faith,
if it were not already unfitted by the same standard
as Hinduism. For Buddhism is also a religion for
the privileged, with no valuation of the individual.
Confucianism, the religion of order, makes laws
of filial reverence which put to shame the customs
of our Western peoples. But to remember that
China whose religion Confucianism has been for
centuries before Christ must in these latter days
repudiate its fundamental principle that she may
permit herself to progress is enough to disbar Con
fucianism, were it not already thrown out of court
by the first requirement of an absolute religion.
The absolute religion must have a God for all
men to love and obey, but Confucianism is essen
tially atheistic ; its indefinable Supreme has no place
in and no active part with the governance of the
universe. But what of Christianity? And first we must
remind ourselves of the fact that Christianity is
not modern civilization. Prof. G. W. Knox puts
the case thus, " No doubt modern civilization owes
much to our religion, but it is not a Christian

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 203
civilization. Many of its elements are of other
origins and some of them are directly antagonistic
to its fundamental principles. The proof which
takes our particular form of modern life as the
fruit of the teaching of Christ at once claims too
much and too little, too much for our social con
dition, and too little for the Christian ideal. It
were indeed the greatest evidence against Chris
tianity, could our civilization be claimed as its
fruits, precisely as China is the gravest indictment
against the Confucian system. The highest claim
of our faith is that it is a protest still, indignant
and uncompromising, against not only the ex
crescences, but against much of the essential char
acter of the modern world." The best that can
be said for civilization is that it is being Chris
tianized. Still must St. Paul's words ring round
the Western world, " Thou that teachest another,
teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a
man should not steal, dost thou steal? thou that
sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou
commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost
thou rob temples? thou that gloriest in the law,
through thy transgression of the law dishonorest
thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed
among the Gentiles because of you." Civilization
is not Christianity.
We must remind ourselves too, that Christianity
is not the Church. Among the sects which vainly

204 THE MIND OF CHRIST
boast themselves to be the body of Christ we look
in vain for one which as a Church consistently
imposes as the sole test of membership in its com
munion the standard set up by the Master Him
self — " Ye are my friends if ye do the things
which I command you." In this connection the
writer already quoted well says, " Christian love
has neither been a condition of admission, nor has
its possession in a high degree been any protection
against discipline and excommunication. It has re
mained a counsel for saints otherwise unobjection
able, and an attainment to be reached when sanc
tification is complete in some life beyond the
world, but for the most it has remained a thing
apart, and many who hold St. Paul verbally in
spired have uttered indignant remonstrance when
in accordance with his words love has been set
forth as the greatest thing in the world." To be a
Churchman is not synonymous with being a Chris
tian, and to be outside the Church is not the same
as being unchristian. Of the church it must be
said as we have said of civilization, it is being
Christianized. The Church is not Christianity.
What then is Christianity? The answer is and
must always be, the religion of Jesus of Nazareth,
the beautiful life the Lord lived illuminated and
interpreted by the simple words He spoke. Here
and here only is the Christian truth, the whole

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 205
truth and nothing but the truth. All faiths must
come to judgment here. Back to Christ is the
spirit which must prevail, for it cannot for one
moment be maintained that Christians have suc
ceeded in advancing beyond their Master. His
life and His idea are still the unattained ideal.
" Our little systems have their day ;
They have their day and cease to be :
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they."
This is the absolute religion, the indispensable,
universal, consummate faith, the faith of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
And how does the religion of Jesus measure up
to the quadrilateral? It was said the absolute
religion must have a God for all men to love and
obey. Once more we stand under the Syrian sky
nineteen hundred years ago. Jesus is alone with
His disciples; Peter and Andrew the unlettered
fishermen; John and James the sons of the ship
owner of Bethsaida; Matthew the former Roman
tax-collector; Simon the one-time fanatic nation
alist ; Philip the materialist ; Bartholomew the mys
tic; Judas the bigot; Thomas the skeptic; and
Thaddeus and James. They stand praying, Jesus
leads them : — " Our Father who art in heaven."
Jesus' Father and John's, Peter's and Matthew's,
Philip's and Judas'. Evidently Christianity has a

206 THE MIND OF CHRIST
God, a God for all kinds of men, a God who knows
no class, caste, nor creed, a God whom every son
of man may adore, love and obey.
It was said that the absolute religion must have
a world-wide message founded upon a conception
of the infinite value of the individual. Once more
we join that group which is bowed in prayer, in
whose faces we see mirrored the world's varying
minds and feelings. " Our Father," then that
word " our " knits those variegated souls into one
brotherhood, bids them claim relationship to Him,
God's best Son, and to all the world full of God's
dear children. " Go ye," said the Christ, " and
make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them
into the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all
things whatsoever I commanded you : and lo, I am
with you always, even unto the consummation of
the age." Remember His story of the prodigal
son ; when he " came to himself he said, I will arise
and go to my Father." Was there ever such a
valuation of the real self of a man whom the men
about him thought fit only to be a swineherd?
Obviously the religion of Jesus has a world-wide
message and it is founded upon a conception of
the infinite value of the individual.
It was said that the absolute religion must be
consistent with reality, that it must consent to be
tested by the plain man's test of truth. In the

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 207
beginnings of Jesus' ministry one speaking to
another said, "We have found Him, of whom
Moses in the law, and the prophets, wrote, Jesus
of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." He to whom he
spoke doubted ; " Come and see," was the answer,
and going and seeing the doubter identified the dis
covery and claimed and was claimed by the Christ.
On the eve of the day they hanged Him on the
Cross, the Master said to His disciples, " Believe
me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me :
or else believe me for the very works' sake." We
know the answer He sent to the bewildered John
Baptist; He submitted to be tested by the plain
man's test of truth. And for nineteen centuries
His religion has stood the test. Historical and
literary study by impartial research have vindicated
the impregnable validity of the fundamental facts
of His life as recorded for us in the Gospels.
Criticism has tried those Gospels by its hottest
fires and as one of the critics has written, " Let
the plain Bible-reader continue to read his Gospels
as he has hitherto read them; for in the end the
critic cannot read them otherwise What the one
regards as their true gist and meaning, the other
must also acknowledge to be so." Not only the
higher but the highest criticism, the criticism of life
has proved that the religion of Jesus may be held,
not as a fragile treasure which must be tenderly
guarded against the rude attacks of unbelief, but as

208 THE MIND OF CHRIST
a fortress whose foundations are imbedded in the
eternal rock of reality. It must be plain that the
religion of Jesus is consistent with reality.
It was said the absolute religion must have an
unsparing ethical ideal. Once again we go to
Jesus Himself. What O Sovereign Master of the
soul is thine ideal for the individual and society?
" Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love
thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy ; but I say unto
you, Love your enemies and pray for them that
persecute you ; that ye may be sons of your Father
who is in heaven; for He maketh His sun to rise
on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the
just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love
you, what reward have ye? do not even the pub
licans the same? And if ye salute your brethren
only, what do ye more than others? Do not even
the Gentiles the same? Ye therefore shall be per
fect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Stand
once again on Calvary where they have hung Him
on His cross; hear Him praying for those who
are striking the nails through His hands and feet ;
remember how just the night before He had given
this word to His followers, " I have given you an
example, that ye also should do as I have done to
you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, A servant is
not greater than his lord; neither one that is sent
greater than he that sent him. If ye know these
things, blessed are ye if ye do them." What is the

THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION 209
ethical ideal of Christianity? Nothing short of
Godlike perfection, nothing less than the redupli
cation of the Infinite Love of the awesome Eternal.
The Ten Commandments are left far under foot,
the golden rule itself is surpassed, this religion's
moral law sinks into the divine depths, soars away
into infinite heights, unsurpassed, unsurpassable in
its reach, for it is as beautiful as the life of the
Father of Jesus Christ. Surely the religion of
Jesus has an unsparing ethical ideal.
Measured by the tests for an absolute religion
the religion of Jesus not only fulfils but overflows
all the requirements. Its God is a Father, all
men's Father, the Father who claims every man,
whom every man may claim ; its message is to all
men without distinction because every man is of
inestimable value to the Father; its fundamental
record and its sublime Author are true, verifiable
by the criticism of experience; its' ethical ideal is
the ultimate perfection of the spiritual man in the
likeness of his heavenly Father. A God better
than Jesus' is inconceivable ; a higher appraisement
of man than Jesus' is unimaginable; a more prac
tical authority than Jesus' is unthinkable; a more
elevated ideal of character than Jesus' is impossi
ble. Jesus' religion is the absolute religion, indis
pensable, universal, consummate. The man who
will face the facts must say with St. Peter, " Lord,
to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of

2IO THE MIND OF CHRIST
eternal life. And we have believed and know that
thou art the Holy One of God."
"Ah no, thou life of the heart,
Never shalt thou depart!
Not till the leaven of God
Shall lighten each human clod:
Not till the world shall climb
To thy height serene, sublime,
Shall the Christ who enters our door
Pass to return no more."

THE END