ess of his will, and the poetry of his
soul, shall be able to create anew in his own heart the true Kingdom of
God!

_THE PRIEST IN THE PATH_

Nearly every year Jesus went to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover.
It was, it appears, in the year 31 that the most important of these
visits took place. Jesus felt that to play a leading part he must leave
Galilee and attack Judaism in its stronghold, Jerusalem. There the
little Galilean community was far from feeling at home. Jerusalem was a
city of pedantry, acrimony, disputation, hatreds, and pettiness of mind.
Its fanaticism was extreme. All the religious discussions of the Jewish
schools, all the canonical instruction, even the legal business and
civil actions--in a word, all form of national activity, were
concentrated in the temple. The Romans refrained from entering the
sactuary; the surveillance of the Temple was in the hands of the Jews.
It was in the Temple that Jesus spent his days during his sojourn at
Jerusalem, and all that he saw aroused his aversion. These old Jewish
institutions displeased him, and the necessity of conforming to them
gave him pain. He who gave forgiveness to all men, provided they loved
him, could find nothing congenial in vain disputations and obsolete
sacrifices, and apparently he brought from Jerusalem one idea
thenceforth rooted in his mind--that there was no understanding possible
between him and the ancient Jewish religion. He no longer took his stand
as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism. In other words,
Jesus is no longer a Jew. He is, in the highest degree, a revolutionary;
he calls all men to a worship founded solely on the ground of their
being children of God. Love of God, charity, and mutual forgiveness--in
these consisted his whole law. Nothing could be less sacerdotal. It was
on his return from Jerusalem, as he passed near Shechem, and when
talking with a Samaritan woman, that Jesus gave utterance to the saying
upon which will rest the edifice of eternal religion--Believe me, the
hour cometh when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye
worship the Father ... but the hour cometh, and now is, when the true
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. On the day
when he said these words he was truly Son of God.

Jesus returned to Galilee full of revolutionary ardour. His innocent
aphorisms and beautiful moral precepts now culminated in a decided
policy. The law is to be abolished