for mankind in the Christian way of prayer.
"Jesus, remember me!" he says (Luke 23:42). How is it that Jesus
comes into the wasted life and makes it new? "One loving heart sets
another on fire."

With all his wide outlook on mankind, his great purpose to capture
all men, Jesus is remarkable for his omission to devise machinery or
organization for the accomplishment of his ends. The tares are left
to grow with the wheat (Matt. 13:30)--as if Jesus trusted the wheat
a good deal more than we do. Alive as he is to the evil in human
nature, he never tries to scare men from it, and he seems to have
been very little afraid of it. He believed in the power of
good--because, after all, God is "Lord of the Harvest" (Matt. 9:38).
He invents no special methods--a loving heart will hit the method
needed in the particular case; the Holy Spirit will teach this as
well as other things (Matt. 10:19, 20). How far he even organized
his church, or left it to organize itself if it so wished, students
may discuss. Would he have trusted even the best organized church as
such? Does not what we mean by the Incarnation imply putting
everything in the long run on the individual, quickened into new
life by a new relation with God and taught a new love of men by
Jesus himself? The heart of friendship and the heart of the
Incarnation are in essence the same thing--giving oneself in
frankness and love to him who will accept, and by them winning him
who refuses. Has not this been the secret of the spread of the
Gospel? The simplicity of the whole thing, and the power of it, grow
upon us as we study them. But after all, as Tertullian said,
simplicity and power are the constant marks of God's
work--simplicity in method, power in effect ("de Baptismo", 2).

CHAPTER VII

JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN

"For clear-thinking ethical natures," writes a modern scholar, "for
natures such as those of Jesus and St. Paul, it is a downright
necessity to separate heaven and hell as distinctly as possible. It
is only ethically worthless speculations that have always tried to
minimize this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our times of
how men even to-day once more enthusiastically welcome the
conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good and bad
becomes all-important to them."[26]

Here in strong terms a challenge is put to many of our current
ideas. Is not this to revert to an outworn view of the Christian
religion--to reassert its dark side, b