o our lips
so easily--too easily--was used by Jesus with a reverential rarity.
You may read whole pages of the Gospels without finding it once.

Jesus, we say, preached the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of
Man. But he was not _always_ preaching them, and as a matter of fact
he never mentioned either of them in exactly those terms. He enforced
them, illustrated them, revealed them, exemplified them, by living as
though they were true, which is a very different thing from "preaching"
them. His days were spent going about doing good, his preaching being
little more than a comment that arose naturally from the good that he
did. The Gospel is neither a sermon nor a treatise on religion; but a
_story_, which tells how Christianity began in something that happened,
in a deed that was done, in a life that was lived. It abounds in
parables and is a parable itself, revealing things hidden from the
foundation of the world.

The order in which _we_ take these elements of religion--first, moral
and religious propaganda, then performance to follow--is here reversed.
The performance comes first; the propaganda, which reduces itself to
the very simple form "Go and do thou likewise," comes afterwards. The
proportions, too, are different. Instead of an immense campaign of
preaching which leaves little energy for doing the things preached
about, the work done, the life lived here overshadow everything else.
The accusation of Carlyle against modern civilization, that it has run
to seed in mere talk, parliamentary eloquence, stump oratory, and such
like, has no application to the birth of the Christian religion.
Something to talk about, something worth talking about, was furnished
before the talking began.

There we touch the dynamic principle of Christianity, cut free from its
entanglements with a mass of things that do not belong to it; the power
which still keeps it alive under a mountain of verbal accretions that
would smother anything less divine. In the beginning was the deed: go
thou and do likewise. So presented, Christianity is not perplexing;
but quite the most convincing religion ever offered either to the
intellect or the heart. The perplexities have arisen from the reversal
of the true order; from the attempt to subordinate the thing done to
the thing said; to lay the foundations in argument and propaganda which
can only be laid in actual performance; and from the loss of reality
and the descent into hollow