of human personality? Physical deformity and moral
guilt could not obscure the divine worth of human life to him. To cause
any soul to stumble and go down, or to express contempt for any human
being, was to him a horrible guilt.

I

This regard for human life was based on the same social instinct which
every normal man possesses. But with Jesus it was so strong that it
determined all his viewpoints and activities. He affirmed the humane
instinct consciously and intelligently, and raised it to the dignity of a
social principle. This alone would be enough to mark him out as a new
type, prophetic and creative of a new development of the race.

Whence did Jesus derive the strength and purity of his social feeling? Was
it simply the endowment of a finely attuned nature? Other fine minds of
the ancient world valued men according to their wealth, their rank, their
power, their education, their beauty. Jesus valued men as such, apart from
any attractive equipment. Why? "The deeper our insight into human destiny
becomes, the more sacred does every individual human being seem to us"
(Lotze). The respect of Jesus for every concrete person whom he met was
due to his religious insight into human life and destiny. But how did he
get his insight?

Love and religion have the power of idealistic interpretation. To a mother
her child is a wonderful being. To a true lover the girl he loves has
sacredness. With Jesus the consciousness of a God of love revealed the
beauty of men. The old gods were despotic supermen, mythical duplicates of
the human kings and conquerors. The God of Jesus was the great Father who
lets his light shine on the just and the unjust, and offers forgiveness
and love to all. Jesus lived in the spiritual atmosphere of that faith.
Consequently he saw men from that point of view. They were to him children
of that God. Even the lowliest was high. The light that shone on him from
the face of God shed a splendor on the prosaic ranks of men. In this way
religion enriches and illuminates social feeling.

Jesus succeeded in transmitting something of his own sense of the
sacredness of life to his followers. As Wundt says: "Humanity in this
highest sense was brought into the world by Christianity." The love of men
became a social dogma of the Church. Some other convictions of Jesus left
few traces on the common thought of Christendom, but the Church has always
stood for a high estimate of the potential worth of the soul