acteristics of your race, and I hope it may long
be so.

I am going to avail myself of this opportunity to say a few words
about a topic that has for centuries been a point of the very greatest
difference and tension between your people and mine, namely, the
character and work of Jesus. Please do not be shocked till you hear
what I have to say. Such of us psychologists as have recently been
interested in the psychological aspect of Jesus' life and work
understand, as had never been understood before, how purely Jewish he
was. Scholars have lately given to his figure a radically new
interpretation.

"_An Extremely Representative Man of Your Race_"

According to many conceptions the chief trait of Jesus was a strong
and deep enthusiasm for the loftiest things of life. He was a little
ecstatic all the time, illustrating the higher powers of man. His soul
was unconquerable by misfortune and disaster, like that of the Jewish
race itself. He was also organizing victory out of defeat, and his
greatest triumph was over death itself. Some think that his youthful
dreams and ideals were to be an agrarian lord of a manor, or a grand
country gentleman of the Jewish order, making contracts with servants,
leasing out farms and vineyards, giving feasts, and the like, for more
than half the parables pertain directly or indirectly to such a
vocation. But this youthful dream he was unable on account of poverty
and his station in life to realize; so two very natural changes took
place in his soul. He came to hate the rich because they were wasting
their opportunities and never doing anything; but far more important,
he developed from these juvenile reveries his world-transforming ideas
of the kingdom, which created the church, visible and invisible, and
re-made society.

The Jews are never beaten; if checked in their aspirations they, like
the prophets in the days of captivity, strike out in higher and nobler
ways. Thus you ought to be proud of Jesus for, as he is now being
understood, he was an extremely representative man of your race. The
real enemies of the Jews are now claiming that no such man ever lived,
which is the view of Drews and his school, some holding that he was a
deliberate invention of the early decades of the first century, and
others, like Jensen, that he was a revived Babylonian myth. But these
new views show that Jesus was not an Aryan, as a few of the
pan-Germanists have claimed, but a typical Semite. It does