ngs are possible
to him that believeth." "He that hath ears to hear let him hear."
His world was always the world of thought. The actual deed of sin was
merely a physical consequence; the cause was spiritual: it was an evil
thought; to harbour an evil thought is to commit the sin. He looked into
the hearts of men, into their thoughts, and there only He found their
reality. All else was transitory. All else would see corruption and die.
The flesh profiteth nothing. But the thought of a man--that is to say
the region now being explored by the psycho-analyst, the
psycho-therapeutist, and the psycho I know not what else--this was the
one region in which Jesus moved, the region in which He proclaimed his
transvaluation of values, a region of which He was so complete a master
that He could heal delusion at a word and disorder by a touch.
One does not perhaps wholly realise, until one has read the muddied
works of modern psychology, how sublime was the soul of Jesus. It might
be possible to infer His divinity from the simplicity of the language
and the white purity of the thought with which He expressed truths of
the profoundest significance even in regions where so many fall into
unhealthiness. "No man can serve two masters"--is not that the teaching
of the modern hypnotist in dealing with "a divided self"? "Set your
affections on things above"--is not that the counsel of the sane
psycho-analyst in treating a diseased mind? "Ask, and it shall be given
you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto
you"--is not this the message of M. Coue, the teaching of
auto-suggestion?--that teaching which makes us say at last that "an
immense hope is dawning on the world."
And, in sober truth, we may indeed believe that this immense hope is
dawning on the world; the hope that mankind may recognise in Jesus, Who
called Himself the Light of the World, the world's great Teacher of
Reality.
Here we approach that unifying principle which was the object of our
quest in setting out to explore the chaos of opinion in the modern
Church.
Is it not possible that the Church might see the trivial unimportance of
all those matters which at present dismember her, if she saw the supreme
importance of Christ as a Teacher? Might she not come to behold a glory
in that Teaching greater even than that which she has so heroically but
so unavailingly endeavoured to make the world behold in the crucified
Sacrifice and Propitiation for
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