us that he used them in a new sense, and
that he preached a new gospel of great joy. Jesus was not a historian, a
critic or a theologian. He used the words of common men in the sense in
which common men understood them. He did not employ the Old Testament as
now reconstructed by scholarship or judged by criticism, but in its
simple and obvious and traditional sense. And his background is the
intellectual and religious thinking of his time. The ideas of demons and
of the future, of the Bible and many other traditional conceptions, are
taken over without criticism. So the idea of God which he sets forth is
not that of a theologian or a metaphysician, but that of the unlearned
man which even the child could understand. Yet though thus speaking in
untechnical language, he revolutionized his terms and filled them with
new meaning. His emphasis is his own, and the traditional material
affords merely the setting for his thought. He was not concerned with
speculative questions about God, nor with abstract theories of his
relationship to the soul and to the world. God's continual presence, his
fatherly love, his transcendent righteousness, his mercy, his goodness,
were the facts of immediate experience. Not in proofs by formal logic
but in the reality of consciousness was the certainty of God. Thus
religion was freed from all particular and national elements in the
simplest way. For Jesus did not denounce these elements, nor argue
against them, nor did he seek converts outside of Israel, but he set
forth communion with God as the most certain fact of man's experience
and as simple reality made it accessible to every one. Thus his teaching
contains the note of universality--not in terms and proclamations but as
plain matter of fact. His way for others to this reality is likewise
plain and level to the comprehension of the unlearned and of children.

For him repentance is put first, for how vastly changed is the
conception of the religious life! The intricacies of ritual and theology
are ignored, and ancient laws which contradict the fundamental beliefs
are unhesitatingly abrogated or denied. He seizes upon the most
spiritual passages of the prophets, and revives and deepens them. He
sums up his teaching in supreme love to God and a love for fellow-man
like that we hold for ourselves (Mark xii. 29-31). This supreme love to
God is a complete oneness with him in will, a will which is expressed in
service to our fellow-men in the simp