is reclamation? No existing society is organized on
these principles, and the only defense the apologists of a bastard
Christianity make is that it is totally impossible to apply the
principles of Jesus to the administration of society. That is, at all
events, an intelligible defense, but is it a legitimate one? Was Jesus
merely a romantic dreamer, with entirely romantic views of love and
justice? Was He a moral anarchist, whose teachings, if interpreted in
laws, would destroy the basis of society? A strange thing indeed in
human history if One who has been loved as no other was ever loved by
multitudes of men and women through the ages, should prove after all to
be an impracticable dreamer or a moral anarchist!

But if Jesus was a dreamer, He dreamed true, and the very reason why He
is loved with such wide and deep devotion is that men do dimly, but
instinctively, perceive that His life presents the only perfect pattern
of life as it should be. Life, as it exists, is clearly not ordered on
a social system which any wise or good man can approve. Hence the wise
and good man is perpetually urged to the enquiry whether Jesus may not
after all have been right?

Jesus certainly acts as one who is right. He acts always with the
assured air of one for whom all debate is closed and henceforth
impossible. He knows His way, and the great moral dilemmas of life
yield instantly to His touch. He penetrates to their roots and makes
us feel that He has touched the essential element in them. The dreamer
vindicates himself by making it manifest that he sees deeper into the
problem than the moralist, and that his is after all the better
morality because it is of higher social value, and makes more directly
for social reconciliation.

Let us take, for example, the judgment of Jesus upon the woman who was
a sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee. The social dilemma of the
fallen woman is much more difficult of solution than that of the
prodigal son. We expect a certain power of moral convalescence in
youth which has been betrayed through folly. Sooner or later the manly
nature kindles with resentment at its own weakness. Moreover, social
law allows a certain opportunity of recuperation to man which it denies
to woman. The sin of the woman seems less pardonable, not because it
is worse in itself, but because it outrages a higher convention. Hence
the strict moralist who might make some allowance for the hot blood of
y