who preceded him to make God known, understandable, lovable. If we have dwelt long on the unique form of his teaching, we must not let this prevent our appreciation of the far greater import of the substance.

The history of religions is the record of an age-long contest between prophet and priest, and the priest has nearly always had the better of it. The reason he that runs may read: the prophet seeks to move us by the ravishment of high ideals; the priest subtly appeals to us with a set of plain rules. The prophet is a mystic, the priest a realist. The prophet is the man of vision, an intuitionalist; the priest a man of precedent, a legalist. Prophetic religion makes a heavy draft on the best on man; priest religion is content to accept man's average—or even a little less. The prophet sets before men a rough and thorny road leading to the heights; the priest opens to men the way of least resistance along the plain. Prophetic religion is only for the thoughtful, the earnest, the aspiring; priest religion is for the idle, the careless, the selfish. The prophet calls for renunciation, so few heed his words; the priest permits indulgence, and therefore has a large following.

So it was ever in Judaism. The prophets enjoined a new life of justice, mercy, righteousness; the priests sought to establish a cult, with machinery for obtaining on easy terms God's pardon for failure to do what the stern prophet exacted. Piety was to be accepted for righteousness, sacrifice for mercy, tithes for justice. The prophets said that God required of his worshipers a pure heart; the priests said that he required clean linen. The one sort of religion cherished as its ideal social justice, the welfare of the people; the other was content with rites scrupulously performed by the rich. One stood for democracy, the other for aristocracy.

The prophets had always insisted that the relation of man to God is personal; the bond between them is an

ethical bond. God is holy; man must be righteous. The priests had always declared that the relation between man and God is mechanical, not vital; that it is established and maintained by rites and sacraments mediated by appointed persons. The prophets taught that every man has direct approach to God, and so is privileged at any time or place to come into intimate relations with him. This doctrine was ruination to a priesthood, which was under professional obligation to insist that approach to God and forgiveness of sins can be had only through Temple and priests. Priestly intercession was therefore a necessity; God would not hear the cries for mercy of laymen, however penitent, but must first be appeased by offerings and sacrifices made through a priest, who thus held the Keys of Heaven.

Against this theory of priesthood and practice of ceremonial religion, Jesus contended as he contended against no other thing. He maintained that it was a perversion of the character of God and of religion, the sin of all sins. The great burden of his teaching was the nearness of God to men, his readiness to pardon sin, his impartial love for all his creatures; and it was upon this basis of the character of God as Father of all mankind that he founded his practical work as institutor of the Kingdom of God. The Sermon on the Mount is nothing else than variations in many keys upon this one theme. (1) For priesthood and all its pretentions, for its fruits as incarnated in the Pharisees, Jesus manifests utmost contempt and detestation. For purely formal and ceremonial religion he reserves his severest censures; he does everything possible to make plain that the prophetic type of religion is to him the only religion. It would be superfluous to quote passages in support of this summary characterization of the teaching of Jesus; any reader who cannot recognize its accuracy, and instantly call to mind a score of sayings

(1) See esp. Matt. 5:45; 6:4, 14; 7:11; cf. Mark 11:25, 26.

that justify it, convicts himself either of unfamiliarity with the teaching or of failure to comprehend it.

His own work finished, Jesus sends forth his disciples into the world to proclaim this prophetic religion, as the most precious truth he has to leave with them, the one truth that the world needs to learn. And what do these disciples? They instantly, with one accord, abandon prophetic religion and devote themselves to establishing a new cult-excusing themselves, no doubt, on the plea that they were making Jesus the centre of that cult. They failed to see that at the very time they were deifying Jesus they were defying him. They began a process at Jerusalem that went on as Christianity advanced, by which the idea of holiness again became ceremonial and Christian prophets were transformed into Catholic priests. Followers of the Christ deserted the Jewish cult only to devise another still more outrageous in pretensions and sterner in spiritual tyranny. They began the greatest apostasy in history; they helped to revive and make permanent as orthodoxy of the ages the gravest and most pernicious of all heresies that God is well pleased by being worshiped with things instead of with hearts. Hence, to this day, the splendor of Christian churches and the emptiness of Christian lives.

It lessens the emphasis of this condemnation but little to urge that the disciples of Jesus merely did what the disciples of Buddha and other great religious leaders and teachers have invariably done: that an irresistible tendency of human nature leads men always to supplement religious and ethical teachings with a church and a cult. Even Comte, who hoped that he had demolished all previous religions, felt himself compelled to invent a new cult, which he called the worship of humanity. True this is, no doubt, but its truth neither explains nor excuses the immediacy or the completeness of the apostasy of the disciples of Jesus. Their one excuse, such as it is, must

be that they never really understood their Master, and that the temporary ascendancy he had obtained over their minds gave place to the renewed ideas of their race and religion, so soon as the power of his personality no longer controlled them. Only on such a hypothesis can we account for their naïve belief that their cries of "Lord, Lord" were an equivalent for doing what he had commanded.

CHAPTER III

JESUS THE REVEALER OF GOD

No trait in the personality of Jesus is more arresting than the greatness of his claims. Both implicit and explicit in his teachings are assertions of right to direct the lives of men that, in the case of any other, would be pronounced resumptuous, extravagant or ridiculous. He is the one person in all history who could make such claims without being laughed out of consideration by all serious persons. Why?

We have already noted the tone of authority in his teaching that astonished his hearers, but we have not analyzed it, nor even considered it more than casually. Among his injunctions to his disciples was this:

Be not called Rabbi,

For One is your Teacher,

And you are all brothers. (1)

Such words can escape accusation of conceit or arrogance only if Jesus was, and knew himself to be, the supreme Teacher of his time and of all time. Nothing but his possession of such knowledge can explain or justify his assertion for himself and his words of a higher sanction than could be ascribed to the prophets and teachers of Israel:

The Queen of the South will rise up in the Judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them,

Because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon,

(1) Matt. 23:8.