IV

As life with God was the secret of the character of Jesus, so love of God is the foundation-stone of his teaching. To love his Father in Heaven was the spontaneous impulse of his pure soul, which found in God the companionship and sympathy denied it among men. Every word and act of his life was a manifestation of this love

My food is to do the will of him that sent me,
And to accomplish his work. (1)

When, therefore, Jesus was asked, "What is the first commandment of the Law?" without hesitation he repeated the words, the Shema of the synagogue service:

Hear O Israel:

Jehovah our God is one Jehovah:

And thou shalt love Jehovah thy God with all the heart, And with all the soul,

And with all the mind,

And with all the strength!(2)

And because Jesus saw that if God were so loved, as a merciful and tender and holy Father, there could be but one result, he gave as the second commandment, again quoting familiar words of the Law:

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. (3)

(1) John 4:34.

(2) Mark 12:29; Deut. 6:4, 5.

(3) Mark 12:31; Lev. 19:18. To Matthew Arnold it seemed passing strange to find these words in Leviticus, but that was because he did not fully understand their significance there. In Leviticus the words are clan ethics-"neighbor" is another Jew; as Jesus spoke them, they are universal ethics, "neighbor" is any fellow man. Inasmuch as Jesus did thus quote from the Law to express his own profoundest teaching, all modern Jews and some modern Christians, deny his originality. He is not the one and only Teacher, they declare, but the last in a long line of Jewish prophets, and if his outlook seems a little broader and further, it is not so much that he is greater as that he is later. As somebody has said, "A dwarf can see further than a giant-if he is mounted on the shoulders of the giant." We need not pause to controvert this view.

Fatherhood and brotherhood, then, were correlative and complementary ideas and words with Jesus. Love of God necessarily implied love of fellow, and the two constituted the principle of the Kingdom of God: a human society of which God was founder and head and all men members; bound together, not by laws and institutions, but by the stronger, if less palpable, tie of human brotherhood. A Kingdom would seem logically to imply a king and subjects, but Jesus never uses either word, or anything equivalent to them. God is not King but Father; men are not subjects but children--that is his way of describing both; and this is a fact that is unimpeachable testimony to his habitual thought of God.

And it is equally fact that Jesus had little to say about man's relations and duties to God; he confined himself mainly to men's duties and relations to each other. What he did say about worship and service of God was, that it might not be suffered to take the place of justice and mercy to our fellows. Nothing so stirred Jesus to holy indignation as pretense of piety by men who robbed and maltreated those whom they should have loved and served as brothers. To the outcast sinner he was always tender, and to such of these as showed desire to forsake their sins he spoke words of peace and pardon. To the sinful woman who anointed his feet and kissed them weeping, he said, "Your sins are forgiven"-she had learned love and was "saved." To Zaccheus, eager to make restitution to any. whom he had wronged, he said, "To-day has salvation come to this house"-the grafting tax-gatherer had learned social righteousness and so had become a new man. But for the proud Pharisee Jesus had only words that sting and burn. Forms and creeds were nothing to him; he looked straight through them to the reality.

Jesus summoned all men to the noble life: the life of personal purity, of sacrifice of self, of service to others, as the one cure for the world's otherwise immedicable ills.

He appealed to the heroic strain not wholly lacking in any of us. Wickedness was in his eyes nothing else than the ignoble life, the self-centered life, and this was the only "heresy" that he recognized.

The Law came by Moses,

But grace and truth by Jesus Christ. (1)

If we accept the words of Jesus as the guide of life, he becomes our Saviour from the theologians, as well as our Saviour from sin. For theologians of all ages have, wittingly or unwittingly, led men back to the Pharisaic notion that right belief is the all-important thing, whereas with Jesus right conduct is all-important. And the theologian has justified himself on the ground that belief determines conduct, and therefore to have right conduct you must first have right belief. Which is true to a degree, but leaves unstated this yet more weighty truth: right belief may be necessary to right conduct, but is no guarantee of right conduct. The belief of the Pharisees was mainly right; their conduct was wholly wrong, and so Jesus condemned them. Nothing can be clearer than that Jesus never intended to make "salvation," or deliverance from moral evil, dependent upon any theory of what he was or did. He made it depend on a changed attitude towards God and man, and it was his chief mission to be the means of so changing the relations of men to God that His will should be done upon the earth and thereby His Kingdom be established.

No, we cannot get away from the fact that Jesus said very little about beliefs, that he spoke almost wholly of conduct. He made the real test of character, the real righteousness, consist in the behavior of men towards their fellows. If he does not say it in so many words, he everywhere implies, that if a man is in right relations to his fellows he cannot be in wrong relations to God. And he (1) John 1:17.

does say, in just so many words, that a man cannot be in right relation to God, so long as he leaves unrighted a wrong done to a fellow. The remedy for injury to a fellow man is not prayers and gifts to God—what men call piety-but restitution, redress, apology. When David had stolen Uriah's wife and murdered her husband, his repentance was wholly inadequate when he declared: Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, And done this evil in Thy sight. (1)

That might have answered the ethical demands of an earlier time, but Jesus taught a very different ethic:

So, if you are bringing your gift to the altar,

And there remember that your brother has something against you,

Leave your gift there before the altar

And go your way—

First be reconciled to your brother,

And then come and offer your gift. (2)

It is perhaps in his parables that Jesus illustrates most clearly, certainly most strikingly, the behavior appropriate to members of his Kingdom. The Good Samaritan (") will instantly occur to every one. Hardly less known is the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, (*) wherein the ultimate test of character and determination of final destiny is made to depend on mercy and kindness shown to one's fellows in distress. The necessity of cultivating a forgiving spirit towards one's brother, instead of a spirit of bitterness and revenge, is illustrated in the possibly less read parable of the Two Slaves. (5) Even harsh judgment of a brother is forbidden; criticism of a brother's faults is

(1) Ps. 51:4. Of course the ethical question is wholly unaltered if the critical view be accepted that David did not write the Psalm.

(2) Matt. 5:23, 24. (3) Luke 10:30-37. (1) Matt. 25:31-46. (5) Matt. 23:18-25.

reproved with gentle irony; (1) and as for anger, it is declared to be equivalent to murder. (2) These are so hard lessons for human nature to learn and obey, that Jesus repeats them in various forms, again and again; and on the duty of forgiveness, in particular, more stress is laid than on any other element of his teaching. He practically makes willingness to forgive a test of membership in the Kingdom:

If your brother wrongs you, rebuke him,
And if he repents, forgive him.

And if he wrongs you seven times a day,

And seven times a day turns to you and says, “Forgive,"

Forgive him! (3)

For, if you forgive men their trespasses,

Your Heavenly Father will forgive you also;

But if you do not forgive men,

Neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (*)

ready to give love. reparable he had

And that this is no arbitrary decree, any student of the teachings of Jesus, who has really tried to walk in his ways, well knows. No one can receive love who is not That was why the sin of Dives was irrefused love to Lazarus, his brother who was in poverty and want, and so was incapable of receiving God's love. In the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, (*) Jesus teaches his followers what is for them. perhaps the hardest lesson of all: that they must treat men, not according to seeming desert, but according to actual want. We must not ask, What have they done? but, What do they need? We must give them, not what justice requires, but what love prompts; not the least they

(1) Matt. 7:1-5.

(2) Matt. 5:21, 22. (3) Luke 17:4.

(4) Matt. 6:14, 15.

(5) Matt. 20:1-16.