JESUS' WAY

CHAPTER I

THE FATHER: THE PRINCIPLE OF THE

WAY

THERE are two ways to live. One may seek first, last, and all the time, to gratify his appetites, indulge his passions, and gain his selfish ends; heedless of the bitter privation, injury, and anguish his greed and pride and lust wreak on those who cross his cruel path or fall into his hard and heartless hands. Until a very few generations ago, our human forefathers, and of course

all our animal ancestors before them, lived for the most part this life of simple sensuous selfishness. Even in the highly evolved circle of twentieth century respectability to which it is our boast to belong, there is enough of this way of life left over to reinforce our innate tendencies in this direction by abundant suggestion from without; and to give some show of excuse to those slanderers of the race, the theologians, who, dwelling too exclusively on this aspect of our racial inheritance, have developed the doctrines of total depravity and original

sin.

So long as the race lived in this way, so far as any man lives in this way to-day, neither man nor God can be seen aright. For the selfish, sen

sual man, since he recognizes no will, respects no rights, appreciates no interests other than his own, thereby ignores and denies, so far as it is possible to do so, all personality in the world except the tiny spark of it he feels within himself. Nature to such a man is a mere shop full of tools accidentally adapted to serve his selfish ends. Among these tools, the most cunningly constructed and serviceable of them all, he finds, to be sure, beings whose external resemblance to himself leads him to call men and women. Yet, inasmuch as they are treated as mere means to his selfish ends, he does not recognize them as brothers and sisters, with feelings as real and wills as valid as his own. Still less can he find, either in nature or in human

history and human institutions, any trace of a heavenly Father. So far as his impure and selfish heart is able to discover, he is perfectly right in saying, what every such fool must say if he is true to his own experience, "There is no God." With this inability to see God, there usually, but not always, goes one or more of the many forms of the murderer's question, "Am I my brother's keeper?”

Now Jesus never wasted breath in trying to prove to such men the existence of God. On the contrary, he plainly told them that it is absolutely impossible to see God from that point of view; or find their heavenly Father in such an experience as that. For this is the meaning of the saying, "Neither doth any know the Father,

save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him." In other words, it is in the filial experience that the Father must be found.

What, then, is the filial experience? How does the Son reveal the Father? Where shall God be found? The answer to these questions is "Jesus' Way."

Instead of regarding other men and women as mere tools for one's own gratification, as mere means to one's selfish ends, which is the essence of sin, one may recognize that they are alive with the same warm affections, eager interests, and alternating joys and sorrows which he experiences in himself. One may make his neighbors' joys and sorrows as real to him as his own; work for their interests;