360774 Jesus and the Christian Religion IN I The Gospel N the world of today, in this time of swift movement and ceaseless change, many religious doctrines that have been handed down to us from former ages are coming to appear antiquated and outworn, and many traditional beliefs are losing their hold upon the minds of men. Certain articles of the ancient creed are called in question; some men are for rejecting them altogether and others claim to interpret them in a new sense without regard to what lay in the minds of their framers. In "religious circles" the relations between innovators and conservatives are daily becoming more strained and the air is filled with agitation and the strife of tongues. At such a time it would seem that we cannot do better than to turn from disputation and go back to the fountain-head of Christianity, the life and teaching of Him we call our Lord and Master; to try to enter into His mind and gain an insight of the religion He believed in and lived by. The following pages are an attempt to bring before the reader some of the leading principles of that religion with the purpose and the hope of inducing him to make a thorough study of a subject until recently too much neglected "the truth as it is in Jesus," and not as it is in the churches or in the Letter-writers of the New Testament. Jesus was brought up to the carpenters' trade in a pious family of Nazareth, a country town of Lower Galilee, until at about the age of thirty, as it is said, he came before the people with a stock of profoundly original ideas, the seed of a religious revolution. The gospels tell us almost nothing of his life and circumstances during the intervening years, but their unwritten history is that of his mental and spiritual growth and change, the development within his soul of the new religion he was to give the world. From the man as we find him we may learn something of his boyhood and youth. To all the influences of the world about him, all shapes that life could show, his young soul must have opened with that eager receptivity which belongs to the temperament of genius, taking in from the whole range of its environment ever new experiences to nurture its growth. His love of nature, in his eyes radiant with the immanence of God, would lead him to the scenes of varied beauty surrounding his home, and his genial sympathies to the haunts of men and the free and natural life of Galilee. Meantime the current of his inner life ran full. We find Jesus entering on his career equipped with a fulness of experience and a maturity of thought In his Vie de Jésus Renan draws an attractive picture of Nazareth, its white houses climbing the slope covered with the fig tree and the olive, and their gardens rich with flowers; and he adds: "Les environs, d'ailleurs, sont charmants, et nul endroit du monde ne fut si bien fait pour les rêves de l'absolu bonheur." Some hundred feet above the village the heights command a magnificent panorama of mountain, plain and distant sea, "a map of Old Testament history," which travelers have described in glowing terms. |