r Jesus' indifference
towards his mother and brothers; of a delicate constitution, he must
have suffered from insults a great deal more than the others, which
throws some light on the severe punishment demanded by Jesus for
comparatively harmless insults. Under such circumstances it is easy to
explain how every "neighbor," and next-of-kin, although to the weak
naturally an "enemy," came to be included in the sphere of that
all-embracing love which is the nucleus of Jesus' teaching. For the
cripple has to face the dilemma either of warping everything into a
powerful, misanthropic hatred, or else to overcome this feeling of
revenge for the high moral superiority of a Plato, Mendelssohn, or a
Kant. Jesus chose the latter of the two courses, and we may well imagine
that it was not at Golgotha that he had the first occasion to cry out,
"Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!"

In the case of Jesus, the whole paradoxical thought of his being the
vicarious sin-offering and world redeemer can best be understood as the
solution, proposed in the Deutero-Isaiah, of the question which had
occupied Job--to wit: Why must the innocent suffer? If the maimed in
body refuse to consider himself as forsaken by his God, as a sinner
punished for some guilt of which he is unconscious, he cannot but assume
that there is such a thing as a vocation to suffering, and believe in
the inscrutable plan of salvation in which his own life and sufferings
are called upon to play some part. Nothing but this conviction of being
thus elected can afford him the desired compensation for his depressed
and hampered ego.

A repressed nature of this type will, in seeking such a compensation,
escape from the harsh reality into the realm of dreams. This is the
basis of what the physician recognizes in hysteria, and in the mental
disease termed "Dementia Praecox." The glorious daydreams of the
millennium, the time of bliss when all strife and all hate will
disappear from the earth, when all the crooked will be made straight,
find their best explanation in this peculiarity. They console the
suffering and heavy-laden for the bitter reality which, in the light of
the old messianic prophecies, appears only as a nightmare, promptly to
be chased away by the dawn of a new day, a new, a perfect era. The
Davidic Jesus, in spite or rather because of his servile form, feels
that he is himself the secret incognito king of that wonderful realm,
the monarch whom G