put before men an ethical code, that would have been to
do what the moralists had done before him--what moralists always do,
with the same naive idea that they are doing a great deal for us.
His object was far more fundamental.

The first thing was to bring people on to the very centre and to get
there at once--to get men away from the accumulation of occasional
and self-directed virtues, from the self-sustained life, from
self-acquired righteousness, and to bring them to face the fact of
God, to realize the seriousness of God and of life, and to see God.
When he preached self-denial, he did not mean the modern virtue of
self-denial with all its pettinesses, but a genuine negation of
self, a total forgetfulness of self by having the mind set entirely
on God and God's purposes, a readjustment of everything with God as
the real centre of all. This is always difficult; it is not less
difficult where the conception of God is, as it was with Jesus,
entirely spiritual. The whole experience of mankind was against the
idea that there could be a religion at all without priest,
sacrifice, altar, temple, and the like. There is a very minimum of
symbol and cult in the teaching of Jesus--so little that the ancient
world thought the Christians were atheists, because they had no
image, no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested
religion in the ordinary sense of the word. We shall realize the
difficulty of what Jesus was doing when we grasp that he meant
people to see God independently of all their conventional aids. To
lead them to commit themselves in act to God on such terms was a
still more difficult thing. To believe in God in a general sort of
way, to believe in Providence at large, is a very different thing
from getting yourself crucified in the faith that God cares for you,
and yet somehow wishes you to endure crucifixion. How far will men
commit themselves to God? Jesus means them to commit themselves to
God right up to the hilt--as Bunyan put it, "to hazard all for God
at a clap." Decision for God, obedience to God, that is the prime
thing--action on the basis of God and of God's care for the
individual.

His purpose that this shall not be merely the religion of choice
spirits or of those immediately around him, but shall be the one
religion of all the world, makes the task still vaster. He means not
merely to touch the Jews. Whether he says so in explicit terms or
not, it is implied in all that he says and