root up the tares you will root up the wheat as well." Our proselytizing
missionary enterprises are thus flatly contrary to his advice; and their
results appear to bear him out in his view that if you convert a man
brought up in another creed, you inevitably demoralize him. He acts on
this view himself, and does not convert his disciples from Judaism
to Christianity. To this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew
initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus as the
Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than those of Moses,
but for the action of the Jewish priests, who, to save Jewry from being
submerged in the rising flood of Christianity after the capture of
Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, set up what was
practically a new religious order, with new Scriptures and elaborate
new observances, and to their list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a
bastard magician, whose comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like
Punch or Til Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the
Christians got the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as Jesus,
himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and could follow
Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.

THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS.

So much for his personal life and temperament. His public career as a
popular preacher carries him equally far beyond John the Baptist. He
lays no stress on baptism or vows, and preaches conduct incessantly.
He advocates communism, the widening of the private family with its
cramping ties into the great family of mankind under the fatherhood of
God, the abandonment of revenge and punishment, the counteracting of
evil by good instead of by a hostile evil, and an organic conception of
society in which you are not an independent individual but a member of
society, your neighbor being another member, and each of you members one
of another, as two fingers on a hand, the obvious conclusion being that
unless you love your neighbor as yourself and he reciprocates you will
both be the worse for it. He conveys all this with extraordinary charm,
and entertains his hearers with fables (parables) to illustrate them.
He has no synagogue or regular congregation, but travels from place to
place with twelve men whom he has called from their work as he passed,
and who have abandoned it to follow him.

THE MIRACLES

He has certain abnormal powers by which he can perform miracles. He
is ashamed of th