of the daily life.

VIII

IF WE SEEK THE ESSENCE OF HIS REVELATION, AND THE PURPOSE OF HIS LIFE

If we would seek the essence of Jesus' revelation, attested both by his
words and his life, it was to bring a knowledge of the ineffable love of
God to man, and by revealing this, to instil in the minds and hearts of
men love for God, and a knowledge of and following of the ways of God.
It was also then to bring a new emphasis of the Divine law of love--the
love of man for man. Combined, it results, so to speak, in raising men
to a higher power, to a higher life,--as individuals, as groups, as one
great world group.

It is a newly sensitised attitude of mind and heart that he brought and
that he endeavoured to reveal in all its matchless beauty--a following
not of the traditions of men, but fidelity to one's God, whereby the
Divine rule in the mind and heart assumes supremacy and, as must
inevitably follow, fidelity to one's fellow-men. These are the
essentials of Jesus' revelation--the fundamental forces in his own
life. His every teaching, his every act, comes back to them. I believe
also that all efforts to mystify the minds of men and women by later
theories _about_ him are contrary to his own expressed teaching, and in
exact degree that they would seek to substitute other things for these
fundamentals.

I call them fundamentals. I call them his fundamentals. What right have
I to call them his fundamentals?

An occasion arose one day in the form of a direct question for Jesus to
state in well-considered and clear-cut terms the essence, the gist, of
his entire teachings--therefore, by his authority, the fundamentals of
essential Christianity. In the midst of one of the groups that he was
speaking to one day, we are told that a certain lawyer arose--an
interpreter of, an authority on, the existing ecclesiastical law. The
reference to him is so brief, unfortunately, that we cannot tell whether
his question was to confound Jesus, as was so often the case, or whether
being a liberal Jew he longed for an honest and truly helpful answer.
From Jesus' remark to him, after his primary answer, we are justified in
believing it was the latter.

His question was: "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?"
Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first
and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt l