followed
Socrates and lived amidst a blaze of genius never since equalled; he is
the greatest representative of human reason in the direction of
spirituality unaided by revelation; "but the errors in the dialogues reach
to absurdity in reason and to sayings shocking to the moral sense."

The writer of this little book has come back to an intensive study of
Jesus at intervals of years, and every time it was like a fresh
revelation, leaving a sense of mental exhilaration and a new sense of joy
in truth. Never was there a feeling that Jesus was exhausted and had
nothing more to say.

For a true valuation of his intellectual contribution to mankind we must
remember that we have not a page of his own writing. We are dependent on
the verbal memory of his disciples; so far as we know, nothing was written
down for years. The fragments which survived probably had to stand the
ordeal of translation from the Aramaic to the Greek. Simply from the point
of view of literature, it is an amazing thing that anything characteristic
in Jesus survived at all. But it did. His sayings have the sparkle of
genius and personality; the illustrations and epigrams which he threw off
in fertile profusion are still clinchers; even his humor plays around
them. Critics undertake to fix on the genuine sayings by internal
evidence. Only a mind of transcendent originality could win its way to
posterity through such obstructions.

But we ought not to forget the brevity of our material when we try to
build up a coherent conception of his outlook on society. There is little
use in stickling on details. The main thing is the personality of Jesus,
his religious and ethical insight into the nature and needs of the social
life of mankind, the vital power of religious conviction which he was able
to put behind righteousness, and the historical force which he set going
through history.

From the indirect influences which Jesus Christ set in motion, no man or
woman or child in America can escape. We live on him. Even those who
attack the Christian Church, or who repudiate what they suppose Christ to
stand for, do so with spiritual weapons which they have borrowed from him.
But it does make a great difference whether the young men and women of our
day give their conscious and intelligent allegiance to Christianity or
hold aloof in misunderstanding. Without them the Christian movement will
mark time on old issues. With them it will dig new irrigation channels an