ounder can be appealed to for a direct
and constant intercourse with God as of a child with his father, and
for the conduct of men towards each other, which such intercourse
with God necessarily implies, but for hardly anything more. Here, as
in no other historical religion, man is free.

The religion of Jesus, therefore, is one of love alone. The divine
nature consists in love, and the impulse which religion communicates,
is simply that which proceeds from being loved and loving. And a
religion of love finds the way, as no other can, to make man free, to
unseal his energies, and to lead him upwards to the best life. The
appearance of such a religion forms the most momentous epoch of human
history. He who brought it forward must occupy a unique position in
the estimation of mankind. It can never be superseded.

It is no doubt the case that the doctrine of Jesus was not in all
respects new. The ideas of the prophets live again in him; his
followers have always found many of the Jewish Psalms to be perfectly
suited to their experience. Jesus lived in the faith of Israel, and
considered that he had come only to make that faith better
understood, and to free it from improper accretions. What was new was
his own person. His great work was that he embodied his teaching in a
life which expressed it perfectly. It is far short of the truth to
say that there was no inconsistency between what he taught and his
own conduct. His life is a demonstration, in every detail, of the
effects of his religion; all flows with the utmost simplicity, and
even as a matter of necessity, out of the truth he taught. What he
preached was, in fact, himself; he was himself living in the kingdom
of God, to which he called others to come; he knew in his own
experience what it was to live as a child with the Father in heaven,
and to view all persons, all things, all duties, in the light of that
intercourse. All his acts and words flowed from the same spring in
his own inner experience. In no other way could his life shape itself
than as it did, and he saw with perfect clearness what men must be,
and on what terms they must live together when God and they were as
Father and children to each other. What he thus knew he lived, as if
no laws but those of the kingdom of heaven had any authority for him,
and so he presented to the world that living embodiment of the true
religion, which has been the main strength of Christianity. Jesus
announces a new union