But it may be said Jesus taught morals, religion, not science or philosophy, and he had no occasion to construct a system of the universe. In morals and religion, more than anywhere else, do mere men build systems when they think, explain things when they teach. But Jesus, teaching morals and religion, was unlike all others, mere men, teaching morals and religion. He said not one word—he, the only teacher who seemed to understand it—about the “origin of evil,” the subject that has vexed not a little theology into lunacy; he, the only one who has seemed capable of doing it, has given us no “theodicy,” nor so much as seemed to think of it at all.
He did not, he who made claim to perfect knowledge of God, explain God or philosophize about God; Jesus did not so much as give us a philosophy of himself, his life, or his mission. It was John, the disciple, not Jesus, the Master, who wrote of the Logos. Jesus offers no philosophy of the plan of salvation; he does not philosophize concerning faith, or prayer, or immortality.
As to evil, Jesus tells men what evil is, shows the ruin it brings upon them, and points out to them the way of deliverance. He talks to men of their evil and the way to make an end of it.
Jesus never investigates. He never doubts his knowledge or questions for one instant the grounds of it. We have no fit word for his method; intuition is perhaps as good as any. His thinking is not a process; it is like seeing, not learning, the truth; seeing not the outside of things as men see them, but the inside of them as God sees them.
Jesus never uses those forms of logic that are absolutely necessary to all others. We are speaking of his “method of thought;” perhaps such words do not apply to him at all. How did he find out what was true? He did not seem to find it out at all; it seemed to be in him. He never seems to discover a truth. He does not, by reasoning from what is to what must be, find out what he did not know before.
In geometry we begin with what we call “axioms,” a few simple principles that need no proof. We call them “self-evident,” because we see that they are true, that they must be true, the instant we know what the words mean that state them to us. Upon these we build our geometry and all the science and art that rest upon it or grow out of it. When we prove one thing we did not know by something that, being self-evident, needs no proof, we put the two together and prove a third, and so on as far as we can go. Jesus would have known the third, and the hundredth, and the last, as he knew the first—without this building-up process. He would know all that the axioms contain as we know the axioms.
For want of fitter words we have been speaking of his “method of thought.” As these words have significance to mere men, Jesus, it seems, had no method of thought; he did not, as men must do, think to know; he knew things. Perhaps this is in part what he meant when he said to Pilate, “I am the Truth.”
CHAPTER VIII.
“NEVER MAN SPAKE LIKE THIS MAN.”
