But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in our time to a different conception.
The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life. His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its interior harmony and its relations with the world about it. Love your enemies,—in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of conduct. The pure in heart shall see God,—with that he put in the hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.
The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, and piety. Jesus sublimated this,—in him chastity becomes purity; in place of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a love embracing earth and heaven.
Jesus taught in parables. A story—an outward, objective fact, something which the imagination can body forth—often facilitates the impartation to another mind of a spiritual experience. The soul has no adequate language of its own,—it must borrow from the senses and the imagination.
The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, "No man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son." That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not even understand himself. And correspondingly, "No man knoweth the Father save the Son:" only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity. God is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature. Peace, assurance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfast goodness.
Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son. What symbol could he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home? Like all statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it did not furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe. But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest human relation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life.
Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,—not on abstract ideas, but on action. His teaching was always as to conduct. Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes.
Above all, he lived what he taught. He left the memory of a life which to his followers seemed faultless. And ever since, those who felt their own inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, as somehow the pledge of theirs.
Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higher principle than Judaism. The historic lineage is not to be too much insisted on. When he said, "Love your enemies," "Forgive that ye may be forgiven," he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea. Judaism was largely a religion of wrath. Jesus planted a religion of love.
The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coarse growth, and for many centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate as fierce as the old Judaism. But blending with it, and struggling always for ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle of Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.