Taking over the Hebrew heritage, Jesus affirmed that the spiritual nature exists in all human beings. In every man there is presumed to be this inner power to reject the unclean admixtures, to ward off and repel the carnal solicitations, to withdraw from the “world,” and to move upward toward the source of purity, which is God. The spirituality of man consisting of purity, the Father-God, the Father of Lights, is likewise conceived as the absolutely pure, in this sense as the most holy. In every man there is a ray of the eternal light emanating from the eternal luminary, and all men are one in so far as their rays converge at the focus of Godhead. To love men is to be conscious of one’s unity with them in the central life, and to give effect to this consciousness. Hence Christian love, the love that Jesus taught, is no earthly love, no mere sentiment, or outreaching of the human affections. On the contrary, the natural human ties are repeatedly set aside in the _logia_. To love another is to love him in God. Later the current phrase became, to love him in Christ; that is, to think of him, and act towards him, as if he possessed the same capacity for purity with oneself. The love of others in God or Christ encouraged a particular kind of earthly beneficence, and it especially inspired the followers of Jesus with an unparalleled zeal in works of remedial (though never of preventive) charity. This may at first sight seem paradoxical. The young man is advised to dispossess himself of all he has, and in the same breath is told to distribute his possessions among the poor. Why not rather scatter them to the winds? Why should not the poor too cease to toil and spin and take heed for the morrow? For their simple necessities God would provide. The two-fold attitude, however, is easy to understand if we remember that certain acts of helpfulness have a symbolic significance, as attesting the value we set upon the person to whose needs we minister, much as a flower offered to a beloved person emblematically intimates our sense of the beauty and worth of the one to whom the tribute is offered. Christian charity, on its earthly side, has a similar meaning and purpose. It is intended to efface the indignity to which human beings are subjected when reduced to extreme indigence or allowed to suffer without relief, for it is the disdain of the spiritual personality thus evinced which Jesus disallows. He bids his followers intimate by earthly tokens their consciousness of the super-earthly worth of their fellow-beings. But the pursuit of riches as such he nowhere encourages—quite the contrary. And it is certainly a mistake to represent Jesus, as has recently been done, as a kind of precursor of modern Socialism, and to think of him as one who, if he had lived in our time, would have laid stress on equality of opportunity for all to gain earthly possessions. He who advocated wealth for none could not be supposed to have sympathized with a social