Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
One does not perhaps wholly realise, until one has read the muddied
works of modern psychology, how sublime was the soul of Jesus. It might
be possible to infer His divinity from the simplicity of the language
and the white purity of the thought with which He expressed truths of
the profoundest significance even in regions where so many fall into
unhealthiness. "No man can serve two masters"--is not that the teaching
of the modern hypnotist in dealing with "a divided self"? "Set your
affections on things above"--is not that the counsel of the sane
psycho-analyst in treating a diseased mind? "Ask, and it shall be given
you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto
you"--is not this the message of M. Coué, the teaching of
auto-suggestion?--that teaching which makes us say at last that "an
immense hope is dawning on the world."
And, in sober truth, we may indeed believe that this immense hope is
dawning on the world; the hope that mankind may recognise in Jesus, Who
called Himself the Light of the World, the world's great Teacher of
Reality.
Here we approach that unifying principle which was the object of our
quest in setting out to explore the chaos of opinion in the modern
Church.
Is it not possible that the Church might see the trivial unimportance of
all those matters which at present dismember her, if she saw the supreme
importance of Christ as a Teacher? Might she not come to behold a glory
in that Teaching greater even than that which she has so heroically but
so unavailingly endeavoured to make the world behold in the crucified
Sacrifice and Propitiation for its sins?
Is there not here the opportunity of an evangel, the dawning of an
immense hope on the world?
But let the Church ask herself, before she abandons her labour of
expounding doctrines concerning the Person of Christ, whether she is
quite clear as to the teaching of Jesus. "Not every one that saith unto
Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that
doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven."
Read St. Mark, the earliest, the least corrupted, of the narratives. It
is a declaration of a new power in human life, and a record of its
achievements. It is this, and nothing else. The one great word of that
gospel is Faith--not faith in a formula or an institution, but faith in
the absolute supremacy of spirit. Faith in spirit means power--power
over circumstance, power over matter, power over the heredity of our
animal origin. Jesus not only sets men free from the prison-house of
material delusion, as Plato and others sought to do; He teaches them the
way in which alone they can exercise spiritual dominion.
There were two things to which He set no limits: one, the love of God,
and the other, the power of Faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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