Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality — John Shaqi
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
Study the manner of Jesus, His attitude to the simplest and most
domestic matters, the love He manifested, and the objects for which He
manifested that love. These things have "a deeper significance than our
pensive theologies have dared to find in them. . . . They belong not to the
fringe of Christianity but to its essence." Christ loved the world.
His religion, which has come to stand for repression founded on an
almost angry distrust of human nature, is in fact "the most encouraging,
the most joyous, the least repressive, and the least forbidding of all
the religions of the world." It does not fear the world, it masters it.
It does not seek to escape from life, it develops a truer and more
abundant life. It places itself at the head of evolution.
There are points on its path where it enters the shadows and even
descends into hell, for it is a religion of redemption, the religion of
the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, but "the end of it all is a
resurrection and not a burial, a festival and not a funeral, an ascent
into the heights and not a lingering in the depths."
Nowhere else is the genius of the Christian Religion so poignantly
revealed than in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins in
the minor key and gradually rises to the major, until it culminates
in a great merry-making, to the surprise of the Elder Son, who
thinks the majesty of the moral law will be compromised by the
music and dancing, and has to be reminded that these joyous sounds
are the keynotes of the spiritual world.
Dr. Jacks well says that we should be nearer the truth if, instead of
thinking how we can adapt this religion to the minds of the young, we
regarded it as "originally a religion of the young which has lost some
of its savour by being adapted to the minds of the old."
Then he reminds us that it was "in the form of a person that the
radiance of Christianity made its first appearance and its first
impression on the world." A Light came into the world.
The Jesus of history drew men to Him by an inward beauty. His serenity
gave the sick and the suffering an almost riotous confidence that He
could heal them. His radiance attracted children to His side. He was
fond of choosing a child for the sublimest of teachings. He made it
clear that entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven is easiest to those who
are least deluded or enchained by appearances, and hardest to those
whose hearts lie in their possessions. The Kingdom of Heaven signifies
freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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