In all His sayings and doings, our Lord was most careful to leave the individual room to grow. Some of the “negative characteristics” of our Lord’s teaching arise out of this universality. If we go to Him looking for a Social system or an Ecclesiastical polity we find nothing of the sort. Humanitarian theorists have turned in disappointment from His word; but a system suited to our age must have been unsuited to Gospel times. Christ gave no system for recasting Society by positive Law, and no ecclesiastical Polity, for men could make laws better when the circumstances which called for them arose. He gave no system of philosophy, for such systems are only the ways of looking at some of the enigmas of life, which suit the cast of mind of the nation or the generation which shapes the system. So different nations and generations should be left to make their systems as of old, only a new truth was declared, and a new force was set to work, which systems would henceforth have to take into account. Again, the next world is what all want to know about. If the founder of a religion would win men’s ears, he must set this before them. But, as we cannot conceive a life under conditions wholly different from that we lead, any description must be misleading. False notions besides engendering devotees and fanatics, would sap human activity and arrest progress. Hence Christ speaks to the fact of a future existence, but says nothing of the mode. He assures us that eternal life awaits those accounted worthy, but of the nature of this life He says nothing. He gives no details on which imagination can dwell. Farther, Christ leaves no ritual. For a ritual belongs to those outward things which must change; it would in time symbolize a view no longer taken, and if some should still cling to it from the idea that it had a magic worth of its own, then it would stand in the way of the truth it was meant to set forth. Laws, Systems, and Ritual, then, were raiment to be changed as times went on; with them therefore succeeding generations were left to deal. The form must come of man, so to man the shaping of it is left. But Christ gave what was more than raiment and more than form. “The words that I have spoken unto you,” said He, “are Spirit and are life.” He gave _seed thoughts_ which should lie in men’s hearts, and germinate when fit occasion came. These thoughts were clothed in terse sayings, such as a man would carry in his head and dwell on the more because he did not see to the bottom of them all at once. Moreover some of these sayings, for instance, “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given,”(1) will startle the hearer as being contrary to what he would expect; and the more he is perplexed, the more he is provoked to think, and thereby a greater impression is made.