Man’s proper relation to God Jesus held to be the exact converse of God’s to man: he taught that man’s sonship consists in a likeness to God, which will express itself in love toward God and toward all men. This teaching is nowhere more clearly set forth than in the words which I have just quoted: “Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven;”[304] the same lesson he inculcated in the prayer which he taught his disciples: “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” On another occasion he charged his followers: “Whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against anyone; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”[305] So Jesus held that love and forgiveness, the characteristics of God himself, are required of men as sons of their heavenly Father; that those who wish to claim such a relationship to God must exercise the same generous affection toward their fellows that God shows to them; and that with this must go such love of God as was taught in the law: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”[306] Salvation Jesus would no doubt have defined in part as peace and confidence of mind in this world and eternal happiness in the next. Our data clearly show that he held that man secures salvation when he enters on the life which belongs to the sons of God, and that the basis of this life, as we have just seen, is love, while its outward signs are acts prompted by whole hearted affection for one’s fellow-men and for God. This life Jesus evidently regarded as the natural one from which man departs through sin, and therefore he taught that repentance from sin is the antecedent condition of entrance into right relations with God, that is to say, into salvation. At the beginning of his ministry he preached in Galilee that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand and called on men to repent and to believe in the good news; and at the end of his work he charged his disciples to preach repentance and the remission of sins to all peoples.[307] But it is important that we should keep clearly before us the fact that Jesus did not lay so much emphasis on the negative element of repentance as on the positive motive of love. He taught that the man who had that motive would naturally exhibit it in a trustful dependence on God and in a righteousness of life which would be of a very different character from that of a life directed by mere obedience to legal and ritual requirements. A man whose thoughts and acts were prompted by love of God and of his fellow-men had attained salvation—that is to say, Jesus held salvation to be a present experience, one which could be realized at any time by any man who recognized God as his father with all which that implied, and who consequently devoted himself to a life of unselfish service.