But in spite of Jesus’ unwillingness to put forward Messianic claims for himself, it is clear that he considered his relation to God as unique in its knowledge and perfection. When he asked his followers to believe on him, he seems obviously to have called on them to trust him as the one who had been divinely commissioned to interpret God to men, and to accept the validity of his teaching as to man’s proper relations to God and his fellow-men, that is, as to the life which they should follow as the sons of their Father. The dogmatic associations which today are attached to the idea of a “belief in Christ,” obscure Jesus’ plain teaching for many. But when his ministry had been brought to its tragic close, his disciples saw him in a new light, and thereafter made his person a matter of supreme moment, as the Church on the whole has done ever since. Again there has been much debate as to the significance of the sufferings and death of Jesus. From our data we must conclude that Jesus did not give to his passion the interpretation which his disciples naturally gave after the event, and which succeeding generations have given it. Yet toward the end of his ministry Jesus recalled and applied to himself the doctrine that the good may suffer death, not for his own faults, but for the sins of others, as found in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah; and it seems clear that he regarded his rejection and crucifixion as essential factors in bringing men into the kingdom of God. What relation now did the teachings of Jesus bear to the religious beliefs and hopes of the Jewish people? Certainly his words on most matters did not appear to his hearers opposed to Jewish doctrines, but rather they seemed to enlarge and to give a nobler content to their own ideas. With the current doctrine that the salvation of the individual depended on his own righteousness he was thoroughly in accord. He gave, however, a deeper meaning to the idea of righteousness: in opposition to the extreme legalistic notions which were emphasized especially by some of the Pharisees, he taught that there must first exist the inner motive of love for God and man from which alone right actions could flow; that one who had recognized his true relations to God and his fellows and whose transformed character showed itself in filial dependence on God and in loving and generous service towards men, and in the practice of humility, was already delivered from the bondage of sin and had entered into a new spiritual life. Although his contemporaries had abandoned their hopes of a prompt realization of the kingdom of God on earth, Jesus showed that that kingdom was already present in its beginning wherever men displayed the character and did the deeds which belonged to the kingdom—in other words, that the kingdom could be realized here by changing present conditions so that God’s will should be done on earth as in heaven. God, to Jesus’ mind,