The Christ of the Gospels (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS CHRIST. rriHE sayings of Jesus Christ are not exhausted in a series of theological dogmas; but they are sufficiently authoritative on all the great religious questions. He gives to the world a clear and well-defined faith, though not after the dry, hard, systematic method of the school-man or theologian. It is not as a philosopher that He speaks; hut no philosopher ever spoke with such authority and power on the doctrines which so largely make up the history of philosophy. The personality of God, a future life, a heaven, and a hell, a judgment of all that is microscopic as well as of what is vast in thought and deed, are present in His teachings as in the power of a revelation. Socrates is full of doubt about these things: at most he is but an earnest enquirer, or a sublime speculator. Aristotle is no materialist; but about the existence of the disembodied spirit in all its individuality, he is evidently perplexed.The recurrence of such phrases as " there is heaven that knows me," in the sayings of Confucius, and the absence of all more definite recognition of the Supreme, shows only too clearly that the great Chinese sage never fully grasped the idea of a personal God, and there is proof quite as clear that, though he sacrificed to the dead, it was more in reverence for past and present custom than in the power of a living faith. There is the fullest demonstration that Buddha had no revelation of a personal Deity, and the Nivarna to which he looked for all deliverance is not very easily distinguished from nihilism. This does not bespeak the greatness of these men, but their weakness. For did they settle these questions ? Socrates never attempted, and, perhaps, like Plato, dreamt in his darkness that a fuller revelation might yet end all doubt ...