The
arrogance of the school fares ill at the hands of Jesus; He will
know nothing of the partisanship of piety or of the separateness
of the godly; He condemns the practice of judging a man's value
before God. Holiness shrinks from contact with sinners, but He
helps the world of misery and sin; and there is no commandment
on which He insists more than that of forgiving others their debts
as one hopes for forgiveness himself from heaven. He is most
distinctly opposed to Judaism in His view of the kingdom of heaven,
not as merely the future reward of the worker, but as the present
goal of effort, it being the supreme duty of man to help it to
realise itself on earth, from the individual outwards. Love is
the means, and the community of love the end.
Self-denial is the chief demand of the Gospel; it means the same
thing as that repentance which must precede entrance into the
kingdom of God. The will thereby breaks away from the chain of
its own acts, and makes an absolutely new beginning not conditioned
by the past. The causal nexus which admits of being traced comes
here to an end, and the mutual action, which cannot be analysed,
between God and the soul begins.
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