He teaches men to bear
the cross, but he does not teach that the cross is sweet and that
sickness is sound. A coming reconciliation between believing and
seeing, between morality and nature, everywhere forms the
background of His view of the world; even if He could have done
without it for His own person, yet it is a thing He takes for
granted, as it is an objective demand of righteousness. So much is
certain; for the rest the eschatology of the New Testament is so
thoroughly saturated with the Jewish ideas of the disciples, that
it is difficult to know what of it is genuine.
Jesus was so full of new and positive ideas that He did not feel
any need for breaking old idols, so free that no constraint could
depress Him, so unconquerable that even under the load of the
greatest accumulations of rubbish He could still breathe. This
ought ye to do, He said, and not to leave the other undone; He did
not seek to take away one iota, but only to fulfil. He never
thought of leaving the Jewish community. The Church is not His
work, but an inheritance from Judaism to Christianity. Under the
Persian domination the Jews built up an unpolitical community on
the basis of religion.
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