Jesus Christ and the Christian Character #262030

When one turns with this new problem to the Gospels, he discovers with fresh surprise the ex traordinary richness and variety of the teaching of Jesus. Each period in history goes with its question to the simple record, and finds an an swer which seems written to meet the special problem of the time. In an age of theology the Gospels were a source of theological doctrine; in an age of ecclesiasticism they fortified the Church; in an age of emotionalism they kindled the flame of piety. The same adaptability is now discovered once more by the age of the Social Question. As others have found in the teaching of Jesus the key Of doctrine or organization or religious experience, so there is now delivered by the same teaching to the mind of the present age a key of the Social Question. Remote from the condition of the modern world as was the life of Jesus, and pri marily directed as was his teaching, not to social but to spiritual ends, he has much to say of social duty. His ethics are not individualist, atomic, a doctrine of the single soul; but organic, social, a doctrine Of the common life.