The Jesus of history drew men to Him by an inward beauty.  His serenity gave the sick and the suffering an almost riotous confidence that He could heal them.  His radiance attracted children to His side.  He was fond of choosing a child for the sublimest of teachings.  He made it clear that entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven is easiest to those who are least deluded or enchained by appearances, and hardest to those whose hearts lie in their possessions.  The Kingdom of Heaven signifies freedom.

He was the great teacher of the poverty of riches, and the wealth of nothingness.  He knew as no other had ever known, and saw as no other had ever seen, the symbolism of nature.  Always His vision pierced behind the appearance to the thing in itself.  He loved “the reality that abides beyond the shadows.”  He directed our spiritual vision to this reality, telling us that the soul makes a natural response “to a world built on the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal fire.”  He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit.  He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things.  The materialist is in prison.

He did not condemn the earth; He taught that its true loveliness is to be discerned only by the spiritual eye.  For Him the earth was a symbol, and the whole realm of nature a parable.

I cannot but think that we are never further from the genius of the Christian religion than when we treat this luminous atmosphere as though it were a foreign envelope, of little account so long as the substance it enshrines is retained intact.  Without it, the substance, no matter how simple or how complex, becomes a dry formula, dead as the moon.

Losing the radiance we lose at the same time the central light from which the radiance springs, and our religion, instead of transforming the corruptible world into its incorruptible equivalents, reverts to the type it was intended to supersede and becomes a mere safeguard to the moral law.

Nothing can allay our present discords and the long confusions of the world, short of “those radiant conceptions of God, of man, of the universe, which are the life and essence of Christianity.”

“Liberty,” says Edouard Le Roy, “is rare; many live and die and have never known it.”  And Bergson says, “We are free when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work.”

This, I think, is what Dr. Jacks means when he speaks of Christianity bestowing liberty—­a new mastery over fate and circumstance.  It calls forth not only the affection of a man, and not only the intelligence of a man, but the whole of his intuitions as well.  The entire personality, the entire field of consciousness, the entire mystery of the ego, is bidden to throw itself upon the universe with confidence, with gratitude, with love unspeakable, recognising there the act of a Fatherhood of which, in its highest moments, the soul is conscious in itself.