wipe away all tears from their eyes, is just as divine and sweet as
when said in the New Testament. We believe that the Golden Rule is just
as golden when uttered by Confucius hundreds of years before Jesus as
it was afterwards.

We believe that the saying about two commandments being the sum and
substance of the law was just as holy when Hillel spake them as when
Jesus uttered them after his time. All truth is divine, and part of
God's divine revelation to his children.

Here is our Bible, then. Now let me speak about Jesus, and see if our
thought is less precious than the old. In my old days, when I preached
in the orthodox church, Jesus was never half so dear, so helpful to me,
as he is now. If I thought of him at all, I was obliged to think of him
as somehow a second God, who stood between me and the first one, and
through whom I hoped deliverance from the law and the justice of the
first. I had to think of him as a part of a scheme that seemed to me
unjust and cruel, involving the torture of some and the loss of most of
the race. You cannot pick the old-time Jesus out of that scheme of
which he is a part. I could not love him then as I love him now. I
could not think of him as an example to follow; for how can one take
the Infinite for an example? How can one follow the absolutely Perfect
except afar off?

But now I think of Jesus and his cross as the most natural and at the
same time the divinest thing in the history of man. Nothing outside of
the regular divine order in it. Jesus reveals to me to-day the
humanness of God and the divineness of man. And he takes his place in
the long line of the world's redeemers, those who have wrought
atonement, how? Through faithfulness even unto death.