ILL Durant, repeating the dreary platitudes of unbelief, tell us there was nothing new in Christ's message.
But there was.
It is still rightly called the Gospel, the good news.
For curiously enough it is as exultantly new to our hopelessly muddled modern world as it was to the weary world of those days.
Everything this unpredictable character said or did was pot" news. It still is.
St. Peter crucified head downwards is said to have been in the proper position to view our tops, world correctly. It may be so. For Christ had set at naught everything that humanity in its baser vision held for true. What men put first He put last; what they called death He called life, saying that what is 300d for the body is often bad, very dad, for the soul, and what is wisdom s of the world is folly in Jod's eyes, and vice versa. And so de preached in tremendous paradoxes bout the first being last and the last first, saying that the humble would 3e exalted and the mighty put down, hat those who laughed should mourn ud tears would be turned into j Man can talk to his fellows simply; ut when God begins talking to us, v can He set right our crooked in a fitting way except in the language of paradox The Saviour T once, like other soralists, mouthed a platitude. His message contains gigantic figures of beech about the possibility of hurl-ug mountains into the sea, and the possibility of threading a needle vith camels. In the Sermon on the Mount He begins every example with he words: "You have heard that it vas said of old," He quotes the latitude, the trite phrase of the "copie, and then He rectifies it in a ash, with a scintillating comment hat to this day sounds new: "But I ay to you" And He was original n His manner here, for He spoke as me having authority, not as the wearisome Scribes and Pharisees.
With a few short words He collapsed he worldlings' whole philosophical louse of cards. The rich accustomed o adulation were amazed at His ipbraidings and at His sensational: Blessed are the poor." Nor were hose the mere smart sayings of a lever speaker. They were truths reighted with mighty consequences or the future; for who can count the harvest of good they have borne, and bear today? Great modern hospitals, schools, orphan asylums have arisen only because He said, As long as you did it to one of these riy least brethren you did it to me."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.