Christianity is man's passport from illusion into reality. It reveals to him that he is not in the world to set the world right, but to see it right. He is not a criminal and earth is not a Borstal Institution. Nature is the handiwork of a Father. Look deeply into that handiwork and it reveals a threefold tendency--the tendency towards goodness, the tendency towards beauty, the tendency towards truth. Ally yourself with these tendencies, make yourself a growing and developing intelligence, and you inhabit spiritual reality.
Study the manner of Jesus, His attitude to the simplest and most domestic matters, the love He manifested, and the objects for which He manifested that love. These things have "a deeper significance than our pensive theologies have dared to find in them. . . . They belong not to the fringe of Christianity but to its essence." Christ loved the world.
His religion, which has come to stand for repression founded on an almost angry distrust of human nature, is in fact "the most encouraging, the most joyous, the least repressive, and the least forbidding of all the religions of the world." It does not fear the world, it masters it. It does not seek to escape from life, it develops a truer and more abundant life. It places itself at the head of evolution.
There are points on its path where it enters the shadows and even descends into hell, for it is a religion of redemption, the religion of the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, but "the end of it all is a resurrection and not a burial, a festival and not a funeral, an ascent into the heights and not a lingering in the depths."
Nowhere else is the genius of the Christian Religion so poignantly revealed than in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins in the minor key and gradually rises to the major, until it culminates in a great merry-making, to the surprise of the Elder Son, who thinks the majesty of the moral law will be compromised by the music and dancing, and has to be reminded that these joyous sounds are the keynotes of the spiritual world.
Dr. Jacks well says that we should be nearer the truth if, instead of thinking how we can adapt this religion to the minds of the young, we regarded it as "originally a religion of the young which has lost some of its savour by being adapted to the minds of the old."