Hearken to me, ye children of the Immortal, dwellers of the heavenly worlds, I have known the Supreme Person who comes as light from the dark beyond. _Isha Upanishat._
Studying at its best the Christian view of the world of life—and it is not worth any man's while to study it at less—we find that Jesus Christ stands there always as greatest among prophets, though 'more than a prophet.' He is in the line of the prophets but at their head; he is their culmination and their fulfilment. He knew himself to be a prophet, and to have the lot of one who 'is not without honour save in his own country.' He lived and taught, and he and his teaching were received, after the manner of the prophets that had gone before. Like Isaiah and Jeremiah he spoke the language of drama and poetry, and gave body in parable and pictorial visions to his message. Like them he spoke and preached always with passion and as being conscious of a very wall of opposing forces. For him as for them the exaltation of religious machinery above religious life, and all self-satisfaction through mere forms and ceremonies, meant an onset of spiritual death. To use these things as a shelter within which a man might follow his self-seeking bent, whether of greed or of fear, was the worst (but one) of sins. 'Hypocrites,' that is, 'play-actors', 'generation of vipers,' he said of the professionally religious of his time. That there was for him one sin greater than such play-acting is of his own supreme greatness. No other prophet recognized and denounced as he did the sin that cannot be forgiven; for no other prophet had as he had the full personally realized revelation of an indwelling God whom man, consciously, might cast out. This, with his marvellous balance of judgement in regard to the letter or the machine and the spirit—the organ and the life that shapes and uses it—is a marked element in his _differentia_ among prophets. And we, who are friends to them all in so far as they protest against depreciation of spirit and life, and against men who make of the products of life from which life has departed obstacles to the urgency of the present, have to consider whether we can go with him as far as he goes, or whether this element of difference between him and the rest is in any way to weaken our alliance with him. He is not only one among his fellows; he is also unquestionably different from them. Is there anything about this difference that should make us who are friends of the prophets quarrel with the Christian who accepts and welcomes it?