The herald., 1897-09-20
The Root Ideas of ChriSt'S
Religion
OUR EARTHLY PARADISE
DIR. E. F. GOFF'S SERMON ON
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
The Duties That Such a Heritage En-
tails-The Flesh and the
Spirit

1.-THE Root Ideas of Christ's Religion"
was Rev. Burt Estes Howard's theme
yesterday morning at the First Presby-
terian church, and in part he said: I'm
the accepted sense of the term, Jesus
had no theology. He possessed no the
cries of life, nor did he at any time ad
vance any speculative or tentative no
tions concerning God or man. AS a re-
ligious teacher he arrayed himself on the
side of no party in the church, nor did
he show any anxiety to create party of
his own. To him religion was not
science, it was a spiritual power at the
heart of life.
To His mind the truth He taught
proved itself in the very utterance. He
did speak with authority, but the
authority was less in Himself than in the
truth He uttered. Men believed, not be-
cause Jesus was the speaker, but be-
cause what He said answered to the
spirit within them, answered to home
sickness in their souls for God and for
truth Creeds and confessions are
largely matters of Interpretation and
opinion, hence as variable as the types
Of mind that hold them. Jesus had no
opinions, but He did have few mighty
convictions 'The words that l speak
unto you, they are spirit and they are
life.''
1t becomes very evident upon any
study of His words and of His deeds
that all Jesus teaching and His living
and logical deductions form two prem
ises. There are two root ideas in His
religion from which the whole structure
of Christianity grows, and they are the
fatherhood of God and the sonship of
man. To Jesus God was no longer.
dead monarch, the naughty czar of the
universe, dwelling in unapproachable
isolation; no frosty Holiness, reserving
Himself from the polluting touch OF hu-
man evil; no omnipotent chancellor of
the moral realm, administering Justice
according to technical covenants" To
Jesus, God had not shut Himself from
men by fire and cloud or by the awful
sanctity of the Holy of Holes. But He
brought God down from the clouds of
Sinai to walk with man in the busy
haunts of daily life.
The idea of sonship cannot be sepa-
rated from that of fatherhood. One in
wolves the other. Jesus proclaimed the
rearness of God when He taught us to
say "Our Father" This was to be our
strength And He filled the veins of hu-
manity with the inspiration of a new
life and hope when He declared us to be
Gods children and called upon us to full
fill our sonship. The call of the Cos
pei is Just a call to manhood; but it gives
a new definition to the word. To be
man is to be Gods son; and to be Gods
son is not to conform ourselves to set
Of rules and principles, but to move up
into the likeness of the Father.
A simple religion, and yet that was all
there was to it. Fatherhood, sonship.
He Himself lived it. 1t made His life.
Because Jesus believed in the fatherhood
of God His own life was serene, strong,
exultant in the midst of conditions that
would overwhelm most of us.
If God is our father and we are His
children, then we must measure our life
not by it's comforts and accumulations,
but by it's approach to the divine perfec-
ton. Therefore Jesus did not see any
thing strange in the material prosperity
of the base and the frequent suffering
of the righteous. Life cannot be COM
puted in circumstances. Any estimate
based on what we call material success
is misleading. Life can be measured only
in terms of eonship. Jesus was not
mawkish sentimentalist, thinking the
world would be purified by sprinkling
cologne on it. But because He saw in
every fragment of humanity the broken
outline of Gods face, He gave Himself
to the development Of the divine image
there He had faith in human perfecta-
bility.
These, then, are the great convictions
on which Jesus built His religion: O
Faith in Gods fatherhood; (2) Faith in
mans sonship. Not complicated reig-
ion but OH how mighty! One great
base of his religion was anchored to an
eternal faith in the divine fatherhood;
the other in a mighty faith in human
perfectibility. Out from the God-side He
sprung His arch of father-love; out from
the man-side He projected the arch of
filial love, and, 10! as the Son of God bent
toward man, the hope of man rose to-
ward God, and the two became one
mighty span over which the life of God
gave itself to man, and the life Of man
gave itself to God. God is love, and in
order to be God-like man, too must be-
come love. This is the simple religion of