The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit by Ralph Waldo Trine online

IX HIS PURPOSE OF LIFTING UP, ENERGISING, BEAUTIFYING, AND SAVING THE ENTIRE LIFE: THE SAVING OF THE SOUL IS SECONDARY; BUT FOLLOWS

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We find him sympathising with and mingling with and seeking to draw unto the way of his own life the poor, the outcast, the sinner, the same as the well-to-do and those of station and influence--seeking to draw all through love and knowledge to the Father.

There is a sense of justice and righteousness in his soul, however, that balks at oppression, injustice, and hypocrisy. He therefore condemns and in scathing terms those and only those who would seek to place any barrier between the free soul of any man and his God, who would bind either the mind or the conscience of man to any prescribed formulas or dogmas. Honouring, therefore the forms that his intelligence and his conscience allowed him to honour, he disregarded those that they did not.

Like other good Jewish rabbis, for he was looked upon during his ministry and often addressed as Rabbi, he taught in the synagogues of his people; but oftener out on the hillsides and by the lake-side, under the blue sky and the stars of heaven. Giving due reverence to the Law and the Prophets--the religion of his people and his own early religion--but in spirit and in discriminating thought so far transcending them, that the people marvelled at his teachings and said--surely this a prophet come from God; no man ever spoke to us as he speaks. By the ineffable beauty of his life and the love and the winsomeness of his personality, and by the power of the truths that he taught, he won the hearts of the common people. They followed him and his following continually increased.

Through it all, however, he incurred the increasing hostility and the increasing hatred of the leaders, the hierarchy of the existing religious organisation. They were animated by a double motive, that of protecting themselves, and that of protecting their established religion. But in their slavery to the organisation, and because unable to see that it was the spirit of true religion that he brought and taught, they cruelly put him to death--the same as the organisation established later on in his name, put numbers of God's true prophets, Jesus' truest disciples to death, and essentially for the same reasons.

Jesus' quick and almost unerring perception enabled him to foresee this. It did not deter him from going forward with his message, standing resolutely and superbly by his revelation, and at the last almost courting death--feeling undoubtedly that the sealing of his revelation and message with his very life blood would but serve to give it its greatest power and endurance. Heroically he met the fate that he perceived was conspiring to end his career, to wreck his teachings and his influence. He went forth to die clear-sighted and unafraid.

He died for the sake of the truth of the message that he lived and so diligently and heroically laboured for--the message of the ineffable love of God for all His children and the bringing of them into the Father's Kingdom. And we must believe from his whole life's teaching, not to save their souls from some future punishment; not through any demand of satisfaction on the part of God; not as any substitutionary sacrifice to appease the demands of an angry God--for it was the exact opposite of this that his whole life teaching endeavoured to make known. It was supremely the love of the Father and His longing for the love and allegiance, therefore the complete life and service of His children. It was the beauty of holiness--the beauty of wholeness--the wholeness of life, the saving of the whole life from the sin and sordidness of self and thereby giving supreme satisfaction to God. It was love, not fear. If not, then almost in a moment he changed the entire purpose and content, the entire intent of all his previous life work. This is unthinkable.

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