The Galilean Gospel

Plot

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE BEATITUDES. Matt. v. 3-12 ; Luke vi. 20-23. The Beatitudes contain Christ's doctrine of happiness. A strange doctrine it must sound to worldly ears ! It seems a series of paradoxes, or even contradictions, amounting together to a declaration that the miserable are the happy. Nowhere does the boldness of the Preacher of Galilee appear more conspicuously than in these opening sentences of the Sermon on the Mount. This Man has faith in the power of His Gospel to cope with every ill that flesh is heir to. He speaks as one who has good news for all classes of men, and for all possible conditions. There is no human experience which He regards with despair. And his doctrine is as original as it is bold, not to be confounded with that of any philosophical school. It is not stoicism. The Stoic preached submission to misery as the inevitable, and offered to his disciples the peace of despair. Jesus looks on evil as something that can be transmuted into good, and for allsufferers has a hope, a reward, an outlook. It is not optimism. The optimist denies evil, or explains it away, and thinks to cure human misery by fine phrases. Jesus admits the evil that is in the world, and speaks of it in plain terms ; only, unlike the pessimist, He declines to regard it as final, insurmountable. The kind of happiness Jesus offers is obviously something novel and peculiar. When He says, Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, He means either that they are blessed in spite of their misery, or that they are blessed through their misery. In either case the blessedness must be something different from what the world usually accounts happiness, something in the soul, not in the outward state. Jesus invites men to reach felicity by the method of inwardness, representing it as...