The Permanent and Transient Elements in the Life of Jesus

Abstract

believed not less definitely than Amos or Aeschylus that sin must bring judgment; he realized too, no less than Aeschylus, the teaching power of suffering; beyond both, he saw that the fires of suffering burn unto purification. Should we pursue the comparison of drama and prophecy further, we should find much to consider on the significance of suffering in Sophocles and we should need to compare Aeschylus' thought of Prometheus suffering for his benefit to humanity with the supreme insight of the author of The Suffering Servant. To me these points that we have touched upon seem some of the essentials of life in its greatness to the consideration of which we are led in the early pages, whether we open the volume of Hebrew prophecy or Greek tragedy-the nature of the power that controls life, the tragedy of life with its inherited weight of woe, its blind impulse to deeds most loathed, its ignorance of God and right, the essence of sin and of right, the meaning of suffering, the true relation between man and man, man and God. In his lecture upon Japanese Religions, Dr. Nitobe, our first exchange professor from Nippon, pictured the ifferent religions as paths leading toward the same mountain summit. Far apart at the first, they draw close together as they approach the top. Butcher, in his Harvard Lectures, characterized Greece and Israel as representing divergent impulses and tendencies of human nature and different ideals of perfection; yet how near they come when by their different and distant paths, drama and prophecy, they climb toward the summit and look up into calm heaven. To each is given some vision of Him who rules with justice. Cardinal Mercier has written: Justice itself is only absolute because it is the expression of the essential concord of men with God and among themselves. Great seekers for this essential concord were the first dramatist of the nation that