than of thought. The man who especially emphasizes universal, racial divine sonship will be sure to admit different degrees of filial obedience and love; while, as already intimated, he who does not prefer to use thus indiscriminately the only words capable of supreme religious content, nevertheless is most eager to urge at the same time God's love for the race and the possibilities of reformation on the part of the evil man. The recognition of this simple fact would have spared the world much unseemly wrangling among men who believed practically the same truths, but preferred to call them different names.
Of these two uses of the same terms, which was the one adopted by Jesus? The second. Not that he denies that relationship which we moderns denote as the divine paternity and sonship. The most casual reading of the New Testament shows that this conception of the love of God is the very core of the Christian teaching.[1] Jesus was himself the living revelation of this love. It is not impossible, though it is by no means beyond question, that, in the third of the three parables interjected by Luke[2] into the main record of Christ's teachings, he sets forth this love of God in the terms of fatherhood. Further, it may be true, as Wendt[3] says, that "he proceeds upon the certainty of it, as upon an undoubted axiom." But even with these admissions, it seems certain that Jesus, with a characteristic sense of that which is appropriate, reserved ever the noblest words of humanity for designating the noblest relations; that is, the relations of those persons who were members of the kingdom of God—who, to use the Johannine expression, had been born anew.[4] In fact, he almost explicitly stated this to be true when he repudiated physical relations and made those his family who did the will of his father in heaven.[5] This appears also in the
