Article November 6, 1915 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from Edward F. Sanderson, Thomas N. Carver, Edward B. Reese, William J. Hart

[Rev. Edward F. Sanderson in The Homiletic Review]

The supreme thing is that you give implicit obedience to those high impulses, perfectly recognizable, which are forever pressing upon you. That is the heart of religion. It was the religion of Jesus. It has been the religion of the world's noblest and best. Jesus felt the pressure within himself of these impulses toward the highest,—the sense of ought, ideals, aspiration, the impulse to dare all for truth and righteousness and love,—and he named the power behind them Father. His one great desire was that all men should know that power within themselves which is making for the highest, and which he called Father. Jesus found supreme satisfaction in his relationship to that power. It was the Father, alive and closer than breathing, urging him on toward the highest.

Jesus had no revelation of God which was different in kind from the revelation which comes to us out of the deeps of our own spirits. His implicit obedience to that power earned for him the fuller revelation which always follows such fidelity. But the light within him was the same light which burns in diminished radiance in us,—the Light which lighteth every man coming into the world. The great phrase of Jesus, so often on his lips and so little understood today, was "the kingdom of heaven," or "the kingdom of God," which, he said, "is within you," and men have looked everywhere except within themselves to find it. To Jesus the kingdom of heaven was the filial relationship of a man to God.

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