Article May 6, 1922 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Rufus M. Jones, George Jackson, Joseph Jastrow, Frederick Harrison, Lothrop Stoddard, H. Howard

[Rufus M. Jones, on "War and the Teaching of Jesus," in the Advocate of Peace]

It was his [Jesus'] purpose to create a society of persons liberated from their old nature by a fresh discovery of God, shrinking from sin and abhorring it, because they had found the divine meaning of life, throbbing with joy because a new world and new dimensions of being had opened out on their vision, living no longer by rivalry and competition, but living by love and its contagious power.

There is only one way to produce that kind of a society. It does not come by command. It cannot be created by act of legislature or by sovereign edict. No force of battalions can compel it. The only way to create a society like that is to begin by exhibiting it in a life that incarnates and embodies it. The only way to produce love as an operative force of life is to trust love completely—and to love regardless of all cost. The only way to reveal the nature of God as love, to carry it as a constructive force into the tissues of the social world, is to translate it into the vital stuff of actual life, to make it visible and vocal. The only way to break the drift of sin and the instinctive drive of selfishness is to kindle a new and higher passion and to set a new attraction at work. Just this Christ did and he did it in such a way that it comes to light not merely as the highest law of life for earth, but as the essential nature of the divine character as well.

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