Jesus follows in the line of Jeremiah's New Covenant and the Book of Deuteronomy in his appeal to the individual, whose worth he so wonderfully magnifies. In Jesus himself his followers saw supreme "Divine Personality, and Perfect Man"; he was the ideal "Son of Man," and this co-existence of the perfectly divine and perfectly human lies at the centre of the new religion and of later theological development of the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ. From the individual Jesus required complete faith and trust in God and the highest social ideals. The most spiritual type of life was that manifested in the simplest and humblest duties, and while the truest religion was to show itself in human activity, the individual who was true to humanity's highest ideals was in fact fulfilling the Law of Christ.
Now, the meaning of the example and teaching of Jesus for the real nature of man and his environment was much more than a religious or a theological problem. Nor could philosophy solve it. Philosophy has always been a late comer in the history of human development. It follows upon the anthropomorphic and mythological explanation of things. It betokens an intro spective and detached mind and a knowledge of the inner life for which Indian and Iranian religions afforded the earliest examples. But the Indo-Iranian peoples, like the Semites, had relatively little positive knowledge, and the Greeks, on the other hand, with all their acuteness and skill, had little real religious instinct. In this respect the more practical West and the more mystical East have always diverged. Philosophy wavered between an explana tion of religious (spiritual, mystical) experience and a reasonable account of man and of the universe wherein he lived; and whereas there has grown up in the Western world an antithesis between "religion" and "science," the true antithesis is the more complex one, (I) between different qualities of religion (in their social and other value), and (2) between religious and related experience (the "numinous") and all that comes through the senses and may be called "non-religious." The ideal of Christianity has been fullness of life. In being true to self man has found the self to which to be true, and the supreme self-consciousness which distinguishes the religion of Israel finds its climax in renunciation as a step towards the fullest life. Men have to learn the one thing needful, and with the refusal of the rich man whom Jesus loved (Mark x. 21) contrast
his own recugnition of what was required of himself. The great refusals mean decay and death. In common with the prophets of Israel Jesus combines compassion and consolation, warning and grief for warning unheeded. From Amos and Hosea onwards, there is a Divine Law as well as a Divine Love; and neither individuals nor nations can offend with impunity. Israel, the first born of Yahweh, suffers when she offends against the Divine Law, but Jesus the "only begotten" goes to his death fulfilling his destiny (cf. Mark viii., 31-33) and "fulfils" what the Israelite "servant of the Lord" had begun (Is. liii.). The whole process, as unfolded in the history of religion, has a more than religious significance, for the great religious ideas concern the very nature of the universe. There is an increasing consciousness of what the universe demands of men (cf. earlier, Micah vi. 8); and the vicis situdes of Christianity and other religions have been so shaped by spiritual needs, and by moral needs, and by mental or intel lectual needs that religion itself represents something from which ethical and intellectual demands cannot be isolated. When the Founder of Christianity set up the ideal of a normal life wherein the religious and non-religious sides should be in harmonious rela tion, it followed that all that religion represents must be a normal and a natural part of man, and the "philosophy"—if that term be retained—which grows most naturally out of the personality of the Founder, must make explicit the ideal harmonious inter relation of spiritual, ethical and intellectual aspects of life and thought.
The old ego-centric conceptions of the universe, which modern knowledge of space and time has put in the background, find their explanation in man's consciousness of ,his essential unity with the universe or of his relation with its God. But the im mense accumulation of facts concerning the universe as revealed to man by his senses is confronted by a no less impressive mass of data of religion and of religious and all related experience. The history of civilization proves that the religious and non religious types of experience can never be lastingly severed, and the modern study of man's mental processes and world of thought is preparing the way for a better knowledge of the part played by religion, in particular by Christianity, in enabling man to understand his total environment.