The secret of this movement doubtless is that in his teachings and life Jesus touched the deep est chords in human nature. He sounded the, profoundest depths of man's moral and spiritual being. The conception •of God which he por trayed, the ideals of life which he illustrated, were the highest and truest of which men can conceive. Such has been the conviction which he has inspired. However far men might fail below the morality of Christ, however much they might deny his principles in practice, they have still been haunted by the feeling that his words were true. In the depths of their hearts men, despite their cruel selfishness, have recog nized in the voice of Jesus the tone of absolute truth.
Our mostrimitive sources of information p assure us that Jesus taught something regarding himself, as well as something regarding God and man. The Gospels assume that this latter aspect of his teaching is inseparable from the former. He assumed to speak to men about the fatherhood of 'God out of a sense of his own unique Kinship to him. He told men what God was and required because he claimed to possess an incomparable knowledge of• God's nature and will. If we can trust the earliest reports of his teaching, we must say that he never separated his message from his personal claims as the bearer of it. However unwarranted the historic theories of Christ's person may have been, they sprang from a legitimate impulse. The Christian religion implies and necessitates some theoretic estimate of Christ.
Christianity and Christianity has sometimes been described as the religion of a book. It would be more correct to say that it is a religion with a book. It is certainly not a book-religion in the sense in which Moham medanism or Confucianism is. It does not appear, as it were, Teady-made in the writings of any single sage or prophet. Its sacred books are its products, not its cause. Its program was not first elaborated in a book and then carried out in life and action. , Christianity did not begin with a body of rules or laws. It is, or, at any rate, originally was, a religion in which motives and principles are primary and whose nature it is to create its own externals.
Nevertheless, the conception that the re ligion of Christ bad its chief source and war rant tit a book has often been maintained, and still has a wide popular acceptance. A similar view prevailed in Judaism concerning the re ligion of Israel. The Mosaic law was believed to have had its origin in heaven and to have prescribed, by divine authority, the complete re ligious duty of man. This law was the antece
dent warrant for all that was to be believed and practised. This conception of an authoritative book in which the laws and principles of the system were incorporated in advance was transferred to the earliest Christian writings and became the popular working theory of the subject.
Nothing is plainer, however, than that such a view, alike of the Hebrew and of the Chris-. tian Scriptures; is quite unhistorical. The Mo saic law was a comparatively late codification of rules and maxims which were developed and collated through a long period of. time. In its present form it was'later than the preaching of the great prophets Whose teaching represents the high-water mark in Israel's religion. In like manner the writings whith compose our New Testament were produced after Chris tianity had been, for a considerable period, a vigorous force in the thought and life of the world. Its oldest books, the earlier letters of Paul, were incidental products of his missionary activity.' They were addressed to individuals, particular congregations or groups of congrega tions, and deal largely with local conditions. They could not have been written with the re motest thought, on the part of the apostle, that he was contributing to an authoritative canon of Scripture. They were doubtless highly prized and carefully preserved by their recipt ents, yet not carefully enough to prevent several of them from being lost. At first they were not thought of as sacred Scripture—they were not placed on a level with the Old Testament; for example; that character they acquired only afterward when they became available in various controversies for the refutation of heresy.
We have reason to believe that the words of Jesus were carefully treasured from the first and the various early efforts to preserve them in writing weee..the geniis ,of the New Test*? meat canon. They were probably preserved for a generation or more in oral tradition only and after various redactions and compilations took form in our present Gospels toward the end of the 1st century. Speaking broadly, then, we may say that the New Testament is the earliest available literary product and record of primi tive Christianity and possesses unequaled his torical and practical value because it acquaints us most closely with Christ and with the first effects of his work in the world. The New Testament contains the original documents of the Christian religion.