Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Jesus in the Experience of Men
One of the parables of Jesus turns on the ferment of leaven in a mass of meal - a vivid forecast of his own effect on the minds of men. He found a world full of established ideas, heirlooms of a great and progressive past, and the immediate effect of his coming was a struggle between inheritance and experience. It was said to them of old time; but I say unto you. The minds of most of us are like palimpsests written over and over again; here the latest notion stands out in the new est script, but between the letters are to be found traces of ideas much older, obliterated but legible; there the old is almost untouched, but the closer observer finds hints of a later hand. Every great thinker sets men re writing these palimpsests, and it is long before it is com pletely achieved; and often by that time a new story is being superimposed on the corrected page. Jesus had the same material to work upon as every great teacher, and his work was done in the same way, on the same terms, and With the same result in the clash of old and new. He has reacted on mankind, as we all know; he has transformed their ideas, blotted out old preconceptions and convictions, and through experience brought men to a new set of principles; but the process has been long and slow.
It is not as if men had really known at first what he meant and what his principles involved or, indeed, guessed how much his personality was to signify. It is easy to talk of his disciples taking the Christian message to the world; but when we begin to consider what this meant.
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