XV - The Message of Christianity

Summary

Now what is this message of the modern prophet but pure Christianity? — not the mass of theological doctrine ingeniously piled up by Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Clement and Athanasius and Augustine, but the real and essential Christianity which came, fraught with good tidings to men, from the very lips of Jesus and Paul! When did St. Paul's conception of the two men within him that warred against each other, the appetites of our brute nature and the Godgiven yearning for a higher life, — when did this grand conception ever have so much significance as now? When have we ever before held such a clew to the meaning of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” In the cruel strife of centuries has it not often seemed as if the earth were to be rather the prize of the hardest heart and the strongest fist? To many men these words of Christ have been as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount have been openly derided as too good for this world. In that wonderful picture of modern life which is the greatest work of one of the great seers of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete illustration of the working of Christ's methods.