to men, lifts man up to the peace of heaven,[1] and at the same time bids him find that peace in fulfilling the bodily duties of his corporate Church life. It will not admit of a selfish quietism. But before this peace of God which Christ proclaims, the worry and 'fear-thought' of our overstrung modern age, its neurotic sensationalism and morbid self-analysis, would retire abashed. Christ would teach us that human nature is itself only when it is itself in its completeness, when the physical is truly the instrument of the spiritual. There is no dualism, no schism in human nature as Divinely planned. The voluptuary and the ascetic are both at fault, the former more so because he sins against the higher self. Christ is the Saviour of the whole man, and to the sick He restores 'perfect soundness,'[2] nor does He refuse to be called the Saviour of the body.[3]
(v) It is a significant fact that in the Gospels the word for 'save' ([Greek: sôzein]) is applied to bodily as well as spiritual salvation; it
- ↑ There is an adumbration of this in the four sublime truths of Buddhism, which lead a man by the sacrifice of the lower self and the helping of others to the final extinction of pain. Bishop Westcott's Gospel of Life, pp. 162, 163. Hardwick, Christ and other Masters, p. 168.
- ↑ Acts iii. 16: St. Peter and the lame man.
- ↑ Eph. v. 23
