Posted June 30, 2006
Profound Thoughts on Christ by Profound Thinkers
Taken from The Gospel According to Jesus
[Already cited on our website]
William Blake
There is not one moral virtue that Jesus inculcated but Plato and Cicero did
inculcate before him. What then did Christ inculcate? Forgiveness of sins.
This alone is the gospel and this is the life and immortality brought to
light by Jesus, even the covenant if God, which is this: if you forgive one
another your trespasses, so shall God forgive you, that he himself may dwell
among you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the
mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty,
he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated
the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and in me. He saw
that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take
possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, "I am
divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me;
or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think." but what a distortion
did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be
taught by the Understanding. The Understanding caught this high chant from
the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, "This was Jehovah come down out
of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man." The idioms of his
language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his
truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.
Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt,
before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and
all that man does, and he knew that this daily miracle shines as the
character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian
churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the
blowing clover and the falling rain.
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