Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/197

 Rh should appear that beneath prayer and analogy, maxim and exhortation there should lie a common conception of an ideal that is to be found among the possibilities of every member of the race, and of psychical capacities that make this ideal a possibility, it would be nothing more than one would expect of a thinker at once so artistic and profound as Jesus.

II. With Jesus man is essentially body and soul, flesh and spirit—an incarnate soul or life. But the two elements are not of equal worth. As the body is more than clothing, so is the soul more than the body. The body is destructible, but the soul may be saved, although it may also be (morally) destroyed. Jesus does not, like many thinkers, regard the body as necessarily evil. It is simply subordinate. So long as the race is in this æon the body is necessary. Upon it depend both the perpetuation of the race through marriage, and, also, death.

This view of man was not altogether peculiar to Jesus. The teaching of the Jewish schools of his time illustrates and, doubtless, to some extent explains his position. According to rabbinical authorities, mankind consisted of body and soul, the former composed of dust, the other descended from God. Further it was held that the soul was preëxistent and was the salt that kept the body from corruption. The gospels nowhere give foundations for the popular notion that the soul is a lower, more physical life-principle, and the spirit a higher, more divine substance. Indeed, it would be quite as reasonable to quote the development of Jewish thought for a precisely opposite view. Still less is there to be found in the words of Jesus the remoter conception of the soul as a sort of connecting link between the body and the spirit.