Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/386

374 Johannine comment upon the significance of Jesus, "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the children of God." From the exactness of these statements one cannot help concluding that to extend the use of these terms by Jesus to all mankind is to confound what was in his mind a possible condition with that which was real only in the case of far too small a number. It would probably be true to his conception to say that as the terms son and father, in the ethical sense—which was the only usage he gave the terms, except to denote purely physical relations—are correlative, the one relationship cannot exist without the other. It is not a question of abstract ethics that here concerns us, but of fact. And the fact of a real spiritual union with God, the outcome of man's natural and normal powers, is called by Jesus and the earlier Christian writers a sonship and fatherhood.

It may be urged that the point at issue is trivial. If Jesus recognizes and enforces that universal love of God for men which is today denoted by the expression fatherhood of God, and if, indeed, his application of the term is simply a question of terminology, why attempt any sharp discrimination? What does it signify if, while teaching today's doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God, he prefers to call only the members of the new society brothers one by another and sons of God?

The answer is threefold. (1) To give to a specific term a general meaning is to confuse all a man's teaching. That which is true of the divine paternity in the sense of Jesus, is not true of the divine paternity in the larger sense. Promises made to those who in this deeper sense pray to their father are not to be transferred to those who will not so pray, but prefer hatred to love, wickedness to purity. A bad man cannot honestly desire that the father's kingdom should come and that his will should be done on earth as in heaven. A man full of selfishness and licentiousness cannot seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness in firm trust that a heavenly father will provide for