Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/43

Rh as the Christ for whom they yearned, and in order that they might become centres of the new life for all mankind. The validity of these beliefs must be largely left to the scientific students of history. Many able scholars have pronounced the beliefs valid. But it is easy for us to recognize that this belief that God raised Jesus from the dead afforded such help to a despairing group of disciples that they were soon able to timidly risk the adoption of Christ’s spirit of service and trust in the process of dying to live, a thing they were certainly not able to do while Jesus was with them. And at a pentecostal feast, after they had made some progress in assimilating these attitudes of their Lord, a large number of disciples become strangely energized or strengthened in their new life. They felt a potent objective support, even God they thought, supporting their new life. If this is true, as the words of a leader can affect a host of men, an impulse in God’s life energized the individual lives of all these disciples, and they began to present the life of Jesus as God’s greatest means of helping men to live successfully.

Some of these disciples wrote down many of the sayings and deeds of Jesus. From the point of view of our studies in philosophy, these scriptures, called gospels, are the most precious possession of mankind. These gospels also express the conviction that if men will test the values of the interests of Jesus, or assimilate and know his character, that the values they would thereby achieve will be a witness to the validity of his claims to be a revealer of the fullest life. They also express the conviction that God himself will be an objective support to such lives, and that when he sees fit he will satisfy the needs and prayers of individual men.

Such a revelation and such a confirmation are just what our studies in philosophy would lead us to expect. After ages of striving in interaction with lesser spiritual realities, God came to constitute the energies of the sun and the earth, to be the creator of organic forms, and the nourisher of the physical needs of men. It is proper to expect that he would effect some way of becoming a spiritual sun for men. He with Christ now, because of the interests that constitute their lives, are ever supplying the energies through which the higher interests and fuller lives of men are being stimulated and nourished. For their interests are being slowly assimilated by men and institutions and are becoming the most vital elements in the cultural environment of men, or of that civilization in connection with which man achieves and fulfils his life, and through which God completes his work of creating beings able to commune with him, beings in his own image.