The life of Christ was throughout a life of prayer. Not only did He love
to spend many hours in lonely communing with His Father, on the
mountain-tops, which He was perhaps the first to love, and to choose for
this purpose, but His whole life was spent in habitual realisation of
God's presence.
Religion is caught rather than taught; it is the religious teacher, not
the religious lesson, that helps the pupil to believe.
What we love, that we see; and what we see, that we are.
We need above all things to simplify our religion and our inner life
generally.
We want to separate the essential from the nonessential, to concentrate
our faith upon the pure God-consciousness, the eternal world which to
Christ was so much nearer and more real than the world of external
objects.
Christ meant us to be happy, happier than any other people.
It is because he is so profoundly convinced of the mystical truth of
Christianity, because he has so honestly tried and so richly
experienced that truth as a philosophy of life, it is because of this,
and not out of a lack of sympathy with the sad and sorrowful, that he
opposes himself to the obscurantism of the Anglo-Catholic and the
emotional economics of the political reformer.
"The Christian cure," he says, "is the only real cure." The socialist is
talking in terms of the old currency, the currency of the world's
quantitative standards; but Christ introduced a new currency, which
demonetises the old.
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