Jesus

‘He goes to great lengths to emphasise the demand for unworldliness, telling the people to think of nothing but God, and not to be anxious about the morrow. The Sermon on the Mount is a demand for asceticism and devotion to God. Jesus attacks hypocrites and worldly-wise-men, and demands a higher standard of conduct. Generally speaking, his attitude to the world is very like Nietzsche’s — harshly critical, and based on a feeling that most men are only half-men, and that they ought to spend all their time becoming whole-men.’

 

‘On reading the Gospels, it becomes clear that Jesus’s aim was the aim of every prophet and artist — to make men more alive, more conscious; a desire to get more life and more will out of a great sea of half-dead matter. He teaches that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and the vehicle of the expression of the God-force.’

 

‘This, then, is the essence of Christ’s teaching: it is the will of the life force that men should strive for more consciousness and life (or, as Jesus would have expressed it, it is God’s will that men strive to become more like Him). All men must be made to realise that this is the single and sole aim. When they do so, they will cease to bother their heads about trivialities; they will cease to be petty and quarrelsome.’

 

‘He had told them that ‘the kingdom of God was within them,’ and that men are gods (as the Eighty-second Psalm states) and must strive to ‘have life more abundantly’ by accepting greater responsibility for carrying out God’s purpose in the world.’