No More Learning

He showed that the spirit alone was of value. He took a keen pleasure in
pointing out to them that though they were always reading the law and the
prophets, they had not really the smallest idea of what either of them
meant. In opposition to their tithing of each separate day into the
fixed routine of prescribed duties, as they tithe mint and rue, he
preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment.

Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful
moments in their lives. Mary Magdalen, when she sees Christ, breaks the
rich vase of alabaster that one of her seven lovers had given her, and
spills the odorous spices over his tired dusty feet, and for that one
moment's sake sits for ever with Ruth and Beatrice in the tresses of the
snow-white rose of Paradise. All that Christ says to us by the way of a
little warning is that every moment should be beautiful, that the soul
should always be ready for the coming of the bridegroom, always waiting
for the voice of the lover, Philistinism being simply that side of man's
nature that is not illumined by the imagination. He sees all the lovely
influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is the world
of light. The world is made by it, and yet the world cannot understand
it: that is because the imagination is simply a manifestation of love,
and it is love and the capacity for it that distinguishes one human being
from another.

But it is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in
the sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being
the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through
some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as
being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His
primary desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire
was to a relieve suffering. To turn an interesting thief into a tedious
honest man was not his aim. He would have thought little of the
Prisoners' Aid Society and other modern movements of the kind. The
conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a
great achievement.
But in a manner not yet understood of the world he
regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things
and modes of perfection.

It seems a very dangerous idea. It is--all great ideas are dangerous.
That it was Christ's creed admits of no doubt. That it is the true creed
I don't doubt myself.

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he
would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is
the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one
alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say
in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past. ' Christ
showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing
he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said--I feel quite
certain about it--that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and
wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-
herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments
in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare
say one has to go to prison to understand it.