No More Learning

He felt that
life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped
into any form was death. He saw that people should not be too serious
over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great
thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds
didn't, why should man? He is charming when he says, 'Take no thought
for the morrow; is not the soul more than meat? is not the body more than
raiment? ' A Greek might have used the latter phrase. It is full of
Greek feeling. But only Christ could have said both, and so summed up
life perfectly for us.

His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be. If the only
thing that he ever said had been, 'Her sins are forgiven her because she
loved much,' it would have been worth while dying to have said it. His
justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be. The
beggar goes to heaven because he has been unhappy. I cannot conceive a
better reason for his being sent there. The people who work for an hour
in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as much reward as
those who have toiled there all day long in the hot sun. Why shouldn't
they?
Probably no one deserved anything. Or perhaps they were a
different kind of people. Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless
mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat
everybody alike: for him there were no laws: there were exceptions
merely, as if anybody, or anything, for that matter, was like aught else
in the world!

That which is the very keynote of romantic art was to him the proper
basis of natural life. He saw no other basis. And when they brought him
one, taken in the very act of sin and showed him her sentence written in
the law, and asked him what was to be done, he wrote with his finger on
the ground as though he did not hear them, and finally, when they pressed
him again, looked up and said, 'Let him of you who has never sinned be
the first to throw the stone at her. ' It was worth while living to have
said that.

Like all poetical natures he loved ignorant people. He knew that in the
soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea. But
he could not stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by
education: people who are full of opinions not one of which they even
understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed up by Christ when he
describes it as the type of one who has the key of knowledge, cannot use
it himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may be
made to open the gate of God's Kingdom. His chief war was against the
Philistines. That is the war every child of light has to wage.
Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In
their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their
tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their
ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of
Jerusalem in Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the British
Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of
respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly
success as a thing absolutely to be despised.