The New Gospel

If the doctrine of Jesus had simply been belief in the approaching end of the end of the world, it would certainly now be sleeping in oblivion.  What is it, then, which has saved it?  The great breadth of the Gospel conceptions, which has permitted doctrines suited to very different intellectual conditions to be found under the same creed.  The world has not ended, as Jesus announced, and as his disciples believed.  But it has been renewed, and in one sense renewed as Jesus desired.

This sublime person [Jesus] … we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus absorbed all of the divine, or has been adequate to it … but in the sense that Jesus is the one who has caused his fellow-men to make the greatest step toward the divine.