It may seem a bit odd that the religious teachers who exalted the teachings of Jesus to the seventh empyrean should in the same breath demote the person of Jesus to the level of a common man; yet they did just that. They lamented with many a crocodile tear the error of the Church in worshiping Jesus and failing to spread His ethics throughout the earth. The implication was that the man Jesus was important only because of the sterling quality of His ethics; though it was hard for some then and it is hard for others now to understand how a mans teaching can be greater than the man. The same persons who exalted His doctrine of love completely ignored His claim to deity and brushed aside His teachings on sin, judgment and hell, as well as His whole system of eschatology. This arrogant picking and choosing among the words of Christ gave some persons the impression that these teachers were far less sincere than they claimed to be, for a man need not be a genius to reach the conclusion that if Jesus was wrong about almost all of His teachings there could be no certainty that He was right about the rest. Well, it is not my intention to fight again the battle of Bunker Hill. If all this belonged only to the past we might be content to let the dead bury their dead and pass on to something else; but the ghosts of the old Modernists appear to have been reincarnated and many of the arguments raised by the liberals a generation ago are now being repeated by the orthodox.
