Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

ciently or are there hundreds of lives lost through criminal carelessness every year? Are your motormen and automobile drivers humane enough to drive safely or do they recklessly push through traffic as if human life were cheap? Have the people of your State and city accepted fully this foremost ideal of Jesus? Have they learned from him that life is worth far more than property, that a soul is infinitely precious?

POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

1. How did the Pharisees criticize Jesus' choice of friends? Why do you think he was so democratic?

2. What did he teach about the value of an individual? Did he feel this way about degraded outcasts or just folks who were good? Why was he so kind to the leper? What great ideals did he teach in his parables of the lost sheep and the lost son?

3. Did the world before Jesus value children as cheap or dear? Illustrate. What did he have to say about the value of a child? What were his reasons?

4. Why did he compare the worth of a man with the value of a sheep? What shows us that in former times property was valued more than human life? In what ways can you prove that human life is not so cheap to-day as in the first century? What do you think Jesus' teaching has had to do with it?

5. Are you apt to value people according to their useful

ness to you? Are you treating everyone in your school or shop equally? If not, why not? What would Jesus do about it?

FOR FURTHER STUDY AND HONOR WORK

6. Do you think of a Chinese as worth as much in God's sight as an American? How does the work of a mod

ern missionary put in practice Jesus' ideal about the worth of a man?

7. Show how this principle of Jesus strikes a death blow at all caste spirit, aristocratic family pride, and race prejudice. Can your life stand this test personally? 8. In Rauschenbusch's Christianizing the Social Order, read pages 412-418, on "The Conservation of Life," and then make up your mind what your own town has yet to learn from Jesus on this great truth. 9. Find out what needless loss of life there was in your town last year, if every one had had Jesus' ideal of the value of life. Are your local factories equipped with all necessary safety appliances to protect life? Choose one of the class to write for the local paper a short article suggesting points in which greater care is needed to protect life in your city.

PART II

JESUS' IDEALS OF PERSONAL GROWTH

CHAPTER VII

THE FOUR-SQUARE SYMMETRY OF LIFE

WE all admire a broadly trained man or woman. As we grow older we long to attain this ideal of development ourselves. Often, however, young people do not grow evenly. In fact, we frequently see boys and girls whose awkward bashfulness is due to rapid growth of arms, legs and feet, and who haven't yet discovered what to do with their hands! Internal organs have not kept pace with overgrown limbs, and muscles have not yet been trained to work together with smoothness and grace. We do not need to worry over this stage of development, for it soon passes with normal growth. As we grow into maturity our bodies tend to grow symmetrical.

Far more serious is the uneven growth into one-sided manhood due to the neglect of body, mind, or soul. It has been quite common for scholars to neglect the body, not realizing that success must begin with physical fitness. On the other hand, many people neglect the mind and pamper the body in very foolish ways. Even to train the body to wonderful strength and perfection is sadly one-sided, if meanwhile the mind is left untrained. The ignorance of prize-fighters is sometimes pathetic, in contrast with their marvelous physical strength. And even sadder is the neglect of the religious or social nature by young folks with sound bodies and good minds. Wise educators aim to-day to develop the fourfold symmetry of life in growing boys and girls, having in mind the foursquare man or woman each of us longs to become.

How Jesus grew into manhood. We could not take Jesus as our ideal person if he had been eccentric and

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »