As Christ Jesus journeyed among the hill-towns of Cæsarea Philippi that lie between the sources of Jordan and Pharpar, he asked a question that must give every man pause at some time or other in his experience; namely, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" It may be that with a consciousness ever seeking symbols to make clear to material sense the parting of the ways which lead earthward and heavenward, the Master had caught a spiritual suggestion from the geographical proximity of the sources of the rivers Jordan and Pharpar,—Jordan, that has symbolized to Jew and Christian the baptism of Spirit, the purification from all fleshliness, and Pharpar, the river of Syria whose waters were not sufficient to cleanse Naaman of his leprosy, though he esteemed them more highly than the rivers of Israel, — these may have served to symbolize to Jesus the relative values of Spirit and matter.
All men will agree that only that which profits is of real value. Value cannot be estimated by linear, superficial, or cubic dimensions. Value defies material analysis or graphic arithmetic. Riches, the accumulation of a mass of values, cannot be measured by a foot rule or weighed in a banker's scale. Seek to register value by material methods, and it eludes our closest scrutiny: values cannot be retained by a material grip. Jesus evidently saw this when he associated the possession of the whole world, the sum total of material possessions, with the loss of soul, spiritual sense.
A fictitious sense of value always leads astray; all Scriptural and secular history teems with pathetic object-lessons of this fact. The pathos as well as the tragedy of the allegorical Adam and Eve is seen in their lack of a correct appreciation of what constituted value. That which was good and "pleasant to the eyes," the false estimate of value, was devoid of all worth when measured by the real standard. This woful lack must also have been the underlying mistake in Cain's unaccepted sacrifice. Solomon, who saw the fictitious nature of all material possessions, nevertheless fell away from loyalty to the true standard, and attributed to the flesh a large degree of value, which fact led to his downfall. Thus we might trace the unhappy course of many a tragic figure who has left the straight and narrow way of Principle and its law to pursue with outstretched hands some phantom of fictitious value.
