About two thousand years ago a very humble and very great man traveled up and down the dusty highways and byways of ancient Judah teaching, preaching, and healing the sick. Mighty empires have since risen and fallen; conquerors have come and gone; strange and erudite philosophies have caught the peoples' imagination, held it for a time, and then been discarded; but with imperishable glory Christ Jesus' teachings have shone through the ages and have retained and maintained their authority and power.
What did this man, whose gospel of salvation turned back the calendars of time and dated a new era of civilization, teach, and how did he teach? He taught men the nature of God, taught them to love Him, to call Him "Father," taught them of His ever-presence and all-power and of His infinite goodness. He also taught man's perfectibility and the brotherhood of man. Succinctly he translated the Ten Commandments of the Mosaic Decalogue into two: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. . . .Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt. 22:37, 39). These commandments are the law; upon them, he said, hang all the law and the prophets.
His classroom was often a field of corn, a desert place, a grassy hillside, or a little ship at sea. His tools were questions and answers, parables, proverbs, homely illustrations—a grain of mustard seed, a barren fig tree, a little child. Never in all history has teaching been so unadorned with material methods and means or so filled with drama, practicality, and love. Scientific, too, it was, for all that he taught he proved in the great laboratory of human experience.
