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CHAPTER IV.
THE AUTHORITY OF JESUS, ITS REAL AND PRETENDED SOURCE.
On what authority did Jesus teach? On that of the most high God, as he expressly states, and often. But to have the authority of God, is not that miraculous? How can man have God's authority in the natural way? Let us look at the matter.
I. The only Authority of a Doctrine is its Truth.
Truth is the relation of things as they are; falsehood, as they are not. No doctrine can have a higher condemnation than to be convicted of falsehood; none a higher authority than to be proved true. God is the author of things as they are; therefore of this relation, and therefore of Truth. He that delivers the Truth then has so far the authority of Truth's God. Then it will be asked. How do we know Christianity is true, or that it is our duty to love Man and God? Now when it is asked. How do I know that I exist; that doubting is doubting; that half is less than the whole; that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be? the questioner is set down as a strange man. But it has somehow come to pass, that he is reckoned a very acute and Christian person, who doubts moral and religious axioms, and asks, How do I know that Right is right, and Wrong wrong, and Goodness good? Alas, there are men among the Christians who place virtue and religion on a lower ground than Aristippus and Democritus,
so important a purpose as the intellectual, moral, and religious development of a man. The words were understood in a very different sense—sometimes even by my Friends. I omitted them in the English edition—for the publisher at first designed to have no notes in that, and I did not wish to reprint, without explanation, what had been so much misunderstood before.
