Christ and the human race Author:Charles Cuthbert Hall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE in THE ESSENTIAL UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE Mb. James Bryce, in the first chapter of "The American Commonwealth," quotes with approval a remark of Aristo... more »tle to the effect that the first step in investigation is to ask the right questions.1 This just observation might with advantage be prefaced by another: the power to ask the right questions presupposes the right mental attitude toward the subject to be investigated. The subject engaging us in these Lectures is the Human Race. My effort thus far has been to find a mental attitude toward this subject that seemed to carry in itself inherent authority as a standard for imitation. We have sought it where, by the common consent of the Western world, it might be expected to exist, namely, in the mind of Christ. The results of my inquiry and the implications contained in those results are before you 1 Cf. vol. i. p. 4, 2d ed. in the first and second Lectures. The historical records of Christ's words, actions, and influence, and of the impressions formed thereby in the minds of men, during a brief but significant time of earthly manifestation, form the larger part of the New Testament writings. By a comparison of these with the conventional attitudes of the Western mind toward Oriental races, we have discriminated the qualities of breadth, sympathy, vital interest, and love that marked the position taken by the mind of Christ toward the great world that stretched out eastward and westward, beyond the bounds of Judaism. It was a world with which by physical inheritance, being of Jewish birth, He had no affiliation. His position toward that larger, foreign world is in sharp contrast with prevailing sentiment found among Western nations and men. Hatred, suspicion, implacable antagonism, ferocious efforts undertaken in the name ...« less