Jesus entirely recast mankind’s common ideas of holiness.  It is no longer asceticism, no longer the mystical trance, no longer the “fussiness,” with which the early Christian reproached the Jew, which still haunts all the religions of taboo and merit, and even Christianity in some forms.  Where men think of holiness as freedom from sin, the negative conception reacts on life.  They begin at the wrong end.  Solomon Schechter, the great Jewish scholar, once said of Oxford, that “they practice fastidiousness there, and call it holiness.”  Unfortunately Oxford has no monopoly of that type of holiness.  But with Jesus holiness is a much simpler and more natural thing—­as natural as the happy, easy life of father and child, and it rests on mutual faith.  It is Theocentric, positive, active rather than passive—­not a state, but a relation and a force.  Holiness with him is a living relation with the living God.  That is why the first feature in it that strikes us is Courage.  “Be of good cheer; be not afraid”; that note rings through the Gospels, and how much it means, and has meant, in sweet temper and cheerfulness in the very chequered history of the Church!  His is the great voice of Hope in the world.  “The Lord Jesus Christ, who is our Hope,” Paul said (1 Tim. 1:1).  Even on the Cross, according to one text, Jesus said to the penitent thief:  “Courage!  To-day thou shalt be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).  We may not know where or what paradise is, but the rest is intelligible and splendid:  “Courage; to-day thou shalt be with me.”  Look at the brave hearts the Gospel has made in every age; how venturesome they are! and we find the same venturesomeness in Jesus—­for instance, as a German scholar emphasizes, in that episode of the daughter of Jairus.  The messenger comes and says she is dead.  Anybody else would stop, but Jesus goes on.  That is a great piece of interpretation.  Look again at his venturesomeness in trusting the Gospel to the twelve and to us—­and in facing the Cross.  “It was his knowledge of God,” says Professor Peabody, “that gave him his tranquillity of mind."[22]

“Jesus,” says Dr. Cairns, “said that no one ever trusted God enough, and that was the source of all the sin and tragedy.”  Look at his emphasis again and again on faith; and the language is not that of guesswork; they are the words of the great Son of Fact, who based himself on experience.  “Have faith in God” (Mark 11:22).  “Be not afraid, only believe” (Mark 5:36).  “All things are possible to him that believeth” (Mark 9:23).  When he criticizes his disciples, it is on the score of their want of faith—­“O ye of little faith”—­it has been taken as almost a nickname for them.  In the hour of trial and danger they may trust to “the Spirit of your Father” (Matt. 10:20).  It is remarkable what value he attaches to faith even of the slightest—­“faith as a grain of mustard seed” (Matt. 17:90)—­it is little, but it is of the seed order, a living thing of the most immense vitality with the promise of growth and usefulness in it.