(1) His singular religious experience. His first followers were impressed with His unique relation to God when they saw in Him the awaited Messiah.  The narratives represent Him as invariably trusting, loving, obeying the Most High as the Father, Lord of heaven and earth.  His sayings lay special stress on God’s tender personal interest in every child of His, on His stern judgment of hypocrites, on His Self-sacrificing love, and on His kindness to the unthankful and the evil.  While it is not easy for us with the limited materials at hand to discriminate clearly between the elements in Jesus’ thought of God which He shared with His contemporaries, and those which were His own contribution, so discerning a believer as Paul, reared in the most earnest circles of Jewish thought, could not name the God to whom he had been brought through Jesus, without mentioning Jesus Himself; God was to him “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The Deity Paul worshipped may be described as that loving Response from the unseen which answered the trust of Jesus; or rather that personal Approach to man from the unseen which produced Jesus.  Men who had not been atheists before they became Christians are addressed by another writer as “through Jesus believers in God.”  It is not enough to say that in Jesus’ experience God was Father; others before Him, both within and without Israel, had known the Divine Fatherhood.  It was the fatherliness in God which evoked and corresponded to Jesus’ sonship, that formed His new and distinctive contribution.  A mutual relationship is expressed in the saying:  “No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son.”  Moving familiarly as a man among men, Jesus did not hesitate to offer them forgiveness, health, power, life; and to offer all these as His own possessions through His peculiar touch with the Most High—­“All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father.”  In the words of the late Professor G.W.  Knox, “Jesus set forth communion with God as the most certain fact of man’s experience, and in simple reality made it accessible to everyone.”

His consciousness of God was not something wholly new; He was not “a lonely mountain tarn unvisited by any stream,” but received into His soul the great river of a nation’s spiritual life.  He was the heir of the faith of His people, and regarded Himself as completing that which a long line of predecessors had begun.  He did not find it necessary to invent new terms to express His thought; but as He passed the old words through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning.  His originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power.  Madame de Stael said that Rousseau “invented nothing, but set everything on fire.”  Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown before.  The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire, with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and rapidly spread throughout the world.