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A relative sinlessness Mohammed shared with Jesus; the acceptance of this doctrine, contradictory to the original spirit of the Qoran, had moreover a dogmatic motive: it was considered indispensable to raise the text of the Qoran above all suspicion of corruption, which suspicion would not be excluded if the organ of the Revelation were fallible.
On the other hand, he saw in Christ the perfect revelation of God to humanity and at the same time the ideal of humanity. He believed in Jesus' sinlessness and in his miracles, especially in his resurrection. The keynote of Channing's character and convictions is found in his sense of the inherent greatness of man. Of this feeling his entire system is but the unfolding.
For let any man of sincere mind and without any system to support look round on all his Christian neighbours, and will he say or will they say that the origin of their well-doing was an attempt to imitate what they all believe to be inimitable, Christ's perfection in virtue, his absolute sinlessness?
The sinlessness is indispensable to the doctrine of His sacrificial death. III. The glorious gifts which flow from that perfect obedience. It gives us a living law to obey. It gives us a transforming power to receive. It gives us a perfect righteousness to trust to. This perfect obedience may be ours. Being ours, our lives will be strong, free, peaceful.
If we only go back far enough in our thought we will certainly come to a time when divine wrath could not exist. Go back to the time before the angels sinned. Go back to the time before there was sin of any kind in all God's universe. But mark, no matter how far that takes you back there was an eternity of sinlessness before it. Yes; an eternity of sinlessness. There was no wrath then.
It is because there has been that one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, was absolutely free; it is because man may look up and see in that life the revelation and possibility of his own; it is because that life, echoing the great cry throughout the world that man everywhere is the son of God, offers the same purity and so the same freedom to all mankind; it is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling to, to believe in, however impure his life is, the perfect purity, the sinlessness of the life of Jesus.
These did not understand, as they say, the simplest parables or teachings; they were jealous of one another; Peter even denied the Lord; in short, the authors of the Gospels cannot be credited with sinlessness and infallibility, supposing that they were really the apostles. If they were not, then all these difficulties of our own making disappear.
"Smite him dead then," said the little one, "without your spirits, with your own gracious hands: so his virtue and his sinlessness will not avail him much; and I should be a sorry servant if I were not to stand by you in so praiseworthy an exploit." "Well then!" said Pietro: "let us go to work; take thou the hammer; I'll carry the axe; he is fast asleep now."
What counsel was theirs for Joan and what had her human mentor taught her? He had taught her in one form or another the beauty of passion and its eternal sinlessness, for that was his sincere belief. By music he had taught her, by musical speech, by the preaching of heathen sage and the wit of modern arguers.
Some followers of the Reverend R.J.Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.
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