Jewish society was built after the same pattern, except that
with the Pharisee the sense of religious superiority bred a kind of
arrogance much more bitter than that which is the fruit of intellectual
or social exclusiveness. With men of this temper the call to love all
men as fellows could only provoke anger and derision. What possible
relation could exist between an Athenian philosopher and a helot, a
Roman noble and a slave, a Pharisee proud of his meticulous knowledge
of the law, and the common people who were unlettered? The gulf that
yawned between such lives was as wide as that which separates the
scholar, the artist, or the aristocrat of modern Europe from the pale
toiler of a New York sweating-room, or the coal carriers of Zanzibar or
Aden. When Jesus bade the young ruler sell all that he had and give it
to the poor, He proposed an entirely unthinkable condition of
discipleship. He bade him discard all the privileges of his order. He
proposed instead real comradeship with the poor, He Himself being poor.
For two thousand years the pulpit has denounced the young ruler for not
doing what no one even now would think of doing--not even those who are
most eloquent in denunciation.
We may waive the question of whether the advice of Jesus to the young
ruler was meant to be of particular or universal application, but we
cannot ignore the new law of life which Jesus formulated when He made
compassion the supreme social virtue.
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