====== The Inner Life ======
== THE HERALD OF THE NEW AGE | AUGUST 1935 ==
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for the salvation of man’s soul. The prophets contended that God was always approachable and near at hand. That like as a Father pitieth his children, even so the Lord pitieth them that reverence him. Usually the priests were successful in having the prophet murdered or silenced in some other way. The priests ruled with an iron hand. They kept the people in ignorance, and lived on the spoils of their religious system.

IT WAS into this environment that Jesus came, fresh from his contact with the great religious teachers of the world. For over twenty years he had been absent from Palestine. He knew little of the oppression of the Jewish priests. He had lived in contact with the Infinite—the Father who loved the universe. Needless to say, his reaction was immediate and drastic. He went into the temple, drove out the cattle, overturned the tables of the money-changers, and after he had driven them out of the temple, he challenged the priests to arrest him by openly defying them. His criticism was short but to the point. “My Father’s house should be the house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.”

Then he left them to stand the ridicule of the crowd and the scorn of the poor. The priests went into a secret council to see how they might destroy Jesus before he repeated his exposure of their commercialized religious system.

To insist that Jesus was a religionist, in the face of such a paradoxical attitude toward the established form of temple worship or loyalty to the Book of the Law, is unreasonable. Jesus never accepted their interpretation, either of the sacredness of the temple, or of loyalty to the sacred Scriptures. He knew there was a day coming when the temple worship would be obsolete. Men would worship God in spirit and in truth; in the secret place of their own soul. As far as the Scriptures were concerned, he knew that much of its contents was the product of the priestly group who had inserted their own viewpoints and standards into the record. They had kept the people in fear and obedience through their insistence that the Book was verbally inspired by God, and must be accepted without question.

Jesus knew their doctrine was not true, and whenever he taught he insisted that the Scriptures needed reinterpreting, and that it was necessary to discard many things. In fact he had come to fulfill the law and the prophets. In other words, he
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