civilisation for two thousand years, and had even the calendar dictated by his birthday. There was no need for him to have become Redeemer; he could have compromised with mammon, as so many others do, and no doubt led an agreeable life. The only penalty he would have paid in this world would have been that his Spirit would not have achieved its full potential. He must have had this Spirit as a boy, but he could not have been the Redeemer as a boy; his Spirit had to grow to a full realisation of its powers before that was possible.
Is it the same for the rest of us, or was he unique and quite different? Is the pursuit of happiness a self-evident truth; or is it the Soul's great betrayal of the Spirit? Does any bishop, who, to gain the preferment he desires in the Church which he loves, flatters those with power and influence, end up in the same position that Christ would have been in, if He had opted for semi-detached domesticity in suburbia? I wonder. If you compromise with mammon, your spirit does not achieve its full potential; it achieves a potential certainly, but it is a flawed potential. Any lover, who cheats, may attain the object of his desires; but how does he eradicate that distrust which his cheating engendered? If he cannot eradicate it, is not the relationship flawed thereafter? But leaving aside compromising with mammon, is Christ's life an example to follow, or to admire?
And what about the next world? Here I think the consequences are more ominous. When a man dies, either he dies like a fly squashed on a window pane, or he lives on; not necessarily then, but maybe as a partaker in a general resurrection later. My guess is that if a man's actions in this world proclaim all day and every day the message, “I do not want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven”, then when the time comes - he doesn't. Can a man more effectively proclaim this message than by deliberately preventing his spirit, his most precious gift, reaching its potential? Is it not a denial of life in its fullness?