*Pastor’s Note: Written back in 1894, it is amazing to me as I study some of the teachers who have passed on into eternity, just how much they taught on a human nature that has changed very little in over a great period of time. Robert Eyton taught a bit over a century ago and so many others taught even further back then that, and yet some of these teachings are still so very relevant, if not more so, today! This is one of those teachings that I will offer in excerpted parts.

Christ Our Moral Teacher – 1

And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. Then He opened His mouth and taught them . . . – Matthew 5:1.

Christ came to teach men how to live—to live in the highest and fullest sense; this is the truth that our age insists upon and demands. He did not come to teach men to get through life by any means necessary and to make what is often called a good death at the very last of life, which should be a contradiction of everything that had gone before it. He came to call men to live every day of their lives as children of the Father; to link their lives on to the unseen spiritual world with all its wealth of motive and stores of grace; to live as “members one of another” in relation to others, counting service as the noblest employment of life; to live, as regards self-improvement, the highest life of which each one was capable; to live as men who have been put in trust with talents, with gifts of heart and reason and will. So having regard to each one’s three-fold relationship, that is, to God, to others, and to self, He came to teach men to live.

Christianity is a concept of life in the widest and fullest sense of the term. Christ was full of truth, and so He taught men to live truly. He came also to give men that inward power which would enable them to rise to this concept of abundant life and to attain to its fulfilment; He came to give grace to enable mankind to live this fulness of life. But this gift was in no way meant to dispense with the necessity of putting forth some effort.