FROM "PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR CLERGY"
We Protestants must sooner or later face this question: Are we to understand the "imitation of Christ" in the sense that we should copy his life ... or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as Christ lived his in all its implications? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ's, but it is unspeakably harder to live one's own life as truly as Christ lived his.
... modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to learn how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature--how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother.
The modern man, moreover, is not eager to know in what way he can imitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meagre and uninteresting it may be. It is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways. All such roads, for him, lead in the wrong direction. (pp. 236-7)
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