"_And entering into the sepulchre they saw a young man sitting on the
right side clothed in a long white garment, and he saith unto them, be not
affrighted, ye seek Jesus of Nazareth--He is risen! He is not here_!"
When we read the Bible with its story of human lives and their great,
wonderful mysteries, we find among them, the greatest of all--the
marvellous one of the Christ birth and death, and as we read we are amazed
at the many confusing ideas of Jesus and His teachings. His disciples
themselves did not understand Him, though He sought always to clearly
interpret Himself; often when He spoke metaphysically they interpreted Him
physically.
There was throughout all the Christ history something so great, so holy,
so inclusive that it was too large for them to comprehend, and for all
eternal ages, the developing minds of men will be the same. They will keep
busy with their attempts at explanation of His life and His words.
Jesus quitted the world in benediction, and He left to those who followed
Him and His precepts, a great inextinguishable hope.
It matters little to those who really understand Truth, whether Jesus the
Christ lived, or whether He was only a symbol worked out by the
imagination of men and priests; be the origin what it may, Christianity
_still_ stands; and Religion still holds sway after centuries of
ridicule and generations of secular and scientific analysis. Something
unknown and uninterpreted beats and surges in the hearts of men, and
brings into expression in every age the clinging to a great mysterious,
wonderful, unseen agency that somehow works its way along the silent
avenues of the human soul.
The man Jesus may or may not have lived. Humanity may keep its birthright
of contradiction forever on this point, but higher than the limited
understanding of the few there lives the Truth of the great Christ spirit
which the name Jesus embodied, and which for centuries gone, and centuries
to be, will wax strong and flourish in the consciousness of men, as they
pass one by one into recognition of it.
Great and sacred was the day of Jesus' birth, and great and sacred was the
day of his death, for both revealed the stages of our human selfhood, and
both point our minds to deeper meanings of existence.
Jesus' life as we follow it from the manger to the cross was the
unmistakable story of the pathway of every human life and each little
action was a part of the great mosaic which each life is setting for
itself, and from which it shall one day read its own great AT-ONE-MENT.
The birth of the Christ consciousness comes to each soul as the dawn of
self-awakening. It is the first faint glimmer of a new world, and the
first hint the soul of man has of union with its source.
This first dawn of consciousness is purely a possession of the inner self,
and those who feel it only follow first by faith. This faith is buffeted
and attacked by the things of life until it is tried and becomes
steadfast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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