Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. DebsDebs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
History
Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs
Debs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
Labor -- United States; Socialism -- United States; Socialist Party (U.S.); Working class -- United States
He who aspires to master the art of expression must first of all
consecrate himself completely to some great cause, and the greatest
cause of all is the cause of humanity. He must learn to feel deeply and
think clearly to express himself eloquently. He must be absolutely true
to the best there is in him, if he has to stand alone.
Such natural powers as he may have should be cultivated by the study of
history, science and literature. He must not only keep close to the
people but remember that he is one of them, and not above the meanest.
He must feel the wrongs of others so keenly that he forgets his own, and
resolve to combat these wrongs with all the power at his command.
The most thrilling and inspiring oratory, the most powerful and
impressive eloquence is the voice of the disinherited, the oppressed,
the suffering and submerged; it is the voice of poverty and misery, of
rags and crusts, of wretchedness and despair; the voice of humanity
crying to the infinite; the voice that resounds throughout the earth and
reaches heaven; the voice that awakens the conscience of the race and
proclaims the truths that fill the world with light and liberty and
love.
JESUS, THE SUPREME LEADER.
Coming Nation (Formerly Progressive Woman), March, 1914.
It matters little whether Jesus was born at Nazareth or Bethlehem. The
accounts conflict, but the point is of no consequence.
It is of consequence, however, that He was born in a stable and cradled
in a manger. This fact of itself, about which there is no question,
certifies conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus Christ. Had
His parents been other than poor working people--money-changers,
usurers, merchants, lawyers, scribes, priests or other parasites--He
would not have been delivered from His mother's womb on a bed of straw
in a stable among asses and other animals.
Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as every other babe ever born
into the world. He was of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of
mankind. The scriptural account of his "immaculate conception" is a
beautiful myth, but scarcely more of a miracle than the conception of
all other babes.
Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but
for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of
which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an
intellectual, moral and spiritual human being.
The chronicles of his time and of later days are filled with
contradictory and absurd stories about him and he has been disfigured
and distorted by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by
ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their blind bigotry and
savage superstition, but there is no impenetrable myth surrounding the
personality of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being or an
allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others have shown us, a flesh
and blood Man in the fulness of his matchless powers and the
completeness of his transcendent consecration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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