How the writer came to discover Christ again, by himself, treading many
roads, which all brought him to the foot of the Mount of the Gospel,
would be too long and too hard a story to tell. But there is a
significance not perhaps wholly personal and private in the example of a
man who always from his childhood felt a repulsion for all recognized
forms of religious faith, and for all churches, and for all forms of
spiritual vassalage and who passed, with disappointments as deep as the
enthusiasms had been vivid, through many experiences, the most varied
and the most unhackneyed which he could find, who had consumed in
himself the ambitions of an epoch unstable and restless as few have
been, and who after so many wanderings, ravings and dreamings, drew near
to Christ.
He did not turn back to Christ out of weariness, because his return to
Christ made life become more difficult and responsibilities heavier to
bear; not through the fears of old age, for he can still call himself a
young man; and not through desire for worldly fame, because as things go
nowadays he would receive more commendation if he continued in his old
ideas. But this man, turning back to Christ, saw that Christ is
betrayed, and, worse than any affront to Him, that He is being
forgotten. And he felt the impulse to bring Him to mind and to defend
Him.
For not only His enemies have left Him, and despoiled Him; the very ones
who were His disciples when He was alive only half understood Him, and
deserted Him at the end; and many of those who were born in His church
disobey His commands, care more for His painted pictures than for His
living example, and when they have worn out their lips and knees in
materialistic piety, think they are quits with Him, and that they have
done what He asked of man,—what He still is asking, what He has been
asking desperately and always in vain for nineteen hundred years.
A story of Christ written to-day is an answer, a necessary reply, an
inevitable conclusion. The balance of modern public opinion is against
Christ. A book about Christ’s life is therefore a weight thrown into the
scales, in order that from the eternal war between love and hate there
may result at least the equilibrium of justice. And if the author is
called a reactionary, that is nothing to him. The man who is thought to
be behind the times often is a man born too soon. The setting sun is the
same which at that very moment colors the early morning of a distant
country. Christianity is not a piece of antiquity now assimilated, in as
far as it had anything good, by the wonderful and not-to-be-improved
modern consciousness; but it is for very many something so new that it
has not even yet begun. The world to-day seeks for peace rather than for
liberty, and the only certain peace is found under the yoke of Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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