But whenever any man attempts to live in the spirit of Jesus, the first
to rally to him are the sincere recusants from the church. He may be
satirised, and probably will be, as a moral anarchist, a fanatic, and a
hare-brained enthusiast; but nevertheless the best men will rally to
him. They rallied to a Father Dolling, they rally to a General Booth.
The types represented by such men lie far apart. One was so high a
ritualist as to be almost Catholic, the other is an ecclesiastic
anarchist so extreme that he dispenses with the sacraments. But these
things count for little; what the world sees in such men is the
essential reality of their life. One of the severest critics of
Dolling once went to hear him with the bitterest prejudice. He found
him with a couple of hundred thieves and prostitutes gathered round
him, to whom he was telling the love of Jesus in the simplest language.
"Dolling may be a Roman Catholic, or anything else he pleases," said
his critic; "all I know is that I never heard any one speak of Christ
like that," and from that hour he was his warmest friend. No doubt
similar conversions of sentiment have attended the ministries of all
apostolic men and women, of Francis and Catherine, of Wesley and
Whitfield, of Moody and General Booth. Men know by instinct the lover
of his kind. Men forgive a hundred defects for the sake of reality.
Perhaps the sublimest of all justifications of Christ's law of love is
that no man has truly practiced it in any age without himself rising
into a life of memorable significance, without immediate attestations
of its virtue in the transformation of society, without attracting to
himself the reverence and affection of multitudes of fellow workers who
have rendered him the same adoring discipleship that the friends of
Jesus gave to Him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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