The Man of GalileeHaygood, Atticus G. (Atticus Greene)
Religion
The Man of Galilee
Haygood, Atticus G. (Atticus Greene)
Jesus Christ -- Historicity; Jesus Christ -- Popular works
There is something here that defies analysis, something that will not
be held in logic forms. Take any doctrine Jesus taught and exemplified.
It may be about truth, honesty, chastity, charity. Read it, see what
it means, apply it to your case, and conscience says, “Amen” to it,
and upon the instant. Conscience receives it as the reason receives
an axiom. Given the facts, you need only to apply his tests, and that
instant you not only suppose, not only think, you know what is your
right and your wrong in the case. If there were no other reason, herein
there is reason enough to follow the Man of Galilee wherever he leads.
I urge upon you for your use in the tests that await you, as a method
of finding out rights and wrongs and determining duty, what I have
tried under many conditions of life and action; a most simple principle
of action--one that has never for one moment failed me or left me
in doubt. It is worth more than all reasonings, than all books of
casuistry, than all advices of friends; nay, it is better than mere
praying as if for some new light or other revelation than that which
has come to enlighten every man that cometh into the world. It is to
ask, “What does Jesus teach here? What would he say if he were to
speak? What would he do if this were his case?”
Blunders of judgment, many and grievous; failures in living up to
the light that the Master gives, more grievous than any blunders of
judgment--these things I confess to sorrowfully and with bitter shame;
but for the truth’s sake, my conscience’ sake, and my Lord’s sake,
this much I must say, and I cannot say less: never have I asked,
“What would he do?” but that the light has shined resplendent and
all-revealing, and the right and the wrong stood out clear, sharp, as
when electric lights shine about us, and I knew what I ought or ought
not to do.
At this point we may recur a moment to what was, in part, considered
heretofore: the fullness, the completeness of his teachings difference
him from all others.
There is not in any other teacher such statement of principles that
you cannot find outside their teachings one single ethical principle
that they have not taught. Other teachers give us many principles of
ethics; does any of them give all? Jesus does, though he wrote no book
and elaborated no system; though we have but few of his words recorded.
What I ask is this: Is there in any teacher of any nation one single
principle of rights and wrongs that the suffrage of the race could
approve, that Jesus does not teach? Is there one single principle of
Jesus as to rights and wrongs that the suffrage of good men can condemn
as false? Men may, indeed, reject his teachings, and oppose them with
bitterest hate, but which one of them--the least or the greatest--can
they show to be immoral, wrong?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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