Do men and women, in their senses, give their strength and life-long service for any other name? Die cheerfully for any other name? Die for one long gone away from them--gone out of the world and, so far as sense and reason know, gone forever? But neither lapse of centuries, distance by separating seas, distances unknown between this world and the world men do not know, or separation by differences of race, cools this love. What the martyrs did in Jerusalem they soon afterward did in Rome, in Alexandria, in every city and country of that age and that part of the world. They did the same thing--died with songs on their lips for this Man of Galilee--in after centuries. So did they in the Middle Ages in every country of Europe. So they have done in our own time in that great island, Madagascar, that has shown in the dark sons of the tropics, whose fathers were heathen idolaters, the overmastering love of men, women, and children, for the Jesus they had never seen; who lived on the other side of the world from them, and taught men how to be saved nearly two thousand years ago. They died in Madagascar as they died in Rome, “the love of Christ constraining them.” And the best people in the world to-day would so die for him in every country where his word has gone. And this love grows fuller and stronger; Jesus is more in the thoughts and love of men than he ever was before. If you would in some sense realize the wonder of which we are now speaking, try to imagine such a passion coming into the hearts of millions of men to-day as would impel them to die with rejoicings for Socrates, or any other born of woman, save the Man who was once a carpenter in Joseph’s shop in Nazareth of Galilee. You cannot imagine such a thing. As to Jesus, and love for him, it is not left to imagination; we have history. And we know a great multitude who would gladly die for Jesus now if to them should come the martyr’s test. When Jesus disappeared from the sight of men there was not a human probability that his name would be other than a reproach, till, like any common felon--like the forgotten thieves between whom he died--his name and fate should drop out of the memory of men. Humanly speaking, it was certain that he would never have a solitary follower. No sane man, reckoning on the ordinary probabilities of human motives and action, could have conceived the possibility of a vast body of disciples, ever growing, and pushing on his conquests round the world, holding together through passing centuries, enduring all manner of opposition and bitter persecution, and now, in this year 1889, the master-force of the world; a force that, beyond all cavil, is now the most active, aggressive, and revolutionizing influence ever set going among men. It could not have been conceived; every dominant power of the world was arrayed against him; there was not a star shining for Jesus if he was only a man.