To think of all human life as a manifestation of the eternal Son,
renders it sacred. Our very struggles and sufferings become full of
meaning. Sin is but the failure to realise it; it is being false to
ourselves and our divine origin; it is the centrifugal tendency in
human nature just as love is the centripetal. There is no life,
however depraved, which does not occasionally emit some sign of its
kinship to Jesus and its eternal sonship to God. Wherever you see
self-sacrifice at work you see the very spirit of Jesus, the spirit of
the Christ incarnate. I find it everywhere, and it interprets life for
me as nothing else can. Take up any work of fiction, no matter what,
and you will find the author instinctively preaching this truth. Look
into any commonplace, everyday life, no matter whose, and you will find
it exemplified. Many a selfish bad man has one tender spot in his
nature, his affection for his child, and for the sake of that child he
will deny himself as he has never dreamed of doing for anything else;
so far as that one influence is concerned he actually reverses the
principle which governs the rest of his life. I have read of an
African negress who on one occasion was beaten nearly to death by the
brute to whom she was slave and paramour. Her murderer, for such he
was, was arrested and placed on trial for his misdemeanour, in
accordance with the rough justice of the white man in his dealings with
the native. In the night the poor dying woman crawled painfully to the
tree against which the ruffian lay bound, cut his cords, and set him
free. It was her last act in this life; in the morning she was found
lying dead on the spot whence the prisoner had fled. This particular
story may or may not be true, but the same kind of thing has been true
a million times in human history. What was the spirit in this
benighted woman of the African wilds but the Christ spirit, the
self-giving spirit seen with such unique sublimity in the life of Jesus?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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