The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Sermons
But if we deny His unique origin, we can not logically account for
His unique life. A life began as was never another life, we might
expect to see continue as no other life continued. A naturally
skeptical man finds it easier to admit the account of Christ's
remarkable birth than to attempt to explain His remarkable life
if He deny the remarkable birth. The unicity of His birth we would
naturally expect to eventuate in the unicity of His life. His life
can not be explained on any principle of heredity. We readily admit
the royal element in His blood, altho the fortunes of His family had
fallen before His birth; but no law of heredity will account for
the physical attractiveness, the mental superiority, and the moral
purity of Jesus, the Christ. Neither will environment account for
His marvelous career and character. What was there in the peasant
conditions of His family life to produce the uniqueness of His
manhood? Neither will education account for the Christ. He was never
in school, in the technical sense of that term, altho He doubtless
studied in the village synagog; and yet He rose above all the
limitations, traditions, and bigotries by which He was surrounded.
It is doubtful if He ever sat at the feet of the greatest rabbis of
the time. It is certain that He never studied at the feet of the
philosophers of Greece and Rome, nor of the dreamy Orient. He never
traveled, except possibly barely across the confines of Palestine,
a country about the size of the State of New Hampshire. How came
He to emancipate Himself from the sectarianism and sectionalism of
His country and century? How came He to be the contemporary of all
the ages? How came He to utter in the Sermon on the Mount truths
which socially and religiously the foremost thinkers of to-day can
barely understand, and dare not fully apply to the solution of the
problems of the hour? No mere human thinker has ever approached the
Sermon on the Mount. But in pure spirituality of thought, our Lord
surpassed it in His last address to His disciples. This address
bears the ineffaceable marks of His supreme divinity and absolute
deity. O, ye critics, I ask you as a problem of literature and life
to account for Jesus the Christ. I ask no favors for Him. It is you
that need the favors, if you oppose the Christ. I demand for Him
simple justice. "What think ye of the Christ?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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