Placing ourselves, in imagination, in the company of those few faithful friends, men and women—who were of the humble and obscure people—among those who received his command to “disciple all nations,” let us look about us and consider what are our prospects of success.
What predominant influence in the world is friendly to the cause of our Lord and Master? The only people who believe in the Lord God have crucified Jesus. The Romans are masters not only in the holy city but in all the world we know, and the Roman power has just sanctioned the death of Jesus. The Greeks still give philosophy and art to the world, but there is not among the Greeks sympathy with the teachings and work of Jesus. No people befriend his cause; no hand is stretched out to his disciples; the world is against his cause, and for his sake against us, his disciples.
Looking at it all as a man might, was there then a single human probability that the cause represented by the crucified Galilean would have the least place in history? That it would abide among men for a single generation? If Jesus was only a man could any thing conceivable by the human mind be more impossible than the realization of the dream (if he was only a man it was but a dream) of this man of Galilee, crucified like a felon?
No wonder certain men, while Jesus was yet among them, “laughed him to scorn.”
CHAPTER XIV.
HIS GRASP UPON MANKIND.
So far we have been studying the character and work of Jesus as he is presented in the evangelists, just as we might study any other character of that period. We have not yet considered Jesus as he now affects the world—a presence and force of our own times.
When the scientists proved the indestructibility of matter, when they discovered the doctrine of the conservation of energy, showing us how the coal measures, that warm millions of homes and drive the machinery of land and sea, are but stored-up sunbeams of untold ages gone, they showed us that through all her wonderful changes Nature loses none of her substance. In this splendid formulation of natural law the scientists have done a secondary but more important service; they have given us a symbol from things material, an illustration of a law of the higher sphere. Nothing is ever lost in the spiritual world.
A thought with life and truth in it, once set going, can no more be lost than a drop of water falling on the fields can be lost. Professor Harrison, of England, is right in his doctrine of posthumous immortality, as far as it goes. He sees part of a truth and states it well. Whatever force there may be in any human life abides in human life. We may not be able to trace it, as we may not trace the identical dew-drop that glittered on the grass this morning and that, exhaled by the rising sun, has now disappeared from our view, but not from existence.