The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

1. No words or teachings of any writer or teacher, of any age, that antagonize or repudiate the words of Jesus have power over the conscience.

2. Those words and teachings of men who never knew Jesus—as Socrates, Confucius, and other such men—that most affect the conscience are those words and teachings of theirs most in harmony with the doctrines and character of Jesus. All light is good, but that which is nearest sunlight is best.

3. The words and teachings of those who do know Jesus, that most powerfully affect the conscience, are those that most perfectly echo his words.

Furthermore, this is true: The words and teachings of Jesus not only stir the conscience as no others do; they illuminate the conscience. Others may affect the sensibility of conscience to a degree, but leave it in the shadows as to the very rights and wrongs of things. The words of Jesus—once their meaning is understood—as they apply to any concrete case of rights and wrongs, not only awaken the sensibility of conscience so that the feeling of obligation to do right and avoid wrong is most pronounced and unmistakable, but this also is true: the light which his words pour on the question in consideration makes transparent what the right thing is and what the wrong thing is.

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?

As all colors are potentially contained in the pure white light, and as the composition of all colors produces the pure white light, so the teachings of Jesus contain in principle all the forms of ethical truth that were ever in the minds of men. But here the analogy fails. All the ethical truth that all others have taught when brought together fails to make the sum total of his teachings; some colors are lacking in them; together they do not make the pure white light of the gospels.