The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

No man who knows history, or the world to-day, will doubt for one moment that millions on millions of human beings—men, women, and little children—have felt and shown for the person of Jesus the most absorbing love; a love that drove out all fear and mastered every other love. Some great teachers and leaders while they were yet in the flesh have had followers and friends who loved them well enough to hazard life for them and to die for them. We can understand the soldier who, on one occasion, when a shell fell close by the first Napoleon, while it was just exploding flung himself between the fatal bomb and his loved chief, and throwing his arms about him died in his stead. But when Napoleon was an exile in St. Helena he complained one day that, among all those he had befriended in the days of his power, there were none to draw sword for him when he was an exile. Who would die for Napoleon now?

There have been thinkers, poets, orators, philosophers, who have enthusiastic admirers who contend for them in the pretty war of words. Shakespeare has as many such admirers as the foremost in all the world. But who loves him—the man—in any such deep, absorbing fashion as untold millions have loved and do now love the Man—Jesus of Nazareth? It surprises you to hear such a question. If Jesus was only a man the question should not surprise. How does it come about that such love as the great army of martyrs and confessors have shown was never felt for any except this Galilean peasant?

There is not now, there never was such love for Buddha or Mohammed. Such love was never professed for the founders of Buddhism or Mohammedanism. Such love was never felt for any person long gone from the midst of men.

This love is not like the fanaticism that fights for one’s own idea; it is the love of a person for a person. This love for Jesus has shown itself to be the master love that ever held sway in the human heart. For this love all other loves have been given up—have been crucified.

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.

But Jesus crucified lives on. Around his cross has been the battle-ground of the ages. All that human skill and bitter hate could do has been done to put out the light he kindled on Calvary. But he lives on—lives in men to-day; single-handed he goes on his conquering way. His servants, because they love him, are pushing his cause in every nation under heaven. As in the old days, in the lands that bordered the Mediterranean, so now among the great pagan nations—in India, China, Japan, Africa, and in the islands of the sea, they are telling the story he commanded them to repeat till he should come again. And, telling it, they are now, as in the days of his first apostles, “turning the world upside down.”