“Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your towers;
The tall, the wise, the reverend head,
Must lie as low as ours.”
You will find the thought, in good and bad versions, everywhere. Do you wish to take this thought fresh from the fountain? Come to the temple, where the disciples, accustomed to nothing great in art, fresh from Galilee, stand gazing in admiration at the glory of the great edifice and one of them cries out: “Master, behold these stones; and what manner of a building is this?” And listen to the Master as he says: “There shall not remain one stone upon another,” and you have the fountain head of all these streams running down into our poetry.
Mark the wonderful consistency, and the wonderful movement of this story—consider it as a drama. You may regard the gospels as beginning at that moment when suddenly there was with the angel a great company of the heavenly hosts, appearing to the shepherds as they watched their flocks by night. It practically ends when the disciples, after the ascension, returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple singing the song which began in angel mouths and ends in human mouths. The purpose of the story was to sing that angelic music into the human heart.
In conclusion: What inferences may be drawn from the statements I have made? Certainly not that the gospels have attained their success because they are a drama. They had to have the truth to succeed. They have the truth, and that has given them success. It behooved that Christ should suffer and rise from the dead the third day. And this behooving lies in something very deep in our nature. We believe that these gospels are inspired; that the authors were moved by the Holy Ghost; and it seems to me to be a necessary inference that the story should be well told; and well told means dramatically told. If it be true that the gospels sweep a larger circle and involve a greater work than was ever attempted by a human brain, if it be true that you can put a million of Shaksperes into their compass and still have an abyss of art unfilled, then you have an inference, an argument, in the line of the evidences of Christianity that has never been attempted. And that is that the best told, most dramatically told story, the story of the visit of God’s son to the earth, of his life, death, resurrection and ascension, must have been told by God himself. No human pen can be eloquent enough, no heart wide enough, no intellect could penetrate into the human heart deeply enough, to produce these gospels. In the literary perfection of the gospel there lies an evidence of the truth, of the divine authorship of the gospels, which in time to come, when all men read and think, will weigh perhaps more than any other kind of argument that has been drawn upon to this hour.
