Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef.
And thus the most awful, the most terrible, and the most incomprehensible word that human lips could frame has become the most winsome and charming in the whole vocabulary. God is Jesus, and Jesus is God! ‘The Word was made flesh.’
The same principle dominates all religious experience and enterprise. Generally speaking, you cannot make a man a Christian by giving him a [271] Bible or posting him a tract. The New Testament lays it down quite clearly that the Christian man must accompany the Christian message. The Word must be presented in its proper human setting. Our missionaries all over the planet tell of the resistless influence exerted by gracious Christian homes, and by holy Christian lives, in winning idolators
from superstition. I was reading only this morning a touching instance of a young Japanese who trudged hundreds of miles to inquire after the secret of ‘the beautiful life’—as he called it—which he had seen exemplified in some Christian missionaries. The Word, made flesh, is thus pronounced with an accent and an eloquence which are simply irresistible.
‘I said, and I repeat,’ says Mr. Edwin Hodder, in his biography of Sir George Burns, the founder of the Cunard Steamship Company, ‘I said, and I repeat, that if the Bible were blotted out of existence, if there were no prayer-book, no catechism, and no creed, if there were no visible Church at all, I could not fail to believe in the doctrines of Christianity while the living epistle of Sir George Burns’ life remained in my memory.’ That was Whittier’s argument:
The dear Lord’s best interpreters
Are humble human souls;
The gospel of a life like his