It stirs wonder in us, therefore, that Christ's every journey across the fields took on the aspect of a triumphal procession, while His popularity waxed with familiarity and the increasing years. Indeed, full oft the rapture men felt toward Him amounted to an intoxication and an ecstasy of devotion. True it is that men now look upon Him through a blaze of light, and, remembering His achievements for art, liberty and learning, have stained His name through and through with lustrous colors. As at eventide we look out upon the sun through white and golden clouds that the sun itself has lifted, so do we behold the carpenter's son standing forth under the dazzling light of nearly two thousand years of history, while the heart colors His name with all that is noblest in human aspiration and achievement.
Nevertheless, be it instantly confessed that from the very beginning this divine Teacher exhibited qualities that kindled in men an enthusiasm that amounted to transcendent delight. The time was when scholars attempted to explain His influence over the multitude by portraying Him with a halo of light about His head. Fortunately these ideas that robbed men of all fellowship with their divine brother have perished, and now we know that there was nothing unusual about His appearance, nor did any effulgent light blaze forth from His person. Whether or not unique beauty of face and form was His we do not know. Coins and statues portray for us the Roman emperors and the Greek scholars. Yet art has broken down utterly in the attempt to combine in one face Christ's majesty and meekness, strength and gentleness, suffering and victory. All that we can know of His personal appearance must be gained through imagination, as it clothed Him with those traits that alone cannot account for His influence over the multitudes. What sweet allurement in the face that made children leap into His arms! What winsome benignity that made mothers feel that His touch would return the babe with double worth into the parent's bosom!
Purity in others has been cold and chaste as ice. How strange that in Him purity had an irresistible fascination, so that the corruptest and wickedest felt drawn unto Him, and "depravity itself bowed down and wept in the presence of divinity." What all-forgiving love, what all-cleansing love, in one who by a mere look could dissolve in repentant tears men long hardened by vice and crime! What an atmosphere of power He must have carried, that by one beam from His eye He could smite to the very ground the soldiers who confronted Him!
Did ever man have such a genius for noble friendship? What bosom words He used! What love pressure in all His speech! How were His words laden with double meanings, so that hearing one thing, men also heard another, even as they who hear the sound of the distant sea, knowing that the sound they hear is but a breath of the great infinite ocean that heaves beyond in the dim, vast dark. Among all the heroes of time He walks solitary by the greatness of His power, His beauty and the wonder of love His personality excited. Standing in the presence of some glorious cathedral or gallery, beholding the Parthenon or pyramids, the rugged mountain or the beautiful landscape, emotion and imagination are sometimes so deeply stirred that men lose command of themselves and break into transports of admiration. But the enthusiasm evoked by mountain or statue or canvas is as nothing compared to the rapturous devotion felt by the multitude for this One, who united in full splendor all those eminent qualities of mind and heart that all the ages and generations have in vain sought to emulate. High over all the other worthies He rises like a star riding in untroubled splendor above the low-browed hills.
In all ages great men have educated themselves by reading the biography of ancient worthies, and emulating the example of the heroes of antiquity. Great has been the influence of these reformers and philosophers, statesmen and poets, hanging in the heavens above men and raining down inspiration upon the human imagination. Yet from all the worthies of the past, and all modern heroes, man has drawn less of inspiration and personal influence than from the single example of this ideal Christ. Passing by His influence upon institutions, education, art and literature, we shall do well to consider how His example has instructed man in the art of a right carriage of the faculties in the home and market-place. In the last analysis, Jesus Christ is the only perfect gentleman our earth has ever known—in comparison with whom all the Chesterfields seem boors. For nothing taxes a man so heavily as the task of maintaining smooth, pleasant and charitable relations with one's fellows. And Christ alone was able always to meet storm with calm, hate with love, scowls with smiles, plottings with confidence, envy and bitterness with unruffled tranquility.
In all His relations with His friends and enemies the quality that crowns His method of living and challenges our thought is the gentleness of His bearing. Matchless the mingled strength and beauty of His life, yet gentleness was the flower and fruitage of it all. For in Him the lion and the lamb dwelt together. Oak and rock were there, and also vine and flower. Weakness is always rough. Only giants can be gentle. Tenderness is an inflection of strength. No error can be greater than to suppose that gentleness is mere absence of vigor. Weakness totters and tugs at its burden. When the dwarf that attended Ivanhoe at the tournament lifted the bleeding sufferer he staggered under his heavy burden. Weakness made him stumble and caused the wounded knight intense pain. When the giant of the brawny arm and the unconquered heart came, he lifted the unconscious sufferer like a feather's weight and without a jar bore him away to a secure hiding-place for healing and recovering. He who studies the great men of yesterday will find in the last analysis that gentleness has always been the test of gianthood, and fine considerateness the measure of manhood and the gauge of personal worth. No other hero moving through the crowds has ever been so courteously gentle, so sweetly considerate in his personal bearing as this Christ—who never failed to kindle in men transports of delight and enthusiasm.
The crying fault of our generation is its lack of gentleness. Our age is harsh when it judges, brutal when it blames and savage in its severity. Carlyle, emptying vials of scorn upon the people of England, numbering his generation by "thirty millions, mostly fools," is typical of the publicists, authors and critics who pelt their brother man with contemptuous scorn. The author of "Robert Elsmere" exhibits that polished scholar and brilliant student as one who gave up teaching because he could find no audience on a level with his ability or worthy of his instruction. Having begun by despising others, he ends by despising himself. Now the popularity of Elsmere's character witnesses to the fact that our generation includes a large number of cynics who scorn their fellows and in Elsmere see themselves as "in an open glass." To-day this tendency toward harshness of judgment has become more pronounced, and there seems to be no leader so noble as to escape brutal criticism and no movement whose white flag may not be smirched by mud-slingers. What epithets are hurled at each new idea! What torrents of ridicule are emptied out upon each social movement!
The fact that society has oftentimes destroyed its noblest geniuses avails little for the restraint of harshness. For years England was wildly merry at Turner's expense. The newspapers cartooned his paintings. Reviews spoke of them as "color blotches." The rich over their champagne made merry at the great artist's expense. After a while men found a little respite from the mad chase for wealth and pleasure and discovered that Turner's extreme examples represented peculiar moods in nature, seen only by those who had traveled as widely as had Turner, while his great landscapes were as rich in imaginative quality as those of any artist of all ages. Only when it was too late, only when harshness had broken the man's heart, and scorn had fatally wounded his genius, did scholars begin to adorn their pages by references to Turner's fame, did the rich begin to pay fabulous sums for the very pictures they had once despised, the nation set apart the best room in its gallery for Turner's works, while the people wove for his white tombstone wreaths they had denied his brow and paid his dead ashes honors refused his living spirit.
In similar vein we remember the English-speaking world has recently been celebrating the anniversary of the birth of Keats, who is the only pure Greek in all English literature, for whose imagination "a thing of beauty was a joy forever," and whose genius in divining the secrets of the beautiful amounted to inspiration. We know now that no poet in all time, who died so young, has left so much that is precious. Scholars are not wanting who believe that had he lived to see his maturity Keats would have ranked with the five great poets of the first order of genius. Yet the publication of his volume of verse received from "Blackwood" and the "Quarterly" only contempt and bitter scorn. Waxing bold, the penny-a-liners grew savage, until the very skies rained lies and bitter slanders upon poor Keats. Sensitive, soon he was wounded to death. After a week of sleeplessness, he arose one morning to find a bright red spot upon his handkerchief. "That is arterial blood," said he; "that drop is my death-warrant; I shall die." And so, when he was one-and-twenty, friends lifted above the boy's dust a marble slab, upon which was written: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Now his name shines like a star, while low down and bespattered with mud are the names of those whose cruel criticisms helped to kill the boy and whose only claim to immortality is their brutality.
Witness also the contempt our age once visited upon Browning, whose mind is slowly becoming recognized as one of the rich-gold minds of our century. Witness the sport over Ruskin's "Munera Pulveris," and the scornful reception given Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." Now that a few years have passed, those who once reviled are teaching their children the pathway to the graves of the great. The harshness of the world's treatment of its greatest teachers makes one of the most pathetic chapters in history. God gives each nation only a few men of supreme talent. Gives it, for greatness is not made; it is found as is the gold. Gold cannot be made out of mud; it is uncovered. And God gives each generation a few men of the first order; and when they have created truth and beauty they have the right while they live to kindness and sympathy, not harshness and cynicism. No youth winning the first goal of his ambition was ever injured by knowing that his father's face did not flush with pride, while his mother's eyes were filled with happy tears, in joy of his first victory. No noble lover but girds himself for a second struggle the more resolutely for knowing that his noble mistress rejoiced in his first conquest. Frost itself is not more destructive to harvest fields than harshness is to the creative faculties. Strange that Florence gave Dante exile in exchange for his immortal poem! Strange that London gave Milton threats of imprisonment for the manuscript of "Paradise Lost!" Passing strange that until his career was nearly run universities visited upon John Ruskin only scorn and contumely, that ruined his health and broke his heart, withholding the wreath until, as he said pathetically, his only "pleasure was in memory, his ambition in heaven," and he knew not what to do with his laurel leaves save "lay them wistfully upon his mother's grave." In every age the critics that have refused honor to its worthies, living, have heaped gifts high upon the graves of its dead.