[526:1] The Martyrdom of Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 109-111.
[527:1] O. B. Frothingham: The Cradle of the Christ, p. 11.
The reader is referred to "Judaism: Its Doctrines and Precepts," by Dr. Isaac M. Wise. Printed at the office of the "American Israelite," Cincinnati, Ohio.
[527:2] If Jesus, instead of giving himself up quietly, had resisted against being arrested, there certainly would have been bloodshed, as there was on many other similar occasions.
[528:1] If what is recorded In the Gospels on the subject was true, no historian of that day could fail to have noticed it, but instead of this there is nothing.
[528:2] See Matthew, xxvii. 51-53.
[529:1] See Matt. xiv. 15-22: Mark, iv. 1-3, and xi. 14; and Luke, vii. 26-37.
[529:2] See Mark, xvi. 16.
[529:3] This fact has at last been admitted by the most orthodox among the Christians. The Rev. George Matheson, D. D., Minister of the Parish of Innellan, and a member of the Scotch Kirk, speaking of the precept uttered by Confucius, five hundred years before the time assigned for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth ("Whatsoever ye would not that others should do unto you, do not ye unto them"), says: "That Confucius is the author of this precept is undisputed, and therefore it is indisputable that Christianity has incorporated an article of Chinese morality. It has appeared to some as if this were to the disparagement of Christianity—as if the originality of its Divine Founder were impaired by consenting to borrow a precept from a heathen source. But in what sense does Christianity set up the claim of moral originality? When we speak of the religion of Christ as having introduced into the world a purer life and a surer guide to conduct, what do we mean? Do we mean to suggest that Christianity has, for the first time, revealed to the world the existence of a set of self-sacrificing precepts—that here, for the first time, man has learned that he ought to be meek, merciful, humble, forgiving, sorrowful for sin, peaceable, and pure in heart? The proof of such a statement would destroy Christianity itself, for an absolute original code of precepts would be equivalent to a foreign language. The glory of Christian morality is that it is NOT ORIGINAL—that its words appeal to something which already exists within the human heart, and on that account have a meaning to the human ear: no new revelation can be made except through the medium of an old one. When we attribute originality to the ethics of the Gospel, we do so on the ground, not that it has given new precepts, but that it has given us a new impulse to obey the moral instincts of the soul. Christianity itself claims on the field of morals this originality, and this alone—'A new commandment give I unto you, that you love one another." (St. Giles Lectures, Second Series: The Faiths of the World. Religion of China, by the Rev. George Matheson, D. D., Minister of the Parish of Innellan. Wm. Blackwood & Sons: Edinburgh, 1882.)