His friends and followers went about from place to place, and preached his doctrines; but gradually added many more of their own. They said that he was the Anointed, the Messiah, the Christ, who was foretold in the Old Testament, and that did strange things called Miracles; that at a marriage feast, where wine was wanted, he changed several barrels of water into wine of excellent quality; that he fed five thousand men with five loaves, walked on the water, opened the eyes, ears, and mouths of men born blind, deaf, and dumb, and at a touch or a word brought back a maimed limb. They called him a SAVIOUR, sent from God to redeem the Jews, and them only, from eternal damnation; next, said that he was the Saviour of all mankind,—Jews and Gentiles too; that he was a Sacrifice offered to appease the wrath of God, who had become so angry with his children that he intended to torment them all forever in hell. By and by his followers were called CHRISTIANS,—that is, men who took Jesus for the Christ of the Old Testament; and in their preaching they did not make much account of the noble ideas Jesus taught about man, God, and religion, or of his own great manly life; but they thought his DEATH was the great thing,—and that was the means to save men from eternal torment. Then they went further, and declared that Jesus was not the son of Joseph and Mary, but THE SON OF GOD and Mary,—miraculously born; next, that he was GOD'S ONLY SON, who had never had any child before, and never would have another; again, that he was a GOD who had lived long before Jesus was born, but for the then first time took the human form; and at last, that he was THE ONLY GOD, the Creator and Providence of all the universe; but was man also, the GOD-MAN. Thus, gradually, the actual facts of his history were lost out of sight, overgrown with a great mass of fictions, poetic and other stories, which make him a mythological character; the Jesus of fact was well-nigh forgot,—the Christ of fiction took his place.
Well, after the death of Jesus, his followers went from town to town, from country to country, preaching "Christ and him crucified;" they taught that the world would soon end, for Jesus would come back and "judge the world," raising the dead,—and then all who had believed in him would be "saved," but the rest would be "lost forever;" a new world would take the place of the old, and the Christians would have a good time in that Kingdom of Heaven. This new "spiritual world" would contain some extraordinary things; thus, "every grape-vine would have ten thousand trunks, every trunk ten thousand branches, every branch ten thousand twigs, every twig ten thousand clusters, every cluster ten thousand grapes, and every grape would yield twenty-five kilderkins of wine."
But everywhere they recommended a life of sobriety and self-denial, of industry and of kind deeds,—a life of religion. Everywhere the Christians were distinguished for their charity and general moral excellence. But the Jews hated them, and drove them away; the Heathens hated them, and put many to death with dreadful tortures; all the magistrates were hostile. But when the common people saw a man or a woman come out and die rather than be false to a religious emotion or idea, there were always some who said, "That is a strange thing,—a man dying for his God. There must be something in that religion! Let us also become Christians." So the new doctrine spread wide; not the simple religion of Jesus,—piety and morality; but what his followers called Christianity,—a mixture of good and evil. In two or three hundred years it had gone round the civilized world. Other forms of religion fell to pieces, one by one. Judaism went down with the Hebrew people, Heathenism went down, and Christianity took heir place. The son of Joseph and Mary, born in a stable, and killed by the Jews, was worshipped as the ONLY GOD all round the civilized world. The new form of religion spread very much as SPIRITUALISM has done in our time, only in the midst of worse persecution than the Mormons have suffered. At this day there are some two hundred and sixty millions of people who worship Jesus of Nazareth; most of them think he was God, the only God. But a small number of men believe that he was no God, no miraculous person, but a good man with a genius for religion. All the Christians think he was full of all manner of loving kindness and tender mercy. So all over the world to-day, among the two hundred and sixty millions of Christians, there is great rejoicing on account of his birth, which it is erroneously supposed took place on the 25th of December, in the year ONE. They sing psalms, and preach sermons, and offer prayers, and make a famous holiday. But the greater part of the people think only of the festival, and very little of the noble boy who was born so long ago in a tavern-barn in Judea. And of all the ministers who talk so much about the old Christ, there are not many who would welcome a new man who should come and do for this age the great service which Jesus did for his own time. But, as on the Fourth of July, slaveholders, and border ruffians, and kidnappers, and men who believe there is no higher law, ring their bells, and fire their cannons, and let off their rockets, making more noise than all those who honor and defend the great Principles of Humanity which make Independence Day famous,—so on Christmas, not only religious people, but Scribes, and Pharisees, and Hypocrites make a great talk about "Christ and him crucified;" when, if a man of genius for religion were now to appear, they would be the first to call out "Infidel!" "Infidel!" and would kill him if it were possible or safe.
Well, one rainy Sunday evening, in 1855, just twelve days before Christmas, in the little town of Soitgoes, in Worcester County, Mass., Aunt Kindly and Uncle Nathan were sitting in their comfortable parlor before a bright wood-fire. It was about eight o'clock, a stormy night; now it snowed a little, then it rained, then snowed again, seeming as if the weather was determined on some kind of storm, but had not yet made up its mind for snow, rain, or hail. Now the wind roared in the chimney, and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her. Tabby opened her yellow eyes suddenly, and erected her smellers, but finding it was only the wind and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and yawned, and then cuddled her head down so as to show her white throat, and went to sleep again.
Uncle Nathan and Aunt Kindly were brother and sister. He was a little more than sixty, a fine, hale, hearty-looking, handsome man as you could find in a summer's day, with white hair and a thoughtful, benevolent face, adorned with a full beard as white as his venerable head. Aunt Kindly was five-and-forty or thereabouts; her face a little sad when you looked at it carelessly in its repose, but commonly it seemed cheerful, full of thought and generosity, and handsome withal; for, as her brother told her, "God administered to you the sacrement of beauty in your childhood, and you will walk all your life in the loveliness thereof."
Uncle Nathan had been an India merchant from his twenty-fifth to about his fiftieth year, and had now, for some years, been living with his sister in his fine, large house,—rich and well educated, devoting his life to study, works of benevolence, to general reform and progress. It was he who had the first anti-slavery lecture delivered in the town, and actually persuaded Mr. Homer, the old minister, to let Mr. Garrison stand in the pulpit on a Wednesday night and preach deliverance unto the captives; but it could be done only once, for the clergymen of the neighborhood thought anti-slavery a desecration of their new wooden meeting-houses. It was he, too, who asked Lucy Stone to lecture on woman's rights, but the communicants thought it would not do to let a "woman speak in the church," and so he gave it up. All the country knew and loved him, for he was a natural overseer of the poor, and guardian of the widow and the orphan. How many a girl in the Normal School every night put up a prayer of thanksgiving for him; how many a bright boy in Hanover and Cambridge was equally indebted for the means of high culture, and if not so thankful, why, Uncle Nathan knew that gratitude is too nice and delicate a plant to grow on common soil. Once, when he was twenty-two or three, he was engaged to a young woman of Boston, while he was a clerk in a commission store. But her father, a skipper from Beverly or Cape Cod, who continued vulgar while he became rich, did not like the match. "It won't do," said he, "for a poor young man to marry into one of our fust families; what is the use of aristocracy if no distinction is to be made, and our daughters are to marry Tom, Dick, and Harry?" But Amelia took the matter sorely to heart; she kept her love, yet fell into a consumption, and so wasted away; or, as one of the neighbors said, "she was executed on the scaffold of an upstart's vulgarity." Nathan loved no woman in like manner afterwards, but after her death went to India, and remained years long. When he returned and established his business in Boston, he looked after her relations, who had fallen into poverty. Nay, out of the mire of infamy he picked up what might have been his nephews and nieces, and, by generous breeding, wiped off from them the stain of their illicit birth. He never spoke of poor Amelia; but he kept a little locket in one end of his purse; none ever saw it but his sister, who often observed him sitting with it in his hand, hand hour by hour looking into the fire of a winter's night, seeming to think of distant things. She never spoke to him then, but left him alone with his recollections and his dreams. Some of the neighbors said he "worshipped it;" others called it "a talisman." So indeed it was, and by its enchantment he became a young man once more, and walked through the moonlight to meet an angel, and with her enter their kingdom of heaven. Truly it was a talisman; yet if you had looked at it, you would have seen nothing in it but a little twist of golden hairs tied together with a blue silken thread.
Aunt Kindly had never been married; yet once in her life, also, the right man seemed to offer, and the blossom of love opened with a dear prophetic fragrance in her heart. But as her father was soon after struck with palsy, she told her lover they must wait a little while, for her first duty must be to the feeble old man. But the impatient swain went off and pinned himself to the flightiest little humming-bird in all Soitgoes, and in a month was married, having a long life before him for bitterness and repentance. After the father died, Kindly remained at home; and when Nathan returned, years after, they made one brotherly and sisterly household out of what might else have gladdened two connubial homes. "Not every bud becomes a flower."
Uncle Nathan sat there, his locket in his hand, looking into the fire; and as the wind roared in the chimney, and the brands crackled and snapped, he thought he saw faces in the fire; and when the sparks rose up in a little cloud, which the country children call "the people coming out of the meeting-house," he thought he saw faces in the fire; they seemed to take the form of the boys and girls as he had lately seen them rushing out of the Union School-house, which held all the children in the village; and as he recognized one after the other, he began to wonder and conjecture what would be the history of this or that particular child. While he sat thus in his waking dream, he looked fixedly at the locket and the blue thread which tied together those golden rays of a summer sun, now all set and vanished and gone, but which was once the morning light of all his promised days; and as his eyes, full of waking dreams, fell on the fire again, a handsome young woman seemed to come forth from between the brands, and the locks of her hair floated out and turned into boys and girls, of various ages, from babyhood to youth; all looking somewhat like him and also like the fair young woman. But the brand rolled over, and they all vanished in a little puff of smoke.
Aunt Kindly sat at the table reading the Bible. I don't know why she read the Gospels, for she knew them all four by heart, and could repeat them from end to end. But Sunday night, when none of the neighbors were there, and she and Nathan were all alone, she took her mother's great squared Bible and read therein. This night she had been reading, in chapter xxxi. of Proverbs, the character of a noble woman; and, finishing the account, turned and read the 28th verse a second time,—
"Her children rise up and call her blessed."