orld, He has no value to us.
But men have ever set aside the weavings of minds so absorbed in the
wonder of their speculations that they could not see the truth. They
have seen through the dreamings of poets, painters, and preachers, who
pictured only their sickly ideals. And, instead of their caricatures,
men have held in their hearts a man, one of their own. And this true
fellow, brother and friend, has spurred them to noble deeds and lofty
living.
Perfection is seen in strength, not in weakness, in virility and not in
tears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin,
mooning etherealism. The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in
a form that a child will pity; it will be admirable from all points of
view. It is the heroic rather than the esthetic we must admire.
The men who followed that one long ago did so not because they had
heard arguments as to His divine claims, but because they were drawn by
the heavenly power of His manhood. This it is that wins men ever, the
magnetism of manhood. The force of a great life is mightier than any
of the things it does. There is about this leader, Jesus, that which
compels us to greatness, spurs us to strife for our better selves,
strengthens to sacrifice and to service for our fellows.
It matters little whence a life like this has come; the greater
question is where does it lead us. Childish minds spend time on the
genealogical trees of the giants; the wise men follow them. The value
of the life of the great Teacher does not depend on our ability to
comprehend it biologically or arrange it chronologically, but on our
vision of its moral and manly perfections and on the power these
attributes have over our lives.
This world will be little helped by the most irrefutable syllogism
concerning the peculiar nature and separate exclusive divinity of its
great religious Teacher. But lives will be lifted everywhere in the
measure that they see the man in Him who taught us of God. For men
need not so much a God who has come down as a man who has attained to
God, not a descent, but an ascent, one who is the life and the truth
because He is the way which they may tread up to the glory that is
their heritage and the God who is their own.
THE LIFE THAT LIFTS
To any save the few in the group of His friends that statement of Jesus
that being lifted up He would draw all men to Him must have sounded
like the ravings of one deluded. It ha
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