uch a part of the
day's work in governing a province like Judea that it had all but
escaped his recollection. Such a representation of the case is not
improbable. It is easy so to tell the story of Jesus' life as to make
his continued influence seem incredible. None would have supposed that
nineteen centuries after his death, Lecky, the historian of European
morals, would say, "The simple record of three short years of active
life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the
disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists."
[4] None would have thought that sixty generations after he was gone,
Montefiori, a Jew, putting his finger on the source of Christianity's
power, would light upon the phrase "For the sake of Jesus," and would
cry: "Of what fine lives and deaths has not this motive been the spring
and the sustainment!" [5] None would have thought that so long after
Calvary seemed to end forever the power of Jesus, one of the race's
greatest men, David Livingstone, engaged in one of the race's most
courageous enterprises, breaking his way into the untraveled jungles of
Africa, would sing as he went, for so his journal says he did,

"Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills my breast"?

Take the personality of the Master out of Christian history and we have
robbed it of its central moral power.

Moreover, the personality of Jesus has always been the standard of
reformation when Christianity has become recreant or laggard or
corrupt. A man named John Wilkes started a political movement in
England in the eighteenth century, and around him sprang up a party who
called themselves Wilkites. These followers of Wilkes, however, went
to extremes so wild and perilous that poor John Wilkes himself had to
explain to everybody that, as for him, he was not a Wilkite. This
lapse of a movement from the original intention of its founder is
familiar in history and nowhere is it more clearly illustrated than in
Christianity. The Master, watching Western Christendom today, with all
our hatred, bitterness, war, would have to say, If this is
Christianity, then I am not a Christian. The Master, wandering through
our cathedrals with their masses, waxen images and votive gifts, or
through our Protestant churches with their fine-spun speculations
insisted on as necessary to belief if one is to be a child of grace,
would have to say, If this is Christianity, then I am not a Chr