in those old days
recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest
sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what
He was and of what He could do.

And then, again, is it not very strange, certainly, that there should
be, in these later days, in all these centuries that have passed between
the day of Jesus Christ and us, that there should have come a vast
accumulation of speculation and conjecture, of theorizing and thought
with regard to Christ and what He was, and that a great deal of it
should have been very strange and should seem to us to-day to have been
very silly, a great part of it should have seemed to be but a work of
intelligences that were half dulled and blinded, full of prejudice, and
shrinking from the error and the danger in which they stood? What does
it mean--all these complicated theologies that we say are keeping us
away from the simple following of the grandest figure that has ever
presented Himself before human kind? I know not how else it can be when
I see what has been the power of Jesus over thoughts and homes and
hearts of men through all these years. It seems to be a previous
necessity that He who most fastens the heart and life of man, who seems
to be most necessary to the soul of men, shall so attract their thought,
shall so draw them all to Himself that their crudest speculations, that
their most erroneous conceptions, shall fasten upon him, and they shall
be in some true way a testimony of the way in which He has always held
the human heart. This is the way in which all crudities of theology, all
the weaknesses of speculation, all even of the most strange and foul
thoughts in regard to the life of Jesus and His manifestation in the
world, have accumulated around that gracious figure, so simple and
strong, which walks through our human life and manifests to us the God.
Surely it is in one conception of it, and the true conception of it, the
great perpetual testimony of how men have cared about Jesus, that they
have speculated about Him in such strange perplexing ways. But He about
whom the world does not care walks through the world and bears His
simple being. There is nothing that fastens upon Him, that perplexes His
life, that makes mysterious and strange the life He lives. But where is
the great man in all the history of human kind that has not gathered
about his person and work the speculations of those whom we find, with
their crude and ungu