Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1876 — “Never Man Spake Like This Man.” [ARTICLE]

“Never Man Spake Like This Man.”

Never was truth made so vital as when it fell from the lips of Jesus. It was no novelty in Jesus to call God His Father. The word had been used before often enough. But the world, by all its wisdom, had not learned to know-God as its Father. Now, little children, by the side of their small cribs, say in infantile trust: “Our Father, who art in heaven;” and the martyr at the stake cries out in assured faith:“ Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus, because He was vitally conscious of the Father’s love, has made mankind also conscious of it. “To them who believe in Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.’ T It was no novelty when Jesus taught men to overcome evil with good, to bless those who cursed them, help those who' persecuted them, love those who hated them. The thing had been said before but now It was done. Now it was said and done so livingly that it was not a’ mere far-off ideal but a commonplace fact, an actual event in human life, a safe rule to go by. To tell of a future life was no novelty. The Egyptians taught a future life in all its minutest details. Nearly every ancient nation believed in immortality. And yet it is true that "life and immortality were brought to light by the Gospel.” Bcforethey were vague possibilities, dim conjectures. But he who believes in Jesus has eternal life abiding in him. Faith in immortality becomes a part of the texture of bin soul, as it was a part of the texture of the soul of Jesus Himself. He was the immortality, the resurrection, the eternal life. He did not prove it by elaborate but unconvincing arguments, as Socrates ip the Phaedo nobly argued for it, expectant of death, amid the laurels and myrtles of an Athenian summer diy. But Jesus was full of that immortal life which dispels all images of decay, and puts death at an impossible distance. These vital truths are the deepest,, and also the highest. They have a character of the infinite about them. Who has not noticed this in reading the words of Jesus? No commentary ever exhausts their meaning. The word* grow more luminous, their meaning deepens while I am thinking about them. That is why Paul speaks of the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of Christ, the knowledge of which “passeth knowledge.” ’frhich' Ta* vital is inexhaustible. We eat and drink and come again, and the banquet is still spread, new, every morning, with daily bread for thesoul. — Jamet Nietman Clarke.