Concerning the Christ (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II CHBIST'S FIBST BECOBDED WOBDS were the first drops to fall into the flask of history from the fountain of Christ's speech. We taste in them all the distinctive flavours of that Water of Life which afterwards flowed so freely from that exhaustless spring. The qualities of spontaniety, originality and authority, which characterise the later utterances of the Great Teacher are all present in this first crystal jet of speech which fell from His fresh, young lips. Yet with all these qualities in them, the words do not impress us as being precocious words. There is nothing weird about them. They do not sound like the sententiously ambitious sayings of a child-prodigy. They do not make us think of Jesus as of one grown old before His time ? one too early withdrawn from the natural interests and simple joys of happy boyhood. Even with these great words upon His lips, words destined for immortality, He is still to us the sweet, glad-hearted, unaffected son of Mary. And this for the reason that they are so obviously unstudied words. The truth which they convey had not been reached by strenuous processes of reasoning. It was native to His mind. The utterance was as effortless as the shedding of its fragrance by a rose. In this fact we find the secret of the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ as a religious teacher. He was born into the world with a perfect faculty for knowing and revealing God. No human being ever approached Him in this respect. In the realm of spiritual truth He moved as freely and as buoyantly as a bird in air. His soul was wondrously winged for flight into that upper region. His thoughts towards God were ever "blithesome and cumberless." Though His heart had nest upon the ground in the love of Marr and of Joseph, His spirit made frequent, lark-like fli...