BUNYAN, in his incomparable allegory, presents his pilgrim as fleeing from the City of Destruction— from the materiality of mortal sense, from the baselessness of earthly pleasure, from the tyranny of evil, from the fear of death—and crying, "Life! life! eternal life!" And indeed these little words "life" and "death" stand for the heart-hunger and the perpetual fear of all the ages. Joy and sorrow, hope and despondency, happiness and misery, love and loneliness, are in their content and suggestion. Orators and poets, scientists and sages, philosophers and mathematicians, have phrased their definitions with many changes of words, but never yet has the unaided human intellect found explicit and incontrovertible terms in which to demonstrate what life is, what it means, whence it comes, how it abides, whither it goeth.
But in the fulness of time there appeared on the earth a new teacher, one of unique personality and with a strange new message to stir and thrill the thought of a worn and weary world. He never sat at the feet of any Zadoc or Ezra or Gamaliel, was never trained by rabbi or scribe or priest. No school of the prophets acknowledged him, no academic grove had instructed him, no alum mater was responsible for him. His immediate following was just a little company of the very common people. And yet, with sublime disregard for all the traditions and conventionalities and proprieties of his race and age, and in the calm and undisturbed consciousness that he is uttering absolute and essential truth, he declares, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom them hast sent;" "I am the way, the truth, and the life."
False Christs have been numerous,—some mad, some bad,—but their self-betrayal has been quickly precipitated. Only the very credulous and the very ignorant have been deceived by them and the illusion has been of only the briefest and most limited character. The life of the man of Nazareth has been bared to the search-lights of the ages; his doctrine has been analyzed by the subtlest intellects; his sayings and his discourses have inspired more comment and discussion than all the literary product of the centuries; the criticisms of friend and foe have been alike exhausted upon his teachings. And yet, today, the life of Christ and the teaching of Christ are the most potential factors in determining human conduct, and the most commanding and entrancing themes that can possibly be presented for human consideration. It is the divinity inherent in the teachings of the real Christ that holds men obedient to them when the great determining crises of their lives come upon them. Mere worldly wisdom plods along, slowly advancing step by step, forced from time to time to retrace its weary way and to correct its false hypotheses or false conclusions, and only through study and strain and sweat are the problems of nature solved; but the Christ of God lifts the veil that hides the eternities and ushers man into the presence-chamber of the living and infinite God.
