There are few who when reminded of the household adage, "Some are born great," have not mentally added, "Yes, and some are born good, too!" We read in the Bible of the colossal characters of patriarch, prophet, and apostle, and feel that in their spiritual development they are so far above the average mentality of ourselves and our immediate neighbors that one might as well try to compare, the lilies and orchids of the horticulturist's supreme skill with a cottager's row of carrots and onions.
Suddenly, from some obscure mountain village, or emerging from some little crowded back street of a teeming city, comes one whose being is aflame with the immanence of God, and whose path in life henceforth is marked by special acts of self-sacrifice and by stupendous achievement. Somewhere from out earth's mists and fogs springs the hero, he whom Carlyle has described as the man who knows; in other words, the man who knows God. The Bible is full of such phenomena. Men and women born in the same houses, wearing the same kind of clothes, eating the same kind of food, working at the same trades as are the vast millions of their brothers and sisters, suddenly for some unexplained cause have stood out apart from the throng as great poets, teachers, reformers, rulers, "doing that which was right in the sight of the Lord." How is it that the light came to them and not to others? Theology jumped at the explanation lying on the surface of the senses, that God must have called such people specially and have made them a personal gift of goodness, that, they could not be so inherently good, so amazingly spiritually minded by any other means. But in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 18), we read, "Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals."
Even after this is accepted we at times wonder if there is any quality of human thought, any starting point which may form the first stepping stone across the Jordan of our earthly experience to the Canaan of spiritual rest, to the consciousness of man's divine character. Studying with eager, earnest hope the heroic figures of the Old Testament, we find that they all seem to possess in common one human quality,—not that of courage, such as characterized the Achilles and Hectors of epic lore, nor that of intellect, such as the ancient Greek or the modern industrial world might respect, but that of love, the element which in its simple human expression is set aside as that which counts least in the real business of life.
