p. 8 | A Saviour of Men by Earle Albert Rowell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California, U.S.A. · Nov 25, 1930

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 46.

A Saviour of Men

By Earle Albert Rowell

Earle Albert Rowell

I was reared an infidel. My parents and other immediate relatives were proud of their unbelief. I was nourished on the vaunting skeptics of the ages.

But I observed the helpless amazement with which every doubter from Celsus to Wells stood around the cradle of the Christ. I wondered why this Babe was thrust into the world at a time when Roman greed, Jewish hate, and Greek subtlety would combine to crush Him. And yet this most powerful devastating combination ever known in history served only to advance the cause of the helpless Infant who was born in a stable—the purest human being in the world born in the filthiest place in the world.

I marveled that this poverty-stricken, uneducated plebeian, who exercised no authority, commanded no army, held no office, received no honors, wrote no books, and who died in early manhood the most contemptible of deaths—a malefactor on a cross between two criminals—I marveled that His name is yet the most esteemed name on earth.

No skeptic could tell me why the dynamic of His words—as charged with power to-day as nineteen hundred years ago—blew powerful empires to bits. Nor could scoffers explain how those pierced hands pulled human monsters with gnarled 'souls out of a hell of iniquity, and overnight transformed them into steadfast glorious heroes who died in torturing flames that others might know the love and mighty power of the Christ who had saved them.

No agnostic could make clear why seemingly immortal empires pass into oblivion while the glory and power of the murdered Galilean are gathering beauty and momentum with every attack and every age. Nor could any scoffer explain, as Jesus Himself so daringly foretold, why His words are flowing in an ever-rising tidal wave of splendor and, by telephone, airplane, and radio, by rail, horse, and foot, are piercing the densest forests, scaling the highest mountains, crossing the deepest seas and the widest deserts to thrill, shock, illumine, and save in every nation, tongue, and people on earth.

No doubter has told how this isolated Jew could utter words at once so simple that a child could understand them and so deep that the greatest thinkers cannot plumb their shining depths. The life, the words, the character, of this strange Man are the enigma of history. Any naturalistic explanation makes Him a more puzzling paradox, a fathomless mystery.

But I learned that the paradox was plain and the mystery solved when I accepted Him for what He claimed to be—the Son of God, come from heaven a Saviour of men, of me.

And who does not thrill at the angel’s words: “Behold, . . . for unto you is born this day . . . a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” And so I bless the day when I learned the wonderful truth that—

“Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, If He’s not born in thee, thy soul is still forlorn.”