A THOUGHT FOR THE SKEPTICAL.
"THERE is a story told of a conversation between Bonaparte and one of his Marshals, while he was a prisoner on the Island of St. Helena. The Marshal had expressed a doubt as to the divinity of Christ—Bonaparte took him up. He dwelt on the fact that thousands of Christ's followers had suffered imprisonment and death for his sake; and that after eighteen centuries, the attachment of his friends to him had suffered no abatement. But all the great men of antiquity were soon forgotten.—Who would die for any of them? Those who followed them with applause while in their glory, soon ceased to cherish any affectionate remembrance of them. I, too, said he, will soon be forgotten. If you can not see that Christ was more than human, I did wrong when I made you a Marshal." This argument which the sharp good sense of Napoleon could not but see and feel, proves other points besides the divinity of Christ. It proves that he was all he claimed to be—the divinely sent Messiah, commissioned of the Father to reveal God to men and especially to become their atoning Mediator and Saviour. The great facts pertaining to the work of Christ are that God was in and with him while he lived; raised him from the dead, and soon after caused him to ascend in visible glory to heaven; there seated him on his own throne to rule this world in the interests of their joint plan of human redemption; and lastly, that in answer to his mediation, the Spirit was sent and still is sent to finish in the hearts of men the work which Jesus had begun and had made provision for in his teachings while he lived and in his atoning sacrifice when he died. These facts received one of their richest installments of proof immediately after Christ's death. Let it be considered that the object of his enemies in taking his life was to crush his cause. To the best human sagacity, this was wise and sure. If Jesus had not been divine; if God had not been in his movements sustaining his cause, it must surely have perished when he gave up the ghost. The disciples themselves tell us that in that hour of terror they all forsook him and fled. Peter had kept his old fishing coat, and now we see him girding it on again, and almost a majority of the disciple-band are ready to join him. If Jesus had not risen and met them with words of hope and cheer, his work must have utterly ceased. Out of many scores of other Messiahs—having the pretensions but lacking all that was real and divine—the entire cause and claims of each and every one went down hopelessly at his death. Not a man of them left a disciple to live and to die for his master after he had gone. Just here lies one of the most conclusive, unanswerable proofs that Jesus of Nazareth was truly the Son of God. His death did not ruin his cause; on the contrary it opened its era of power! Just when, according to all analogy and all philosophy, it should have died out and passed away into oblivion, then it rose and shone like the sun in the firmament; it began to travel in the greatness of its strength; it smote the hearts of his murderers and made its first conquests there in Jerusalem—that home of bigotry and corruption—almost before the blood he had shed was dry on the mount of crucifixion. And this new power remained year after year attesting the divinity of the man of Nazareth and endorsing the whole circle of his claims to be the Messiah. How should a man who had done comparatively so little while he lived, accomplish so much after he was dead? How can the broad, palpable, undeniable facts of this history be accounted for if Jesus were only human, and hence was nothing but a vile impostor? Did such divine power ever attend the cause of a mere impostor? Does God give his sanction to fraud and lies? It is fortunate for the evidences of gospel Christianity that its earliest human friends and laborers had absolutely no earthly or selfish motive for giving to it their testimony and their life. For them there was in that cause no fame, no bread, no social standing—not one of those things that human hearts love and live for. So far from this was the truth of the case, they every one of them knew that adhering to that cause, they must suffer the loss of all things and be accounted the filth and off-scouring of the world. Were they men of other passions than ours that they should be enamored of stripes, bonds, imprisonments; of shame and scorn; of poverty, hunger, exile and death? Or would they have suffered all this for a known impostor? Would they have borne it save under a perfect conviction that their Lord had gone up in triumph to heaven, and save under the power of a present God in their own hearts? Judge ye.