The curious thing is that He Himself anticipated this kind of
love as His eternal heritage with men. He expected that men would love
Him more than father or mother, wife or child, and even made such a
love a condition of what He called discipleship. The greatest marvel
of all human history is that this prognostication has been strictly
verified in the event. He is the Supreme Lover, for whose love,
unrealizable as it is by touch, or glance, or spoken word, or momentary
presence, men and women are still willing to sacrifice themselves, and
surrender all things. The pregnant words of Napoleon, uttered in his
last lonely reveries in St. Helena, still express the strangest thing
in universal history: "Caesar, Charlemagne, I, have founded empires.
They were founded on force, and have perished. Jesus Christ has
founded an empire on love, and to this day there are millions ready to
die for Him."
Napoleon felt the wonder of it all, the baffling, inexplicable marvel.
Were we able to detach ourselves enough from use and custom, to survey
the movement of human thought from some lonely height above the floods
of Time, as Napoleon in the high sea-silences of St. Helena, we also
might feel the wonder of this most wonderful thing the world has ever
known.
That the majority of men, and even Christian men, do not perceive that
the whole meaning of the life of Christ is Love is a thing too obvious
to demand evidence or invite contradiction.
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