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CHAPTER IV

HIS METHOD

MANY leaders have dared to lay out ambitious programs, but this is the most daring of all: "Go ye into all the world," Jesus said, "and preach the gospel to the whole creation."

Consider the sublime audacity of that command. To carry Roman civilization across the then known world had cost millions of lives and billions in treasure. To create any sort of reception for a new idea or product to-day involves a vast machinery of propaganda and expense. Jesus had no funds and no machinery. His organization was a tiny group of uneducated men, one of whom had already abandoned the cause as hopeless, deserting to the enemy. He had come proclaiming a Kingdom and was to end upon a cross; yet he dared to talk of conquering all creation. What was the source of

his faith in that handful of followers? By what methods had he trained them? What had they learned from him of the secrets of influencing men?

We speak of the law of "supply and demand,” but the words have got turned around. With anything which is not a basic necessity the supply always precedes the demand. Elias Howe invented the sewing machine, but it nearly rusted away before American women could be persuaded to use it. With their sewing finished so quickly what would they ever do with their spare time? Howe had vision, and had made his vision come true; but he could not sell! So his biographer paints a tragic picture-the man who had done more than any other in his generation to lighten the labor of women is forced to attend the funeral of the woman he loved in a borrowed suit of clothes! Nor are men less stubborn than women in opposition to the new idea. The typewriter had been a demonstrated success for years before business men could be persuaded to buy it. How could any

one have letters enough to justify the investment of one hundred dollars in a writing machine? Only when the Remingtons sold the Caligraph Company the right to manufacture machines under the Remington patent, and two groups of salesmen set forth in competition, was the resistance broken down.

Almost every invention has had a similar battle. Said Robert Fulton of the Clermont:

"As I had occasion daily to pass to and from the shipyard where my boat was in progress, I often loitered near the groups of strangers and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculations of losses or expenditures; the dull repetition of 'Fulton's Folly.' Never did a

single encouraging remark, a bright hope, a warm wish cross my path."

That is the kind of human beings we arewise in our own conceit, impervious to suggestions, perfectly sure that what's never been done

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never will be done. Nineteen hundred years ago we were even more impenetrable, for modern science has frequently shot through the hard shell of our complacency. "To the whole creation." Assuredly there was no demand for a new religion; the world was already oversupplied. And Jesus proposed to send forth eleven men and expect them to substitute his thinking for all existing religious thought!

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In this great act of courage he was the successor, and the surpasser, of all the prophets who had gone before. We spoke a moment ago of the prophets as deficient in humor; but what they lacked in the amenities of life they made up richly in vision. Each one of them brought to the world a revolutionary idea, and we can not understand truly the significance of the work of Jesus unless we remember that he began where they left off, building on the firm foundations they had laid. Let us glance at them a moment, starting with Moses. What a miracle he wrought in the thinking of his race! The world was full of gods in his day-male gods, female

gods, wooden and iron gods-it was a poverty stricken tribe which could not boast of a hundred at least. The human mind had never been able to leap beyond the idea that every natural phenomenon was the expression of a different deity. Along came Moses with one of the transcendent intellects of history. "There is one God," he cried. What an overwhelming idea and how magnificent its consequences. Taking a disorganized crowd of folks who had been slaves in Egypt for generations—their spirits broken by rule and rod-Moses persuaded them that God, this one all-powerful God, was their special friend and protector, fired them with faith in that conviction and transformed them from slaves to conquerors!

Moses died and the nation carried on under the momentum which he had given it, until there arose Amos, a worthy successor.

"There is one God," Moses had said.

"God is a God of justice," added Amos.

That assertion is such an elementary part of our consciousness that we are almost shocked by

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