Testimony 1 To His Words
Fairbairn, Rev. A. M. “Studies in the Life of Christ”. Chicago: W. P. Blessings Company, 1880. Pg 189
“His words (the words of Jesus) have been a sort of infinite wonder to the world, a kind of Divine heart and conscience to it. They are but few; we can read in an hour all of His thought that survives in the forms human art has created to clothe and immortalize the human spirit.
Nor was He careful to preserve them, wrote no word, commanded no word to be written; spoke, as it were, into the listening air the words it was to hear and preserve for all time. And the speech thus spoken into the air has been like a sweet and subtle Divine essence in the heart of humanity.
If we image a handful of sweet spices cast into the ocean subduing its salt and brackish bitterness, and making it for evermore pleasant to the taste; or a handful of fragrance thrown into the air spreading and penetrating till it filled the atmosphere of every land, and made it healing and grateful as the breath of Paradise; — we may have an imperfect physical analogy of what Christ’s words have been, and what His teaching has done for the thought and spirit of man.
Had the words of any other great teacher perished; had the wisdom of Socrates, or the science of Aristotle, or the eloquence of Cicero, or the poetry of Aeschylus or Sophocles been lost, our world had still been little different from what it is today.
But had the words of Christ vanished into silence, passed into the halls of oblivion, or had they never been spoken, our world had been quite other than it is, and been far from as wise and good as it is now.
So great and infinite in value have been those teachings, in quantity smallest of fragments, in quality greatest and priceless of the treasures that have enriched the world.”
