Description
The Manhood of the Master Here’s a classic in devotional literature, a twelve-week, day-by-day study of the character of Jesus Christ by someone who was once numbered among the nation’s best-known pastors, Harry Emerson Fosdick. For some twenty years, from 1927 to 1947, he preached to the nation on NBC radio’s “National Vespers.” This is his 1913 bestseller, newly typeset and brought back into print.Here are selections from the Now the difficulty with accepting this idea of Jesus is that it takes a man nineteen centuries after Jesus, to suggest it first. Nobody who saw the Master seems to have suspected anything like this about him. The moneychangers, beaten by his stinging whip, the Pharisees, castigated by his scathing words, were not impressed by his “infinite sweetness, vague poetry, universal charm.”When he told the story of the good Samaritan, he let us know the moral or religious state of every character in it, save one. The robbers were bad; the priest and Levite were Jews; the Samaritan was a heretic; but the victim on the road, who was he? Was he a Jew, a Gentile or a Samaritan? Was he good or bad? Was he grateful or churlish? No one knows. Jesus did not describe him save thus far, that he was a man who needed help.Whatever else may be true of Jesus, he was no “pale Galilean.” The first impression which he makes is one of overflowing radiance and gladness.To be gifted with supernal powers and never to use them selfishly; to be sent on a divine mission and never to expect God to stop the lions’ mouths; to be offered a temporal kingdom and to be crucified for a spiritual one, that was the temptation and triumph of Jesus.To wrong a child seems to him a crime so heinous that no punishment can be too severe for the man who has deliberately done it, and no self-sacrifice can be too great, even cutting off a hand or plucking out an eye, if necessary to prevent harm to “these little ones.”What did the priest and Levite do that stirred the Master’s disapproval? They did nothing. That was the sole fault with them. They endeavored to be neutral when a concrete example was presented to them of the warfare of evil on men; they simply went by on the other side.
