Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/396

384 hosts of good, plain, practical people of all sorts who have left us a constitutional heritage, We have further encouragement in the law by which successive generations tend to revert to a normal type: peculiarities are got rid of, defects are supplemented, excesses arc restrained; a certain amount of refuse is wrought out and cast aside age after age. The blind man has children with eyes. On the whole, we can not marvel that with such a mongrel ancestry of saints and sinners we manifest such contradictory tendencies, and are such an enigma to ourselves, as if not two men but a thousand were contending within us for the dominion in the changing moods that pass over us, and in the wild, irregular thoughts that shoot through the mind, and try to find their way to the surface to gain their own appropriate expression. That blessing and cursing should proceed from the same lips, that men should come away from prayers at church and get into very unlovely tempers at home, is doubtless very sad, but it is just what might have been expected from those who reckon among their progenitors the evil and the good, the best and the worst, of a whole country.

This doctrine of the close kinship of mankind triumphantly establishes, apart from genealogical tables, the fact that Jesus Christ bad descendants from King David, but impairs the value of the fact when it is established. David, the King of Israel, flourished above a thousand years before Christ, and left behind him many children. The channels of succession being so numerous, and having their fountain-head so far back, had time before the birth of Christ to branch out in every direction, and could not have missed any genuine Jew in the land, especially if he was of the tribe of Judah. Jesus Christ, being of this tribe, was undoubtedly in the succession, and had in him the blood of the son of Jesse. But then was there a man of the tribe of Judah at least who had not? Is there a man living now who has not? Of course the conventional value of Christ's descent by what is termed lineal succession from David, and its value as a fulfillment of prophecy on that ground, are independent of the generalizing proofs which would make out all to be David's children.

The evidence seems conclusive that Mary, the mother of Jesus, had several children after the birth of her illustrious First-born. He had brethren and sisters, and if some of these left posterity in the earth, as we may reasonably suppose they did, it is certain that we are the descendants, the children, of Mary, and have a kinship with Christ, much closer physically than we have dared to believe.

In his case the phrase "Son of man" had a unique significance, but the doctrine which has been expounded in this paper shows that it has a real and solemn significance to whomsoever applied. Each of us is "son of man" in the tremendous sense that he is descended from all the people who have posterity remaining, who lived on earth a few centuries ago. Every individual living before Christ who has descendants at all has them in us. We are the offspring of the whole of humanity