The One Who Needs No Statue
by
A movement is started in Italy to celebrate religiously the close of the nineteenth century.
The idea is to erect at different points on the Peninsula nineteen colossal statues of Christ. The statues, one for each century, are to be of cast-iron, gilded, heroic in size.
There can be no objection to the idea, since it gives expression to proper religious feeling. But should it fail of execution, that would be quite as well. —-
For one Man only in all the history of the world no statue is needed. To the glory of one Man we can add nothing save through obedience to the laws which He brought on earth. —-
Where a weak woman is kindly treated, where children are received with tenderness, where the hungry are fed and the old cared for, there is a monument to Christ–such a monument as He would ask to have built.
The wisdom of Confucius, the self-abnegation of Gautama, the lofty idealism of Zoroaster, may be fitly commemorated and perhaps magnified by human monuments or human praise.
But men can build nothing that shall add to the glory of that life which is the basis of good among all men.