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In mind of the fact that there would be no Christmas without Jesus Christ, today I am simply posting an essay many of you may already be familiar with called “One Solitary Life”. I first heard it when Paul Harvey recited it on the radio, but there are many, many copies of it circulating everywhere.

What many don’t know is that the one most are familiar with differs in a significant way from the original, which was published by Dr. James Allan Francis in “The Real Jesus and Other Sermons” © 1926 by the Judson Press of Philadelphia (pp 123-124 titled “Arise Sir Knight!”). You can Google the phrase “One Solitary Life” and get over 30,000 hits, and all the ones I checked are almost exactly the same - and they are NOT the original.

Here is the original text:

“Let us turn now to the story. A child is born in an obscure village. He is brought up in another obscure village. He works in a carpenter shop until he is thirty, and then for three brief years is an itinerant preacher, proclaiming a message and living a life. He never writes a book. He never holds an office. He never raises an army. He never has a family of his own. He never owns a home. He never goes to college. He never travels two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He gathers a little group of friends about him and teaches them his way of life. While still a young man, the tide of popular feeling turns against him. One denies him; another betrays him. He is turned over to his enemies. He goes through the mockery of a trial; he is nailed to a cross between two thieves, and when dead is laid in a borrowed grave by the kindness of a friend.Those are the facts of his human life. He rises from the dead. Today we look back across nineteen hundred years and ask, What kind of trail has he left across the centuries? When we try to sum up his influence, all the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned are absolutely picayune in their influence on mankind compared with that of this one solitary life…”

The difference, in case you missed it, is in that last paragraph, second sentence: “He rises from the dead.”

And it makes all the difference in the world.

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