 CHAPTER III. THE MAN AND HIS MIND. It is a common place, with those who take literature seriously, that what is to reach the heart must come from the heart, and the maxim may be applied conversely, that what has reached a heart has come from a heart, that what continues to reach the heart, among strange peoples in distant lands, after long ages, has come from a heart of no common make. The Anglo-Saxon boy is at home in the Odyssey, and when he is a man, if he has the luck to be guided into classical paths, he finds himself in the unit, and from this certain things are deduced about the makers of those poems, that they knew life, looked on it with bright, keen eyes, loved it, and lived it over again, as they shaped it into verse. When we turn to the first three Gospels, we find the same thing. Here are books, with a more worldwide range than Homer or Virgil, translated again and again from the first century of their existence on to the latest, and then more than ever, into all sorts of tongues, to reach men all over the globe, and that purpose they have achieved. They have done it not so much for the literary graces of the translations, or even of the original authors, though in one case these are more considerate than is sometimes allowed. That the Gospels owe their appeal to the recorded sayings and doings of our Lord is our natural way of putting it today. But if for our Lord we put a plainer description, more congenial to the day in which the Gospels were written, we shall be in a better position to realize the significance of the worldwide appeal of his words. Thus and thus, then, spoke a mere provincial, a Jew, who, though far less conspicuous and interesting, came from the region of Meliega and Philodemus, not from their town of Gadara, nor possibly from their district, but from some place not so very far away. It was not to be expected that he should win the hearts of men as he did. He had not the Greek culture of the two Gadarenes. Celsus even found his style of speech rather vulgar, but he has, as a matter of common knowledge, so common as hardly to be noted, won the hearts of men in every race and every land. The fact is familiar, but we have, as historians and critics, to look for the explanation. What has been his appeal? And what's the heart and nature from which came this incredible power and reach of appeal? Out of the abundance, the overflow, of the heart, the mouth speaketh, he said. This he amplified, as we have seen, by his insistent on the weight of every idle word. The unstudied and spontaneous expression or ejaculation, the reflex in modern phrase, which gives the real clue to the man's inner nature and deeper mind, which justifies him, therefore, or condemns him. The overflow of the heart, he holds, shows more decisively than anything else the quality of the spring in its depths. Here is the suggestion which we find true in ordinary life, as well as in the study of literature. If we turn it back upon its author, he at least will not complain, and we shall perhaps gain a new sense of his significance by approaching him at a new angle, from an outlook not perhaps much frequented. How did he come to speak in this manner, to say this and that? To what feeling or thought? To what attitude to life is this or the other saying due? If he, too, spoke out of the overflow of his heart, and we can believe it when we think of the freshness and spontaneity with which he spoke, of what nature, and of what depth, was that heart. We can very well believe that much in his speech, that was unforgettable to others, he forgot himself. They remembered, they could not help remembering what he said, would he? No, he said it, and moved on, keeping no register of his sayings, and so much the more natural and characteristic they are. Nor would he, like smaller people, be very careful of the form and turn of his speech, it was never said. Certainly he gave his followers the rule not to study their language. Whether or no he had consciously thought it all out, we can see the value of his rule, and how it fits in with his way of life and safeguards it. And as such a rule, speech will not be stereotyped. No set form of words will impose itself on the free movement of thought. The mind can, and will, move of itself unhampered, and when the mind keeps and develops such freedom of movement, it commonly breaks new ground, and handles new things. Not to be careful of our speech means, for most of us, slovenly thinking, but when a man thinks in earnest and takes truth seriously. When he speaks with his eye on his object, his language will not be slovenly, his instinct for fact will keep his speech pure and true. This is what we find in the sayings of Jesus. There is form, but living form, the freedom and grace which the clear mind and the friendly eye communicate insentibly and imitably to language. Our task in this chapter is primarily a historical one. From the words of Jesus we have to work back to the type of mind from which they come. There is always danger in such a task. We may forget the wide and living variety of the mind we study. Our own minds may not be large enough, nor tender enough, not various, quick and sympathetic in such a degree as to apprehend what we find, to see what it means, and to relate it to itself detail to whole. How much greater the danger here? While we analyze, we have to remember that the most correct analysis of features or characteristics may easily fail to give us a true idea of the face or the character which we analyze. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The face and the character have an integrity, a wholeness. The detail may be of immense value to us, studied as detail, but for the true view the detail familiar as it may be to us and dear to us must be sunk in the general view. Especially is this true of great characters. The reconstruction of a personality to borrow a phrase from psychologists is a very difficult matter, even when we are masters of our detail. There is a proportion, a perspective, a balance, a poise about a character. My terms may involve some mixture of metaphors, but if the mixture brings out the complexity and difficulty of our task it will be justified. Above all there is life, and as a life deepens and widens it grows complex, unintelligible and wonderful. It is more so than ever in the case of Jesus. Yet we have to grapple with this great task if we are to know him, even if here as elsewhere we realize quickly that the beginning of real knowledge is when we grasp how much we do not know, how much there is to know. Attempted in this spirit, a study of the mind of Jesus and his characteristics should help us forward to some further intimacy with him. The Gospels do not, like some biographies ancient and modern, give a place to the physical characteristics of Jesus. Suetonius in a very short sketch adds the personal aspect of the poet Horace, who, it is true, had led the way by such illusions and tells us how Augustus said he was a squat little pot, Sicilis oba. The Acts of Thecla, in a similar way, described St Paul's short figure with its suggestion of quickness. But the only personal trait of this sort that I recall in the New Testament are the eyes of Jesus and Paul's way of stretching out a hand when he spoke. In view of this reticence it is rather remarkable how often the Gospels refer to Jesus looking. He looked round upon on the people of the synagogue and then with some suggestion of a pause and silence while he looked he saith unto the man. When Peter deprecated the cross we find the same. When he had turned about and looked on his disciples he rebuked Peter. When the rich young ruler came so impulsively to him to ask about eternal life, Jesus looking upon him loved him. And we touch there a certain reminiscence of eyewitnesses. There are other references of the same kind in the narratives. The look seems to have come into the story naturally without the writer's noticing it. There must have been much else as familiar to his friends and companions. They must have known him as we know our friends, the inflections of his voice, his characteristic movements, the hang of his clothes, his step in the dark and all such things. Did he speak quickly or slowly or move his hand when he spoke? The teaching posture of Buddha's hand is stereotyped in his images. We are not told such things about Jesus and guessing does not take us very far. Yet a stanza in one of the elegies written on the death of Sir Philip Sidney may be taken as a faraway likeness of a greater and more wonderful figure and not need us very far astray. A sweet attractive kind of grace, the full assurance given by looks, the petual comfort in a face, the liniments of gospel books. If we are not explicitly told of such things by the evangelists, they are easily felt in the story. The paradoxes, as we call them, are rather dull named for them, surely point to a face alive with intellect and gaiety. The way in which, for instance, the leper approaches him implies the man's eyes fixed in close study on Jesus' face, and finding nothing there to check him and everything to bring him nearer. When Mark tells us that he greeted the Syrophoenician woman's sally about the little dogs eating the children's crumbs under the table with the reply, for the sake of this saying of yours, we must assume some change of expression on such a face as that of Jesus. We read again and again of the interest men and women found in his preaching and teaching, how they hung on to him to hear him, how they came in crowds, how on one occasion they drove him into a boat for a poor bit. It is only familiarity that has blinded us to the charm they found in his speech. They marveled at his words of charm, to the gaiety and playfulness that light up his lessons. For instance, there is a little-noticed phrase that grows very delightful as we study it in his words to the seventy disciples. Into whatsoever house he enter, first say, peace to this house, the common Salaam of the East, and if a son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it. If not, your Salaam will come back to you. A son of peace. Not the son of peace. What a beautiful expression. What a beautiful idea, too, that the unheeded peace comes back and blesses the heart that wished it, as if courteous and kind words never went unrewarded. Think again of Solomon in all his glory. Before the phrase was hackneyed by the common question, do not such words reveal nature? A more elaborate and more amusing episode is that of the Pharisee's drinking operations. We are shown the man polishing his cup elaborately and carefully, for he lays great importance on the cleanliness of his cup, but he forgets to clean the inside. Most people drink from the inside, but the Pharisee forgot it, dirty as it was, and left it untouched. Then he sets about straining what he is going to drink, another elaborate process. He holds a piece of muslin over the cup and pours with care. He pauses. He sees a mosquito. He has caught it in time and fixed it away. He is safe and he will not swallow it. And then, as Jesus, he swallowed a camel. How many of us have ever pictured the process and the series of sensations as the long hairy neck slid down the throat of the Pharisee, all that amplitude of loose hung anatomy, the hump, two humps, both of them slid down, and he never noticed. And the legs, all of them, with the whole outfit of knees and great padded feet. The Pharisee swallowed a camel and never noticed it. It is the mixture of sheer realism with absurdity that makes the irony and gives it its force. Did no one smile as the story was told? Did no one see the scene pictured with his own mind's eye? No one grasped the humour and the irony with delight. Could anyone, on the other hand, forget it? A modern teacher would have said, in our jargon, that the Pharisee had no sense of proportion. And no one would have thought the remark worth remembering. But Jesus' treatment of the subject reveals his own mind in a number of aspects. When he bad turned the other cheek, that sentence which Salsas found so vulgar, did no one smile then at the idea of anybody ever dreaming of such an act. Nor at the picture of the kind brother taking a boat from his brother's eye with a whole bulk of timber in his own. Nor at the suggestion of doing two miles of forced labour when only one was demanded. Nor when he suggested that anxiety about food and clothing was a mark of the Gentiles. Did none of his disciples mark a touch of irony when he said that among the Gentile dynasties the kings who exercise authority are called benefactors? It was true. Eugetis is a well-known kingly title, but the explanation that it was the reward for strenuous use of monarchy authority was new. Are we to think his face gave no sign of what he was doing? Was there no smile? We are told by his biographer that Marcus Aurelius had a face that never changed for joy or sorrow, being an adherent he adds of the Stoic philosophy. The pose of superiority to emotion was not uncommonly held in those times to be the mark of a sage, Horaceus no admirari. The writers of the Gospels do not conceal that Jesus had feelings and expressed them. We read how he rejoiced in spirit, how he sighed and sighed deeply, how his look showed anger. They tell us of his indignant utterances, of his quick sensitiveness to a purposeful touch, of his fatigue, of his instant response, as we have just seen, to contact with such interesting spirits as the Syrophoenician woman and the rich young ruler. Above all, we find him again and again moved with compassion. We saw the leper approach him with eyes fixed on the face of Jesus. The man's appeal, if thou wilt, thou couldst make me clean. His misery moves, Jesus. He reaches out his hand and with no thought for contagion or danger, he touches the leper, so deep was the wave of pity that swept through him, and he heals the man. It would almost seem as if the touching impressed the spectators as much as the healing. Compassion is an old-fashioned word, and sympathy has a wide range of suggestions, some of them by now a little cold. We have to realize, if we can, how deeply and genuinely Jesus felt with men, how keen his feeling was for their suffering and for their hunger, and at the same moment reflect how strong and solid a nature it is that is so profoundly moved. Again, when we read of his happy way in dealing with children, are we to draw no inference as to his face, and what it told the children? Finally on this part of our subject, we are given glimpses of his dark hours. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of his offering up prayers and supplications with strong crying in tears, and learning obedience by the things that he suffered. And Luke, perhaps dealing with the same occasion, says that he was in agony, a strong phrase from a man of medical training. Luke again, with the other evangelists, refers to the temptations of Jesus, and in a later passage records the poignant and revealing sentence, E are they that have continued with me in my temptations. Finally, there is the last cry upon the cross. So frankly, and yet so unobtrusively, they lay bare his soul as far as they saw it. From what is given us, it is possible to go further and see something of his habits of mind. His thought will occupy us in later chapters. Here we are concerned rather with the way in which his mind moves and the characteristics of his thinking. First of all, we note a certain swiftness, a quick realization of a situation, a character or the meaning of a word. Men try to trap him with a question, and he instantly recognizes their trickery. When they ask for a sign, he is as quick to see what they have in mind. He catches the word whispered to Jairus, half years, half divines it in an instant. He is surprised at the slowness of mind in other men. And in other things, he is as quick. He sees the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time. He beholds Satan falling, Aorist principle, from heaven like lightning. Two very striking passages which illuminate his mind for us in a very important phase of it. We ought to have been able to guess without them that he saw things instantly and in a flash, that they stood out for him in outline and color and movement there and then. That is plain in the parables from nature, and here it is confirmed. Is there in all his parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the focus wrong? The tone of the parables is due largely to this gift of visualizing to use an ugly modern word and of doing it with swiftness and precision. Several things combined to make this faculty or at least go along with it, a combination not very common, even among men of genius, an unusual sense of fact, a very keen and vivid sympathy and a gift of bringing imagination to bear on the fact in the moment of its discovery and afterwards in his treatment of fact. On his sense of fact we have touched before in dealing with his close observation of nature. It is an observation that needs no notebook that is hardly conscious of itself. There is, as we know, a happy type of person who sees almost without looking, certainly without noticing, and sees a right too. The temperament is described by Wordsworth in the opening books of the Prelude. The poet type seems to lose so much and yet constantly surprises us by what it has captured and sometimes hardly itself realizes how much has been done. The gains are not registered, but they are real and they are never lost and come flashing out all unexpectedly when the notice struck that calls them. So, one feels, it was with Jesus's intimate knowledge of nature. It is not the knowledge of botanist or naturalist, but that of the inmate and the companion, who by a long intimacy comes to know far more than he dreams. Wise Master Manners, wrote the Greek poet Pinda long before, know the wind that shall blow out on the third day and are not wrecked for headlong greed of gain. They know the weather, as we say, by instinct. An instinct is the outcome of intimacy, of observation accurate, but self-conscious. It chimes in with this instinct for fact that Jesus should lay so much emphasis on truth of word and truth of thought. Any hypocrisy is eleven, any system of two standards of truth spoils the mind. The divided mind falls because it is not one thing or the other. It is impossible to serve God and mammon. Truth and God go together in one allegiance and a nontheocentric element in a man's thought will be fatal sooner or later to any aptitude he has by nature for God and truth. We find this illustrated in Jesus' own case. At the heart of his instinct for fact is his instinct for God. He goes to the permanent and eternal at once in his quest of fact because his instinct for God is so sure and so compelling. Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in Jesus' conversation a constant progress from the arbitrary and special to the essential and universal forms of thought, a true freedom from fastidiousness, a singular largeness in his intellectual life. The small question is answered in the larger. The life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. When he is challenged on divorce, he goes past Moses to God. He which made them at the beginning made them male and female. Every question is settled for him by reference to God and to God's principles of action and to God's laws and commands and God as we shall see in a later chapter is not for him a conception borrowed from others a quotation from a book. God is real, living and personal and all his teaching is directed to drive his disciples into the real. He insists on the open mind, the study of fact, the fresh keen eye turned on the actual doings of God when life and thought have such a center, a simplicity and an integrity follow beyond what we might readily guess. When an eye is single, thy whole body is also full of light. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light. It is this fullness of light that we find in Jesus. And as the light plays on one object and another, how clear and simple everything grows. All round him was subtlety, cleverness, fastidiousness. His speech is lucid, drive straight to the center to the principle and is intelligible. We may not see how far his word carries us, but it is abundantly plain that simple and straightforward people do understand Jesus, not all at once, but sufficiently for the moment, and with a sense that there is more beyond. His thought is uncomplicated by distinctions due to tradition and its accidents. His whole attitude to life is simple. He has no taboos. He comes eating and drinking, and he told his followers when he sent them out to preach, to eat what they were given, give alms, he says, of such things as he have, and behold, all things are clean unto you. If God gives the food, it will probably be clean, and the old taboos will be mere tradition of men. He is not interested in what men call signs in the exceptional thing. The ordinary suffices when once he's got in it. One of Jesus's great lessons is to get men to look for God in the commonplace things of which God makes so many as if Abraham Lincoln were right, and God did make so many common people because he likes them best. The commonest flowers, God thinks them out, says Jesus, and takes care of them. Hence, there is very little need of special machinery for contact with God, priesthoods, trances, visions, or mystical states, abnormal means for contact with the normal. When Jesus speaks of the very highest and holiest things, he is as simple and natural as when he is making a table in the carpenter's shop. Sense and sanity are the marks of his religion. Center fact is a phrase which does not exclude, perhaps Stephen suggests, some hint of dullness. The matter of fact, people are valuable in their way, but rarely allumative, and it is because they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus's case, there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy. He likes the birds and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations. They are not the natural objects with which dull people try to brighten their pages and discourses. They are happy living things that come to his mind, as it were, of themselves, because, how shall we say, they know that they will be welcome there, and they are welcome. His pity and sympathy are unlike ours in having so much more intelligence and fellow feeling in them. He understands men and women as his gift of bright and winning speech shows. After all, as Carlisle has pointed out in so many places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding of sympathy that gives the measure of our intellects. It is the faculty by which men touch fact and master it. It is the want of it that makes so many clever and ingenious people so futile and distressing. The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy are the foundations, so to speak, of the imagination which gives their quality to the stories and pictures of Jesus. He thinks in pictures, as it were, they fill his speech and every one of them is alive and real. Think, for example, of the light of the world, the straight gate and the narrow way, the pictures of the bridegroom, so were Pearl Merchant and the men with the net, the sheep among the wolves, the woman sweeping the house, the debtor going to prison accompanied by his creditor, the officer with the judge's warrant, the shepherd separating the sheep from the goats, the children playing in the marketplace pretending to pipe or to mourn the fall of the house, or the ironical pictures of the blind leading the blind straight for the ditch, the vintagers taking their baskets to the bramble bushes, the candle burning away brightly into the buttle, the offering of pearls to the pigs, or his description of what lay before him as a cup and a baptism and of his task as the setting fire to the world. There is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these pictures, not least about those touched with irony. There are, however, pictures less realistic and more imaginative. One or two of them, in the language of the fireside, quite creepy. Here is a house, a neat, trim little house, and for the English reader there is of course a garden or a field round it and a wood beyond. Out of the wood comes something, stealthily creeping up towards the house, something not easy to make out, but weary and travel-stained and dusty and evil. A strange feeling comes over one as one watches. It is evil. One is certain of it. Nearer and nearer to the house it creeps. It is by the window. It rises to look in and one shudders to think of those inside who suddenly see that looking at them through the window. But there is no one there. Fatigue changes to triumph. Caution is dropped. It goes and returns with seven worse than itself and the last state of the place is worse than the first. Is this leaving the real? One critic will say it is. No, says another man, in a graver tone and speaking slowly. It's real enough. It's my story. But have we left the text too far? Then let us try another passage. Here is a funeral procession, a beer with a dead man laid out on it, wrapped in a linen cloth, bound head and foot with grave-clothes. They're common enough sight in the East, but who are they who are carrying him? Those silent, awful figures bound like him, hand and foot, and wound with the same linen cloth, moving swiftly and steadily along with their burden. It is the dead, burying the dead. Add to these the account of the three temptations, stories in picture which must come from Jesus himself, and illustrate another side of his experience. For to the mind that sees and thinks in pictures, temptation comes in pictures which the mind makes for itself, or has presented to it, and at once lights up, pictures horrible, and once seen, hard to forget and to escape. No wonder he warns men against the pictures they paint themselves in their minds. Add also the other pictures of Satan fallen, and Satan pushing into God's presence with the demand for the disciples. Are we to call these visions? The word is ambiguous. Or are they imaginative presentiments of evil, as it thrust itself on the soul with all its allurements, and all its ugliness? Visions in the sense that is associated with tramps we shall hardly call them. They are pictures showing his gift of imagination. Lastly, on this part of our subject, let us remind ourselves of the many parables and pictures and sayings which put God himself before us. Here is the bird's nest, and the one little sparrow fallen to the ground. And God is there, and he takes notice of it. He misses the little bird from the brood. Here again is quite another scene, the rich and middle-aged man who has prospered in everything and is just completing his plans to retire from business, when he feels a tap on his shoulder, and hears a voice speaking to him, and he turns, and his face to face with God. And are there all the other stories of God's goodness, and kindness, and care? Is not the very phrase, Our Father in Heaven, a picture in itself, if we can manage to give the word the value which Jesus meant it to carry. When one studies the teaching of Jesus and concentrates on what he draws us of God, God somehow becomes real and delightful in a most wonderful way. With all these faculties brought to bear on all he thinks and loosened in all he says, there is little wonder that men recognized another note in Jesus from that familiar in their usual teachers. Rabbi Eliezer of those times was praised as a well trough that loses not a drop of water. We all know that type of teacher, the tank mind, for no doubt supplied by pipes and ministering its gifts by pipe and tap, regulated, tiresome, and dead. The water that I shall give him, says Jesus in the fourth gospel, shall be in him a well of water, springing up to eternal life. The water metaphors of the New Testament are not of trough and tank. Jesus taught men, not from a reservoir of quotations like a scribe or a rabbi, but possessed of authority itself. Who gave him that authority? asked the priests. Who authorizes the living man to live? All things are delivered unto me of my father. My word shall not pass away. He has proved right. His words have not passed away. The great son of fact, he went to fact, drove his disciples to fact, and in the striking phrase of Cromwell, spoke things. And we can see in the record again and again the traces of the mental habits and the natural language of one who habitually based himself on experience and on fact. Critics remark on his method of using the Old Testament and contrast it with contemporary ways. St. Paul, for instance, in the passage where he weighs the reading's seeds and seed, is plainly racking language to the destruction of its real sense. No one would ever have written seeds in that connection. But in the style of the day, he forces a singular into an utterly non-natural significance. St. Matthew, in his first two chapters, proves the events which he describes to have been prophesied by citing Old Testament passages, two of which can conspicuously refer to entirely different matters and do not mean at all what he suggests. The Hebrew with the Old Testament, like the Greek of those days with Homer, made what play he pleased. If the words fit his fancy, he took them regardless of connection or real meaning. If he was pressed for a defense, he would take refuge in allegory. A fashion was set for the church which bore bad fruit. The Old Testament was emptied of meaning to fortify the Christian faith with proof texts. When Jesus quotes the Old Testament, it is for other ends and with a clear, incisive sense of the prophet's meaning. Go ye and learn what that meaneth. I will have mercy and not sacrifice. He not merely quotes Hosea, but it is plain that he has got at the very heart of the man and his message. Similarly, when he reads Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, he lays hold of a great passage and brings out with emphasis its value and its promise. He touches the real and no lapse of time makes his quotations look odd or quaint. When he is asked, which is the first commandment of all, he at once, with what a modern writer calls a brilliant flash of the highest genius, links a text in Deuteronomy with one in Leviticus. Hero Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength. And yet, the second is like, namely this, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none of the commandment greater than these. Thus his instinct for God and his instinct for the essential, carry him to the very centre and acme of Moses' law. At the same time, he can use the Old Testament in an efficient way for dialectic when an argumentum ad hominem best meets the case. Going to fact directly and reading the Bible on his own account, he is the great pioneer of the Christian habit of mind. He is not idly called the Captain by the writer to the Hebrews. Authority and tradition only too readily assume control of human life. But a mind like that of Jesus, like that which he gave to his followers will never be bound by authority and tradition. Moses is very well, but if God has higher ideas of marriage than what? The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, but that does not make them equal to Moses. Still less does it make their traditions of more importance than God's commandments. The Sabbath itself was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Where the habit of mind is thus set to fact, and life is based on God, on God's will and God's doings, it is not surprising that in the daily round there should be noted sanity, reserve, composure and steadiness. It may seem to be descending to a lower plane, but it is worthwhile to look for a moment at the sheer sense which Jesus can bring to bear on the situation. The Sabbath, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Well if a man's sheep is in a pit on the Sabbath, what will he do? Or will he refrain from leading his ox to the water on the Sabbath? Such questions bring a theological problem into the atmosphere of sense, and it is better solved there. He is interrupted by a demand that he arbitrate between a man and his brother, and his reply is virtually, does your brother accept your choice of an arbitrator? And that matter is finished. Are there few that can be saved? Ask someone in vague speculation, and he gets a practical answer addressed to himself. Even in matters of ordinary manners and good taste, he offers a shrewd rule. Luke records also two or three instances of perfectly banal talk and ejaculation addressed to him. The bizarre talk of the Galilean murders, the pious, if rather obvious remark of some man about feasting in the Kingdom of God, and the woman's homey congratulation of Mary on her son. In each case, he gets away to something serious. Above all, we must recognize the power which everyone felt in him. Even Herod, judging by rumour, counts him greater than John the Baptist. The very malignity of his enemies is a confession of their recognition that they are dealing with someone who is great. Men remarked his sedative and controlling influence over the disordered mind. He is not to be trapped in his talk to be controlled or flattered. There is greatness in his language, in his reference of everything to great principles and to God. Greatness in his freedom from ambition, in his contempt of advertisement and popularity, in his appeal to the best in men, in his belief in men, in his power of winning and keeping friends, in his gift for making great men out of petty. In all this, we are not stepping outside the Gospels nor borrowing from what he has done in nineteenth centuries. In Galilee and in Jerusalem, men felt his power. And so finally what of his calm, his sanity, his dignity in the hour of betrayal, in the so-called trials before the priests, before Pilate on the cross. The Pharisees, said Tertullian, ought to have recognized who Christ was by his patience. End of chapter 3. Chapter 4 of The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4, The Teacher and His Disciples. It was as a teacher that Jesus of Nazareth first began to gather disciples around him. But to understand the work of the teacher, we must have some general impression of the world to which he came. The background will harp us understand what had to be done and what it was he meant to do. Bishop Gore, in a book recently published, suggested that the belief that God is love is not axiomatic. Many of us take it for granted as the point at which religion naturally begins. But, as he emphasized, it is not an obvious truth. It is something of which we have to be convinced. Something that has to be made good to men. Unless we bear this in mind, we shall miss a great deal of what Jesus has really done by assuming that he was not needed to do it. Out of a darker world than ours came this new spring. We must look at the world as it was when Jesus came. In a later chapter we shall have to consider more fully the religions of the Roman world. One or two points may be anticipated. First of all we have to realize what a hard world it was. Men and women are harder than we sometimes think and the natural hardness to which the human heart grows of itself needed more correction than it had in those days. Among the many papyrus documents that have been found in late years in Egypt, documents that have pictured for us the life of Egypt and have recorded for us also the language of the New Testament in a most illuminative way, there is one that illustrates only too aptly the unconscious hardness of the times. It is a letter, no literary letter, no letter that anyone would ordinarily have thought of keeping. It has survived by accident. It was written by an Egyptian Greek to his wife. She lived somewhere up the country and he had gone to Alexandria. She had been expecting a baby when he left and he wrote a rough but not an unkind letter to her. He writes, Hilarian to Alice, greetings. Know that we are still even now in Alexandria. Do not fidget if at the general return I stay in Alexandria. I pray and beseech you, take care of the little child and as soon as we have our wages I will send you up something. If you were delivered if it was a male let it live. If it was a female cast it out. How can I forget you? So don't fidget. The letter is not an unkind one. It is sympathetic. Masculine, direct and friendly. And then it ends with the suggestion inconceivable to us today that if the baby is a girl it need not be kept. It can be put out either on the land or in the river left to kite or crocodile. The evidence of satirists is generally to be discounted because they tend to emphasize the exceptional and it is not the exceptional thing that gives the character of an age or of a man. It is the kind of thing that we take for granted and assumed to be normal that shows our character or gives the note of the day. And what we admit to notice may be as revealing. In the place of the Athenian comic poets of the third and fourth centuries B.C. we find, too wearisomeness, one recurring plot. The heroine turns out to be not just a common girl but the daughter of the best family in Athens, exposed when she was a baby. When Plato sketched his ideal constitution, in addition to the mating of suitable pairs to be decided by government, he added that if the offspring were not good enough it should be put away where it would not be found again. Aristotle allowed the same practice. The most cultured race on earth freely exposed its infants, and this letter of Hilarion to Alice, a dated letter, by the way, of September or October in the year 1 AD, makes it clear that the practice of exposure of children still prevailed, and there is other evidence which need not now detain us. It is a hard world where kind people or good people can think of such things as ordinary and natural. Evidence of the character of an age is given by the treatment of criminals, and that age was characterised by crucifixion. They would take a human being, spread him out on a cross on the ground, drive nails through his hands and feet, and then the cross was raised. The agony of the victim during the movement is not to be imagined. It was made fast, and there the victim hung, suspended between heaven and earth, to live or die at his leisure. By and by crows would gather around him. I have been good, said the slave. Then you have your reward, says the Latin poet. You will not feed the crows on the cross. There is a very striking phrase in St. Matthew. And sitting down they watched him there. The soldiers nailed three men to crosses, and sat down beneath them to dice for their clothes. Our tolerances, like our utterances, come out of the abundance of the heart, and stamp us for what we are. We cannot easily realise all that slavery meant. When we read in the Fourth Gospel that the Lamb of God taken away the sin of the world, that was written before Jesus Christ had abolished slavery. For, we remember, it was done by his people against the judgment of the business experts. Slavery went robbing the man of every right that nature gave him. And as Homer said long ago, far-seeing's use takes away half a man's manhood when he brings the day of slavery upon him, he became a thief, a liar, dirty and bad. And with the woman it was still worse. The slave woman was a little lower than the animal. She might not have offspring. It was natural, men said. Nature had designed certain races to be slaves. Slavery was written in nature. It was nature's law. These were not the thoughts of vulgar people, but of some of the best of the Greeks. Not of all indeed, but society was organised on the basis of slavery. It was an accepted axiom of all social and economic life, as to the spirited world background. For the present, let us postpone the heathen world and consider the Jews, who represented in some ways the world's highest at this period. Modern scholarship is shedding fresh light on the literature and ideas that were prevalent between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. But what uncertainty about God? Why some people should think that it was easier to believe in God in those days than now. I do not see. Far less was known of God. The record of his doings was not so long as it is for us, and it was not so well known. No one could understand what God meant, if he was quite clear himself. Look at what he did with the nation. He chose Israel. He established the kingdom of David. They did not get on very well, and at last were carried away into captivity in Babylon. So much he did for his people, and when he brought them back again to the promised land, it was to a very trying and difficult situation, and were still followed after Nehemiah's day. Alexander the Great's conquest of the East left a Macedonian dynasty ruling those regions, and one of their great kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to stamp out the religion of Jehovah altogether. The Book of Daniel is a record of that persecution, about 166 BC. The Maccabean brothers delivered Israel and rescued the religion of Jehovah, and a kingdom of assault was established with them, but the grandsons of the Liberators became tyrants. What did God mean? Out of all the promises to Israel, to the House of David, this is what comes. Herod follows, a foreign king and a needsomite, and the Romans are over all, Suzerains, and rulers. In despair of the present, men began to forecast the future. A time will surely come, they said, when God will give an anointed one, the Messiah, he will set all Israel free. He will make Israel rule the world instead of the Romans. He will gather together the scattered of Israel from the four winds, reunite, and assemble God's people in triumph in Palestine. And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man spoke, I don't care if he does. My father, all his life, looked forward to that. What does it matter now if God redeems his people, or if he does not? My father is dead. The answer was, why should your father not come with the redeemed Israel? But what evidence is there for that? Does God care for people beyond the grave? Is there personal immortality? That became the anxious question. But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven? Are you quite sure that there is any distinction in the other world between good and bad, between Jew and Gentile? Some people thought the kingdom would be in Jerusalem. Others said it would be in heaven, and added that the Jews will look down and see the Gentiles in hell. Something worth seeing at last. But after all, it was still guesswork. Perhaps was the last word. When the question is asked, was Jesus the Messiah? The obvious reply is, which Messiah? For there seems to have been no standard idea of the Messiah. The Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term as in modern politics, socialism or tariff reform. Neither of them has come. Perhaps they never will come and nobody knows what they will be till they do come. Jesus is not what they expected. A Jewish girl at an American student conference a year or two ago said about Jesus, I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him. Of course, he was not in her Jewish sense. The term was a vague one. The main point was that men were uncertain about God. God was unintelligible. They did not understand his ideas, either for the nation or for the individual. God's plans miscarried with such fatality. Or if he had some deeper design, it was still all guesswork. It seemed likely or at least right that he should achieve somehow the final damnation of the Gentiles, the Romans and the rest of us. But nothing was very clear. In the meantime, if God was going to damn the Gentiles in the next world, why should not the Jews do it in this? Human nature has only two ready in answer for such a question. As we can read in too many dark pages of history in the stories of wars and religious persecutions, the uncertainty about God in Judaism reacted on life and made it hard. Even the virtues of men were difficult. They were apt to be nervous and uncertain because their aim was uncertain and they wanted inspiration. Of course there are always kindly hearts, but a man will never put forth quite his best for an uncertainty. There was a want of centre about their virtues, a want of faith and as a result they were too largely self-directed. A man was virtuous in order to secure himself in case God should be awkward. There was no sufficient relation between God and man. God was judge, no doubt, but his character could be known from his attitude to the Gentiles. Could a man count on God? And how far? Could he rely on God supporting him on God wishing to have him in this world and the next? No, not with any certainty. It comes to a fundamental unbelief in God resting, as Jesus saw, on an essential misconception of God's nature and this resulted in the spoiling of life. Men did not use God. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also, Jesus said, and it was not in God. Men's interest and belief were elsewhere. Now the first thing that Jesus had to do as a teacher was to induce men to rethink God. Men, he saw, do not want precepts. They do not want ethics, morals or rules. What they do need is to rethink God, to rediscover him, to re-explore him, to live on the basis of relation with God. There is one striking difference between Christianity and the other religions in that the others start off with the idea that God is known. Christians do not so start. We are still exploring God on the lines of Jesus Christ, rethinking God all the time, finding him out. That is what Jesus meant us to do. If Jesus had merely put before men an ethical code, that would have been to do what the moralists had done before him, what moralists always do with the same naive idea that they are doing a great deal for us. His object was far more fundamental. The first thing was to bring people onto the very center and to get there at once, to get men away from the accumulation of occasional and self-directed virtues, from the self-sustained life, from self-acquired righteousness and to bring them to face the fact of God, to realize the seriousness of God and of life and to see God. When he preached self-denial he did not mean the modern virtue of self-denial with all its pettinesses but a genuine negation of self, a total forgetfulness of self by having the mind set entirely on God and God's purposes. A readjustment of everything with God as the real center of all. This is always difficult. It is not less difficult where the conception of God is, as it was with Jesus, entirely spiritual. The whole experience of mankind was against the idea that there could be a religion at all without priest, sacrifice, altar, temple and the like. There is a very minimum of symbol and cult in the teaching of Jesus, so little that the ancient world thought the Christians were atheists because they had no image, no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested religion in the ordinary sense of the word. We shall realize the difficulty of what Jesus was doing when we grasp that he meant people to see God independently of all their conventional aids. To lead them to commit themselves in act to God on such terms was a still far more difficult thing. To believe in God in a general sort of way, to believe in providence at large is a very different thing from getting yourself crucified in the faith that God cares for you and yet somehow wishes you to endure crucifixion. How far will men commit themselves to God? Jesus means them to commit themselves to God right up to the hills. As Bunyan put it, to hazard all for God at a clap. Decision for God, obedience to God, that is the prime thing, action on the basis of God and of God's care for the individual. His purpose that this shall not be merely the religion of choice spirits or of those immediately around him but shall be the one religion of all the world makes the tasks to a vaster. He means not merely to touch the Jews. Whether he says so in explicit terms or not it is implied in all that he says and does that the new movement should be far wider than anything the world had ever seen. It was to cover the whole of mankind. He meant that every individual in all the world should have the centre of gravity of his thinking shifted. Again, he had to think of a recreation of the language of men till God should be seen as a new word. Our constant problem is to give his word his value, his meaning. He meant that men should learn their religious vocabulary again till the words they used should suggest his meanings to their minds. Something of this was achieved when some of his disciples came to him and said, Teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. Further, he had to secure that men should begin the rethinking of all life, personal, social and national from the very foundations on new lines. What is called a transvaluation of all values. With a new centre everything has to be thought out in you into what St. Paul calls the fullness of Christ. Then finally the question comes how to secure continuity? Will the movement outlast his personal influence? These are his problems. Large enough, every one of them. How does he face them? The Gospel began with friendship and we know from common life what that is and how it works. Old acquaintance and intimacy are the heart of it. The mind is on the alert when we meet the stranger, quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought to see who and what he is. It is critical, self-protective rather than receptive, but as time goes on we notice less, we study the man less as we see more off him. Yet in this easier and more careless intercourse when the mind is off guard it is receiving a host of unnoticed impressions which in the long run may have extraordinary influence. Pleasant and easygoing, a perpetual source of interest and the rest of mind, the friendship continues till we find to our surprise that we are changed. Stage by stage, as one comes to know one's friend by unconscious and freely given sympathy, one lives the other man's life, sees and feels things as he does, slips into his language and, by degrees, into his thoughts and then wakes up to find oneself, as it were, remade by the other's personality so close has been the identification with the man we grew to love. This is what we find in our own lives and we find it in the Gospels. Ascented from St. Augustine's Confessions gives us the key to the whole story. Said ex animata, alio accentito alias, one loving spirit sets another on fire. Jesus brings men to the new exploration of God, to the new commitment of themselves to God, simply by the ordinary mechanism of friendship and love. This, in plain English, is, after all, the idea of the incarnation, friendship and identification. Jesus has a genius for friendship, a gift for understanding the feelings of men. Look, for example, at the quick word to Jairus. As soon as the message comes to him that his daughter is dead, Jesus wheels round on him at once with a word of courage. This quickness in understanding, in feeling with people, marks him throughout. An instinctive care for other people's small necessities is a great mark of friendship and Jesus has it. We find him saying to his disciples, come ye yourselves apart privately into a desert place and rest awhile. What a beautiful suggestion. He himself, it is clear from the records, felt the need of privacy, being by oneself, of quiet. And he took his quiet hours in the open, in the wild, where there was solitude in nature and there, he would take his friends. There were so many coming and going that they had no leisure to eat. And Jesus says to them in his friendly way, let us get out of this, away by ourselves, into a quiet place. What you want is rest. What a beautiful idea to go camping on the hillside under the trees to rest and with him to share the quiet of the lonely place. It is not the only time when he offers to give people rest. Come unto me and I will give you rest. How strange when one thinks of the restless activity of Christian people today with typewriters and conventions and every modern method of consuming energy and time. How sympathetic he is. We may notice again his respect for the reserve of other people. On the whole, how slowly Jesus comes to work with men. He never rushes the human spirit. He respects men's personalities. Men and women are never pawns with him. He does not think of them in masses. The masses appeal to him, but that is because he sees the individual all the time. To one of his disciples, he says, I have prayed for thee. What a contrast to the conventional friend of man in the abstract. With all that hangs upon him, he has the leisure to pray intensely for a single man. It gives us an idea of his gift and friendship. His faith in his people is quite remarkable when we think of it. He believes in his followers. He shares with them some of the deepest things in his life. He counts them fit to share his thought of God. He makes it quite clear to them how he trusts them. He puts before them the tremendous work that he has to do. Work more appealing in its vastness the more one studies it. And then he tells them that he is trusting the whole thing with them. What a faith it implies in their moral capacity. What acceptance of the dim beginnings of the character that was to be Christian. Someone has spoken of his apparently unjustified faith in Peter. What names he can give his friends as a result of his faith in them. Ye are the light of the world, he says, the salt of the earth. When we remind ourselves of his clear vision, his genius for seeing fact, how much such praises have meant to those men. Think how he gives himself to them in earnest. How he is at their disposal. He is theirs. They can cross question him at leisure. They can tell him that the Pharisees did not like what he said. They doubt with Peter the wisdom of his open speech. They criticize him. If they do not understand his parable, they ask what he means and keep on asking till he makes it plain. He is in no hurry. He is the master and their teacher and he is at the service of the slowest of them. But there is another side of friendship. For one great part of it is taking what our friends do for us as well as doing things for them. How he will take what they have to give. He lets them manage the boat while he sleeps and go and prepare for him and see to the Passover meal. The women, we read, minister to him of their substance. There is a very significant phrase in St. Luke where he says to them at the end, Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations. He tells them there that they have helped him. How? Apparently by being with him. Is not that friendship? In the same chapter we find an utterance that reveals the depth of his feeling for his friends. With desire I have desired a Greek rendering of Semitic intensive. Tweet this Passover with you before I suffer. They are to help him again by being with him and he has longed for it, he says. The Gospel of John sums up the whole story in a beautiful sentence. Jesus having loved his own which were in the world loved them and to the end. Augustus is right. One loving spirit sets another on fire. Note again the word he uses in speaking to them. Tecna. It is a diminutive, a little disguises children in our English version. It reappears in the fourth Gospel in even more diminutive forms with a particularly tender suggestion. The word of Mark answers more closely than anything I know to boys as we use it in the Canadian universities. Men or undergraduates is the word of the English universities, students in Scotland and in India. In Canada we said boys and I think we get nearer and like one another better with that easy name. And it was that easy present word or one very like it that he used with them. Nor is it the only one of the kind. Fear not little flock, he said. Do not the diminuatives mean something? Do they not take us into the midst of a group where friendship is real? And in the centre is the friendliest figure of all. Look for a moment at the men who followed him at the type he calls. They are simple people in the main, warm hearts and impulsive natures. The politics of Simon the zealot might at one time have been summed up as the knife and plenty of it. A simple and direct enough type of political thought in all conscience. However hopeless and ineffectual as history showed. But he gave up his politics for the friendship of Jesus. Peter again is the champion example of the impulsive nature. Why Jesus called James and John the son of thunder? I am not sure. Dr. Randall Harris thinks because they were twins. Other people find something of the thunderstorm in their ideas and outlook. The publican in the group is much of the same type. He is ready to leave his business and his custom house at a word. Once more, the impulsive nature and the simple. It is possible that Jesus looked also to another type of which he gained very little in his lifetime. For he speaks of the scribe who has turned disciple again and brings out of his treasure things new and old. The more complicated type of the trained scholar full of the old learning but open to new views. In the meantime he draws to him people with the warm heart. Yes he said but cultivate the cool head. Again and again he will have men counter the cost know what they are doing be rid of delusions before they follow him. What did they expect? They had all sorts of dreams of the future. When we first find them there is friction among them which is not unusually a group of men with ambitions. Even at the last supper their minds run on thrones. They are haunted by taboos. Peter long after boasts that nothing common or unclean has entered his lips. They fail to understand him. Are he also without understanding? He asks not without surprise. At the very end they run away. There then is the group. What is to be the method? There is not much method. As Harnock says about the spread of the early church a living faith needs no special methods a sentence worth remembering. Infinite love in ordinary intercourse is another phrase of Harnock in describing the life of the early church. It began with Jesus. He chose twelve says Mark. That they may be with him. That is all. And they are with him under all sorts of circumstances. The son of man hath not where to lay his head. They saw him in privation fatigued exhausted. With every chance to see weakness in his character they did not find much amiss with him. That is surely significant. They lived with him all the time in a genuine human friendship a real and progressive intimacy. They were with him in popularity and in unpopularity. They were with him in danger when Herod tried to kill him and he went out of Herod's territory. But friendship depends not only on great moments it means companionship in the trivial too. It means idle hours together partnership in commonplace things meal and garden chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary life ordinary talk gossip chat every kind of conversation about Herod's and Roman governess and the zealots custom house memories tales of the fisherman's life on the lake stories of neighbors and home rumors about the Galileans who were murdered by Pilate. All the babbling talk of the Bazaar is round Jesus and his group and some of it breaks in on them and his attitude to it all is to those men a constant revelation of his character. They are with him in the play of feelings with him in the fluxes and refluxes of his thought learning his ways of mind without realizing it. They slip into his mind and mood by a series of surprises when they are imagining no such thing. Anything everything serves to reveal him. They tramp all day and ask some village people to shelter them for the night. The villagers tell them to go away. The men are hungry and fatigued. What a splendid thing it would be if we could do like Elijah and burn them up with a word so the hot thought rose. He turned and said you know not what manner of spirit you were of. What a gentle rebuke. The son of man has not come to destroy men's lives but to save them. Then follows one of the wonderful sentences of the gospel. They went on to another village very obvious but very significant. A missionary from China told me how 30 years ago or more he was driven out of the town where he lived how the gentlefolk egged on the mob and they wrecked his house and hounded him out of the place. He told me how it felt the misery and the indignity of it. Jesus took it undisturbed. He taught a lesson in it which the church has never forgotten. Their life was full of experiences shared with him. He has his reserve, his secret. Yet in another sense he gives himself to them without reserve. There is prodigality of self-impartation in his dealings with them. He lets them have everything they can take. He becomes theirs in a great intimacy. He gives himself to them. Why? Because he believes, as he put it, in seed. Socrates saw that at the teacher's real work his only work is to implant the idea like a seed. An idea like a seed will look after itself. A king builds a temple or a palace. The seed of a banyan drifts down into a crack and grows without asking anyone's leave. There is life in it. In the end the building comes down but for what the banyan holds up. The leaven in the mule is the most powerful thing there. There is very little of it but that does not matter. It is alive. Life is a very little thing but it is the only thing that counts. That is why the farmer can sow his fields and sleep at night without thinking of them and the crop grows in spite of his sleeping and he knows it. That is why Jesus believes so thoroughly in his men and in his message. God has made one for the other and there is no fear of mischance. Look at his method of teaching. People marveled at his words of charm hung about him to hear him. He said that the word is the overflow of the heart. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. What a heart then his words reveal. How easy and straightforward his language is. Today we all use abstract nouns to convey our meaning. We cannot do without words ending in ality and anon but there is no recorded saying of Jesus where he uses even personality. He does not use abstract nouns. He sticks to plain words. When he speaks about God he does not say the great first cause or providence or any other vague abstract. Still less does he use an adverb from the abstract like providentially. He says your heavenly father. He does not talk of humanity. He says your brethren. He has no jargon no technical terms no scholastic vocabulary. He urges men not to over study language. Their speech must be simple. The natural spontaneous overflow of the heart. Jesus told his disciples not to think out beforehand what they would say when in trial. It would be given to them. He was perfectly right and when Christians obeyed him they always spoke much better than when they thought out speeches beforehand. They said much less for one thing and they said it much better. Take the case of the martyr an early and historical one whose two speeches were during her trial Christiana Sum and on her condemnation Deogratius. With this remark his own gift of a resting phrase the freshness of his language how free it is from quotation how natural and how extra ordinarily simple. Everything worthwhile can be put in simple language and if the speech is complicated it is a call to think again. As a woman overcuriously trimmed is to be mistrusted so is a speech said John Robinson of laden the minister of the pilgrim fathers. The language of Jesus is simple and direct the inevitable expression of a rich nature and a habit of truth. You feel he does not strain after effect epigram, antithesis or alliteration of course he uses such things like all real speakers but he does not go out of his way for them. No and so much the more significant are such characteristic antithesis as you cannot serve God and mammon and whosoever shall save his life shall lose it coming with a spontaneous flash and answering in their sharpness to the sharp edges of life. His words caught the attention and lived in the memory. They revealed such a nature they were so living and unforgettable. Remark once again is preference for the actual and the ordinary. There are religions in which holiness involves unusual conditions and special diet. Some forms of mysticism seem to be incompatible with married life but the type of holiness which Jesus teaches can be achieved with an ordinary diet and a wife and five children. He had lived himself in a family of eight or nine. It is perhaps harder but it is a richer sanctity if the real mark of a saint is as we have been told that he makes it easier for others to believe in God. In any case the ordinary is always good enough with Jesus. Only he would have men go deeper always deeper. Why can you not think for yourselves? he asks. Signs were what men demanded. He pictures divas his mind running on signs even in hell. What could you do with signs? Look at what you have already. You read the weather for tomorrow by looking at the sky today. The south wind means heat. The red sky fair weather. Study. Look. Think. His animals as we saw are all real animals. It is real observation. Real analogy. When he speaks of the lost sheep it is not a fictitious joy that he describes or an imaginary one. It is real. The more we examine his sayings with any touch of his spirit the more we wonder. Of course it is possible to handle them in the wrong way to miss the real thought and make folly of everything. Thus when he says he is the door the interpreter may strain to silly detail and make faith the key and I don't know what the panels and hinges could be. That is not the style of Jesus. The soul of the thing the great central meaning the real analogy is his concern. Seriousness in observation seriousness in reflection is what he teaches. Men and women break down for want of thinking things out. Many things become possible to those who think seriously as he did and so to speak without watertight compartments. Jesus is always urging seriousness in reflection. Seriousness in action too is one of his lessons. An emphasis on doing but on doing with a clear sense of what one is about and why. A part of the action is clear thought always exactness accuracy. You must think the thing out he says and then act or let it alone. The artistic temperament we all know is very much an evidence today. In the comment of Bagshot we are told that the drawback is that there is so much temperament and so little art. Why? Because the artistic temperament means so little by itself. It is one of the secrets of Jesus that it is action that illuminates. What is it that makes the poem? The poet sees beggar children running races or little Edward in the weathercock or something greater if you like the light of the woman's hair or a flower and you say he has his poem. He is not. He must work at the thing. When we study the great poets we realise how these things are worked out to the point of nerve strain and exhaustion. The poet devotes himself heart and soul to the work. He alters this and that once and again. He sees a fresh aspect of the thing and he alters all again. He writes and rewrites getting deeper and deeper into the essential values of the thing all the time. Where in all this is the artistic temperament? It gave him the impulse but something else achieved the work of art. I have the feeling that the great works of art are achieved by the shopkeeper virtues in addition to the artistic temperament that sees and feels them at the beginning. It is action that gives the value of a thought. Jesus sees that. He says that frankly to his disciples. If you want to understand in the long run it is carrying the cross that will teach you the real values. I have been treating him almost as if he were an authority on pedagogy. Fortunately he never discussed pedagogy never used the terms I have been using. But he dealt with men he taught and he influenced them and it is worth our study to understand how he did it to master his methods. One loving spirit sets another on fire. As for the effect of his words at once as Seely put it they were seething effervescence broodings resolutions travel of heart men were brought face to face with a new issue. It was a time of choice things would not be as they were men must be with him or against him must accept or reject the new teaching the new teacher the new life. As he said I came to send fire on the earth to divide families to divide the individual soul against itself till the great choice was made and so it has always been where men have really seen him. We have to notice further the transformation of the disciples who definitely accepted him. Very wonderful to me wrote Phillips Brooks to see how the disciples caught his method. The promise was made to them that they should become fishes of men and it was fulfilled. Jesus made them strong enough to defy the world and to capture the world. There is something attractive about them they have his secret something of his charm they are magnetic with his power. A new impulse to win men marks them a new power to do it a new faith which grows in significance as you study it the faith of William Carrey a hundred years ago was the same thing a perfectly incredible faith that they actually will win men for God and Christ and they did and along his lines and by his methods of love even for Gentiles. Woe is me if I preach not the gospel said St. Paul who to preach the gospel shipwrecked his life and suffered the loss of all things but these men are sure that it is worthwhile. They have a new passion for men and women an interest not merely in saving of their souls but in every real human need. The early church made a point of teaching men trades when they had none they learnt all this from him the greatest miracle in history seems to me the transformation that Jesus affected in those men everything else in Christian or secular history compared to it seems easy and explicable and it was achieved by the love of Jesus the church spread over the world without social machinery the gospel was preached instinctively naturally the earliest Christians were persecuted in Jerusalem and were driven out I picture one of them in flight on his journey he falls in with a stranger before he knows what he is doing he is telling his fellow traveller about Jesus it follows from his explanation of why he is on the road he warms up as he speaks he never really thought about the danger of doing so and the stranger wants to know more he is captured by the message and he too becomes a Christian and then this involuntary preacher of the gospel is embarrassed to learn that the man is a Gentile he had not thought of that I think that is how it began so naturally and spontaneously these people are so full of love of Jesus that they are bound to speak one loving heart sets another on fire