not drawn from objects which both he and his hearers had seen. If English poets followed this rule they would have to banish lions, tigers, avalanches, crevasses, and a great deal beside from their compositions. Now Jesus always kept within the limits of his own experience. His inexhaustible wealth of illustration never leads him outside the circle of his own daily life. Hence the unequalled vividness of all his sayings. And in a certain sense the matter of his teaching is as familiar as its form. He never used an argument or a proof which any of his hearers could not follow. Fully to appreciate his discourses and his parables needed no learning or special knowledge that is not in the reach of every clear head and pure heart. It needed only that knowledge of the world and life, that knowledge of human nature, that selfknowledge for which every true man strives. Indeed, even this was hardly necessary. The one fatal obstacle to comprehending Jesus was a belief on the part of those that heard him that they knew every thing, and were all that they should be already. The one thing needful was a conscience laid open to his influence by dissatisfaction with itself, and a burning desire to become purer and better, a conscience eager to learn the truth instead of being fenced against it by its own prejudices. Jesus never forced a truth upon any one by authority. Though he spoke with all the power of intense conviction, yet he constantly appealed to his hearers themselves, to their sense of truth, to their affections, to their conscience, and loved to convince them by a question or an appeal: "What think you?" "What man is there among you, who . . . "Judge for yourselves!" "Hearken and

understand!" 1 For he always went on the belief that he had not to implant any new principle or pour any new affections into human nature, but had simply to call from its depths what was sleeping there already and bring it into conscious life. It was in his own heart and life that he had found the truths he preached; and if he could but free the inner lives of others from all that oppressed and entangled them; if he could but bring their spiritual powers to full and true development, they too would come to experience, to know, to feel, what he had known and felt himself. It may well be said of Jesus that he did not preach a new doctrine, but a new life. What he preached he had first lived and felt, and the natural consequence was that he found an ally in the conscience of every true-hearted man. If we bear all 1 Matthew vii. 9, 16, xv. 10, xxi. 28; Luke vii. 40, 42, x. 36, et seq.

this in mind, and remember his love of parables and the richness of metaphor and illustration which characterized his teaching, we shall not be at a loss to answer the question whether Jesus was a popular teacher.

For the rest we can ascribe no dazzling gifts to him. He appears to have been entirely without those qualities which catch the eye and take the imagination by storm. On the whole, his appearance and his address seem to have been exceedingly simple. Externally, one would have said, he had little or nothing to help him. We still possess a story in our Gospels which may be regarded as an emblematic description of the way in which Jesus, as a popular teacher, satisfied the spiritual wants of countless hearers with but the slenderest possible means at his disposal.1

Once, when Jesus had gone in a boat to a solitary place, the multitude heard where he was and followed him by land. The physician of souls was too pitiful to withdraw from them, and he cured their sick. But when the evening fell, his disciples said to him: "There are no houses here, and it is late already. Send them away to get food in the places round about!" But Jesus answered: "They need not go away. Give them something to eat." "But we have only five cakes of bread and two fishes to eat with them," they replied.

Bring them to me," said Jesus; and commanding the people to sit down on the grass, he took the bread and fish and, after pronouncing the customary blessing over them, broke them up as usual and gave the pieces to his disciples. They gave them to the people, who ate or passed them on until they were all satisfied; and when they collected the broken fragments still left by the outside rows they filled twelve baskets! There were about five thousand present.

66

Our Gospels still contain a few traces of the original meaning of the story, such as that "Jesus began to teach them many things," especially concerning the kingdom of God;" but the Evangelists evidently accepted it in its literal sense, and were perhaps influenced in their treatment of it by the story of Elijah's miracle at Zarephath,2 and still more that of the manna sent to feed the Israelites in the wilderness under the great hero of the old dispensation. In this literal sense, accordingly, they worked it out, by the addition of such details as that the people were told to sit down in groups or parties

3

1 Matthew xiv. 13-21 (Mark vi. 30-44; Luke ix. 10-17; and John vi. 1-14) 21 Kings xvii. 8-16; compare 2 Kings iv. 42-44.

8 Exodus xvi.: Psalm 1xxviii. 24: compare vol. i. pp. 289, 290.

of a hundred and of fifty, and by the calculation that the bread required would have cost two hundred pence (about £6 or £7), and that there were five thousand men," besides women and children," there. We need not stay to prove that this literal acceptation of the story lodges us in palpable absurdities, for every child knows that if we take away a part of any thing the remainder is less and not more than the whole was. Nor is it worth more than a passing mention that the first two Gospels repeat the story further on with slight modifications,1 such as that the multitude numbered four thousand and remained three days with Jesus; that the disciples had seven cakes, and that seven baskets of fragments were left. The essential features of the story remain the same. Some commentators have seen in these twelve baskets the spiritual sustenance of the twelve tribes, and have understood the story to mean that, when the whole heathen world had been fed by Jesus, there was still enough left for the Jews. Such a story lends itself, by its very nature, to all kinds of modifications and ingenious speculations that perhaps have nothing to do with its true meaning. The Evangelists give us the clew to the real significance of the story when they bring the two "miracles of the loaves and fishes" (somewhat clumsily, it must be confessed) into connection with a warning uttered by Jesus against "the leaven" of the Pharisees; and again, when they report a saying in which Jesus promises that all "who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be satisfied." The meaning of the story seems to be that Jesus, with the slenderest means at his command, fed the souls of countless multitudes. Of this bread of the spirit it is literally true that it increases when it is consumed, and increases still more when imparted to others.

2

Here, then, we have a strikingly true and accurate picture of Jesus as the feeder of the great multitude, as the teacher of the people. We see him journeying through Galilee, and ask what means he had at his disposal for the accomplishment of his great purposes. He had no honored name or sounding title; no great patron to support him; no learning to command the respect, or traditional authority to enforce the assent, of his hearers; no brilliant powers or dazzling personal gifts, and one would have said that he had nothing to recommend him above others, or to secure him any special influence. He was a man of the people, brought up as a workman, sim

-

1 Matthew xv. 32-38 (Mark viii. 1-9).

2 Matthew xvi. 5-12 (Mark viii. 13-21).

8 Matthew v. 6.

ple in his language, and of ordinary dress and appearance. But see how the people press round him to catch every word he utters! See how his simple language fascinates them; how his familiar illustrations hold them by hundreds in strained attention! And, when he ceases, mark the impression he has made, the universal wonder, the exalted joy, the intense earnestness, the silent consolation, which have flowed from his preaching! Surely this man of Nazareth, undistinguished as he seemed, was in the highest and fullest sense a teacher of the people.

Jesus attracted and fascinated his hearers not only by his style of teaching, but also by the subject of which he spoke. A few special remarks on this point may here be made.

Jesus once compared himself, as a religious teacher or "Scribe who had learned from the kingdom of heaven," to a householder who kept all kinds of valuable things for which he had no immediate use in a storeroom. When he entertained his family and guests, friends and strangers, he brought out all manner of beautiful and useful things for them, some new and some old. It is a true description of the teaching of Jesus. The treasure-house of his spirit was inexhaustible. He knew the necessity of interweaving old expressions with which his hearers were familiar and new ones which would stimulate reflection, and so retaining their attention without wearying them. He regarded richness and diversity of form as essential to popular teaching. But this intermingling of "new" and "old" extended to the substance of his teaching also, and is illustrated by the preceding words: "Every Scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven." The "new" and the "old" alike referred to the kingdom of God; and significantly enough the "new" is mentioned first, for not only did the Master's wonderful originality give fresh meaning to even the oldest form of words, but he himself was fully aware that, though the religion he taught was almost as old as humanity itself, and the expectation of the kingdom of God as old as the spirit of prophecy, yet he was actually proclaiming principles and truths that were altogether new to his age and his people.

What these new truths and principles were we shall presently inquire, but must content ourselves on this occasion by citing one characteristic instance.

Jesus had taken up the task and the message of John, and had so far brought forth that which was old. But to him the

kingdom of God meant something very different from what John had understood by it, and in a certain sense his preaching of the kingdom was very new indeed. Now, since the parables, discourses, and sayings of Jesus deal almost exclusively with this kingdom, it is absolutely necessary for us to know what he meant by it. To say that the waking and sleeping hours of Jesus were filled by the ideal of the future, which had been the hope of Israel's men of God and the lifepower of the nation for centuries, to say that that ideal was the source of his zeal and the inspiration of his life is, after all, so entirely vague as to come to little or nothing; for we know that there had never been a fixed body of doctrines or ideas concerning the Messianic age, and that there was none in the time of Jesus. Moreover, Jesus showed great independence of conception in this matter. Though his mind had been fed by the writings of the prophets, yet he passed over the political aspects of the Messianic hope in absolute silence, and fixed attention exclusively upon its spiritual side. All the religious hopes which had thrilled the hearts of the noblest of his country's children, the expectation of a more perfect and wide-spread knowledge of God, of a pure moral life, of untroubled love and harmony among men, of rest to the soul and peace between God and man, all these he combined, in their ripest perfection and under their fairest forms, into one glorious conception, looking for its fulfilment in the immediate future at the founding of the kingdom of heaven. Under this expression, then, he understood a condition of the highest spiritual weal. But this was not all. He was too good an Israelite, too practical a man, and had too firm a grasp of the actual conditions of life, not to feel that all the institutions of social life, and the external lot of man, must be made to correspond to this spiritual condition. To him the Messianic kingdom meant society glorified by pure religion and perfect morality, enjoying as a consequence untroubled bliss, and blessed by God in ample measure with all material good.

--

John had laid almost exclusive stress upon the last judgment and the destruction of the godless, which were to precede the founding of the kingdom. His preaching, therefore, was the sound of an alarm and a cry to penitence. Jesus, during far the greater part of his ministry, threw this terrible judgment entirely into the background; and even during the last few weeks of his life, when it assumes a prominent place in his preaching, still the announcement of the golden age is always prevailingly joyous and consoling on his lips, a true