upon the Word of God. Of this opportunity Jesus was accustomed to avail himself,* as did his apostles after him.+ Christ is sometimes represented as withdrawing from the Church of his day. This is a mistake. Corrupt as it was, he labored in and with it until it expelled him. Very little information is afforded us of Christ's personal appearance, or his methods in public speaking. It is a significant fact that no one of his biographers has attempted, in the remotest degree, a description of his form and features. There are clear indications that he did not possess a robust constitution. But in a frame which was perhaps slight, there burned an unquenchable flame. He possessed, in a remarkable degree, that mysterious personal magnetism which is the secret of all true oratory. No sooner did he rise to speak than all eyes were fastened on him.§ He thus secured the attention of his audience from the outset. He spoke with an ease and grace which seemed marvelous to those who knew him only as the son of the carpenter. Yet he exercised at times a wondrous moral power. Before his eyes the traders in the Temple quailed, and the mob at Nazareth¶ and at Jerusalem** opened to give him free passage through. The officers who were sent to take him at a later period in the Temple left him untouched, testifying-never man spake as this man.tt The soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane fell back when he turned, questioning and indignant, though mild, upon them. This moral power already manifested itself. The common people, comparing his teaching with that of the scribes, noted the difference, saying, He speaks with authority.§§ Evidently in his presence every one felt * Matt. xii., 9; Luke iv., 16; John vi., 59; xviii., 20. Acts xiii., 5; xiv., 1; xviii., 4. The journey which left his disciples fresh enough to go into the city for provisions exhausted him.-John iv., 6, 8. Under the cross which the condemned carried to the place of execution, he sank, unable to complete the task. Matt. xxvii., 32; Mark xv., 21; Luke xxiii., 26. Compare also Isaiah liii., 2. § Luke iv., 20. || Luke iv., 22. Luke iv., 30. **John x., 39. ++ John vii., 32, 45, 46. §§ Mark i., 22; Luke iv., 32. that he was before no ordinary man. Behind his words was a powerful personality. The teacher was more than the lessons which he taught. He did not impress the common people as a learned man. Of the learning of the schools, he perhaps, humanly speaking, knew little. For that learning he cared nothing. He openly condemned it.* As the gardener sometimes gathers in spring the dead leaves that he may burn them, Jesus raked away these traditions of the past that he might get at the roots of life. He touched them, if at all, with the torch of a sharp sarcasm that set them in a blaze. But he was well versed in the three books which make up God's library on the earth-Life, Nature, and the Scriptures. From his mother he had acquired familiarity with the latter. He knew them thoroughly. He quoted from them often, and referred to them by indirection yet more frequently.. He pointed to them as witnesses to his mission. He confounded his antagonists by new disclosures of their hidden meaning. He was equally familiar with the law, the poe try, and the prophecies. Those of his disciples who, in this respect, have most closely resembled him, have always possessed the greatest moral power over mankind. From the days of King Josiah§ to those of Luther, every reformation of the Church has been wrought by the resurrection of the entombed Word of God. Nature no less lay open to him. He loved her as the minister of God's mercies and the revelator of his truth. To him all nature was a sublime parable, into whose significance he gives to our duller vision an occasional glimpse; and we know that there are meanings yet beyond, which he has not disclosed. The hieroglyphics of nature he perpetually interpreted. The flower that bloomed at his feet, the bird that * Matt. xv., 3-9; Mark vii., 5-13. + John v., Matt. xxii., 31, 32, 42-45; Mark ii., 25, 26; Matt. xii., 5-7. § 2 Kings xxii., 8-13; xxiii. 39. || Matt. vi., 28, 29. caroled its springy lay above his head,* the storm that hurtled in the air, assumed a new significance, and, voiced by him, spoke with new language. He possessed that intuitive apprehension of moral truths that gives to physical phenomena their soul, which is the secret of all metaphor, and the power of all true poetry of nature. Human life was his last, and, we may almost say, his bestread book. "He knew what was in man." With divine intuition he pierced the disguise in which we all constantly enwrap ourselves, and read the subtlest secrets of the soul within. To him the still unsolved riddle of the ages, man, was no enigma. Into the caskets, gold, silver, lead, in which, as in those of Portia, that contained Bassanio's fate, the soul lies oft concealed, he glanced with unerring vision, and read the secret writing which alone gives it its true value. It was this divine knowledge, which we only blunderingly approximate by much observation and hard study, that gave him such wondrous power over the hearts of men. In all his controversies he never shelled concealed batteries at random, as we often have to do. He knew who needed comfort, who reproof. He knew how to puncture Nicodemus's pride, to wring confession from the dissolute yet ill-satisfied woman at the well, to expose the avarice that still clung to the rich young noble, and forbade his winning in that race that demands of every competitor his unrobing.§ With the events of his times and with the occupations of his audiences he made himself familiar. Life furnished him his most frequent texts and his chief store-house of illustrations. He made concurrent history enforce the truths he taught. The imprisonment of John the Baptist afforded him a text for a discrimination between the covenant of law and the Gospel of liberty. The massacre of the Galileans gave point to a brief but pungent exhortation to repentance. The attempted deposition of Archelaus suggested one of his most signifi* Matt. vi., 26. § Matt. xix., 16-22. + Matt. vii., 24-27. John ii., 25. Luke xiii., 1-5. * cant parables. The common events of every-day experience were equally significant to him. He borrowed from the merchant, the fisherman, the farmer,§ the court, the commonest avocations of the housekeeper. Not till a later period, it is true, did he employ those matchless stories whose pure but simple beauty is only enhanced by the truth which they contain, as a beautiful face is made luminous by the soul which speaks in the silent language of its changeful features. But the characteristics of his later teaching throw back their light upon the fundamental characteristics of this his earlier ministry; and, however variant in form, we know that in essence they were the same. He rarely spoke in lengthy or formal discourse. Tried by the laws which govern a modern orator, his brief but pregnant sayings would not stand the test of scholastic criticism. He delighted in apothegms, proverbs, brief and pithy sentences, and even startling paradoxes.** These cling to the memory, which refuses to retain more elaborate expositions. Repeated from age to age, they have become interwoven into the very fabric of all literature. The oration, like a stately tree infixed into the soil, furnishes its shade and fruit only to the few who can gather about it. The proverb, like a single seed wafted by the winds of heaven, even into other lands, repeats itself in other generations, and in various climes and multitudinous forms of speech. His teaching was stimulating rather than informing. De Quincey has divided literature into two classes-books of instruction and books of power. The words of Christ were words of power. "The words that I speak unto you," said he, "they are spirit and they are life." He aimed not to do the world's thinking for it, but to make the world think for * Luke xix., 12-28. Compare Josephus, Antiq., xvii., 9, § 3; xi. Luke v., 10; Matt. xiii., 47-50. Luke xiv., 16-24. ¶ Matt. xiii., 33. **Note, for example of this characteristic of his teaching, the Sermon on the Mount. Matt. v., 10-12, 14, 29, 30, 44; vi., 3, 21, 24, 34; vii., 1, 7, 12, †† John vi., 63. Compare Luke iv., 32. 20. + Matt. xiii., 45, 46. § Matt. xiii., 3-9, 24-30. itself. And, despite the many encomiums on ancient literature, it is still true that, for the most part, the highest forms of useful mental activity date from the days of Christ. Kaulbach, in his famous cartoon of the Reformation, has gathered about the central figure of Martin Luther, with the open Bible in his upraised hand, the poets, painters, discoverers, and philosophers whose combined toil has constructed this edifice in which we live, which we call the civilization of the nineteenth century. Around the luminous figure of the Great Teacher might well be gathered nearly all who have combined to emancipate the body from servitude, the mind from thraldom, and the soul from superstition. Ary Scheffer has given us Christus Consolator and Christus Rememorator. The portrait of Christus Liberator is yet to be painted. Of the matter of Jesus's discourses at this period of his ministry, the evangelists have given us but little information; enough, however, to indicate their general character. Six hundred years before, during the long Babylonish captivity, the prophets of God had kept alive the hopes of his people by promising the coming of a kingdom which should embrace all other kingdoms, and whose majesty time should not decay, nor earthly power break.* That the Jews had interpreted this of temporal dominion, and had pictured themselves the head of an empire out rivaling those of Cyrus and Alexander, will not seem strange to any one who considers that even to the present day there are many to whom the phrase kingdom of truth is a mysticism. Jesus declared that the time of which those prophets had spoken was fulfilled, and the kingdom they foretold was at hand. He urged the people to prepare for it by personal repentance of sin, and by believing in the glad tidings he had come to proclaim.t Rarely did he indicate either himself as the Messiah who was to inaugurate and maintain this new empire, or attempt to reveal the spirituality and universality which characterizes * Dan. ii., 44; vii., 13, 14, 22, 27; Isa. ix., 6, 7; see also Micah iv., 7. + Mark i., 15. |