and the flowers and those Oriental skies and those stars of the night; by his dreams of the past and his enthusiastic visions of the future. He was able to find

"Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

He was one of the master minds of genius, and needed not to follow the line of ordinary drudgery and detail, but seemed to see that which the world had struggled to master.

race.

And just one more phase in the education of Jesus I must not pass by. One thing you will be struck with in reading his life from the very beginning to the end; and that is the sharp contrast between his method of dealing with men and the Jewish law, and that which prevailed in Jerusalem among the scribes and rabbis of his time. Jesus, above all things, is pre-eminently humanitarian. He never thinks of placing a quibble of the law above the heart-ache or the hunger or the toil or tear of any least child of his The one thing he bitterly and unmercifully condemns on the part of the Pharisees and their fellows at Jerusalem is this making the real righteousness of God of no effect on account of their paltry, petty, contemptible observance of the little minutiae of the law, and calling this the orthodoxy of their time. It is from him that the word rings out, "The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath." It is from him that comes that sentence of condemnation for the son that bestows his property upon the temple, and neglects to care for his father and mother. It is he who despises the pitiful tithing of mint, anise, and cumin, when made a substitute for practical humanity and helpfulness.

Everywhere moral considerations supreme, everywhere humanity first and foremost; and the law and the ceremony and the sacrifice and everything else made not to rule and dominate and crush and tyrannize over man, but to help him, or be destroyed. This is the characteristic of Jesus. Where did he get it? We know not how much of it may have been his natural, spiritual insight; but we can trace a few of the external influences that may have led him into this line of thought. Palestine now is desolated, poor, and dead; its beauty and its glory all passed away. But, in the time of Jesus, Capernaum, a great and flourishing city, only a few miles - a little short walk - from Nazareth, was for the first century what New York or London is to the nineteenth. Right through Capernaum and close to Nazareth, passed the great highway of trade from Rome, from Greece, from Asia Minor, on to Arabia, Damascus, and the far East. This great surging tide of trade flowed back and forth, year after year, all through the childhood of Jesus, passing almost by his very door, bringing not simply Jews, but Romans, Grecians, men from Asia Minor, Phœnicians, Syrians, traders from Tyre, from Sidon, from Damascus, - from all the peoples of the then known world. They passed and repassed, so that Jesus was schooled not in the narrow exclusiveness of Judea, where no man was a man except he was a Jew; but he was trained in the broadest of all schools and systems, - the school of the world. And he learned there to look upon all nationalities and all men as common children of the one Father who is in heaven. And out of this has come those wondrously broad sayings, like the parable of the good Samaritan. And these represent not Jewish exclusiveness, but all humanity. They fitted the religion of Jesus to go forth as a conqueror over the world, and appeal not merely to Judaic hearts, but everywhere to the heart of man. In the midst of these influences, then, trained in the laws, the traditions, and in the common superstitions and beliefs of the time; filled with the promises, the prophecies, and the hopes of his race, — Jesus worked at his trade as a carpenter, and waited for the deliverance of his people.

PUBLIC LIFE.

We are now to consider some of the main characteristics and circumstances of the public life and teaching of Jesus.

The modern world would give much for an authentic portrait of the man as he emerged from the obscurity of his humble life at Nazareth, and entered upon that career which has made his name first in the history of religions. Many men have busied themselves in imagining what his earthly presence must have been like; and yet none of the pictures that have ever been made have any claim to authenticity. We do not know how Jesus looked, except as we judge of his personal appearance by the peculiar type of the nation to which he belonged. We shall come as near to it as is now possible if we think of him as a typical Hebrew; and the race characteristics have not changed very much. Jesus, then, belonged to that people that Christianity has poured contempt upon, and has pursued with persecution from that day until now.

As to the length of his public ministry the authorities are not at agreement, and consequently we shall not be able to decide. As I have already told you, according to the narrative of John, this ministry appears to have extended over something like three years and a half. According to the narrative of the synoptics, as they are called, - Mark, Matthew, and Luke, - the ministry was only a little over a year. Neither can we now determine anything as to the exact chronological order of either the life or the teaching.

The scene of this ministry was in Galilee, around the lake, in the towns, on the hill-sides, and in Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity. Perhaps you have hardly noticed how small a country this Palestine was, within the contracted limits of which started this movement that has changed civilization. The widest part of Palestine was hardly more than the distance from here to the city of Worcester, and the length of the country from north to south was somewhat less than four times that distance; that is, about one hundred and forty miles by forty. This gives you a conception of how small is this little strip of land that was the scene on which this greatest drama of the world has been enacted.

When Jesus was about thirty years old, the narratives tell us, the nation in Judea, and its immediate vicinity especially, were startled by what seemed to them the reappearance of one of the old prophets. John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching "the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." We do not know anything about the parentage or the birthplace of this John the Baptist. All we know is this sudden appearance of his in the wilderness, and then the death that he met afterward at the hands of Herod. Picture him clothed in a camel's skin tied about his waist by a leathern belt, living on the wild honey that he could gather there in the desert, eating the dried locusts, — which was no unusual thing, but rather the common food of the poorest people, - a figure like this, strong only in his moral earnestness, coming as a prophet with a message to the people, ringing his word through all that region, so that it echoed up the valleys and from hill-top to hill-top all over the land, the one word, " Repent! the kingdom of God is at hand." Here is the veritable Jewish prophet. We generally get a false conception of what these prophets were, growing out of the mistake that the main characteristic of the prophet was the foretelling of future events. This, originally, had nothing whatever to do with the character or the office. The Hebrew word for prophet, illustrated in the lives of its most distinguished representatives, simply carries the idea of one who appears among the people with a message from God. So that our word, "herald," more nearly represents the original idea than does our ordinary modern notion of foreseeing or foretelling something in the future. John the Baptist then appeared, announcing the immediate coming of this kingdom of God. And, far off on the hills of Galilee, the young Jesus, his mind in a ferment, seething with the thoughts of the past history of his race and of its future high destiny, as he believed it lay in the mind and heart of God, this Jesus hears that cry, and to him it is the voice of his own public call; and he starts, whether alone or with friends we know not, and probably walks this not very long distance, until he appears among those that have been gathered by the unusual cry of the Baptist, and asks that he also may partake of this life, and thus proclaim his faith as identical with that of the prophet.

All this story of the reluctance of John to baptize Jesus is no part of the original tradition: it is probably an afterthought. The story of the dove and the opening heavens, of course, is only legendary and poetical embellishment, gathering about this crisis period in the life of Jesus in the imagination of his followers in later times. The one thing that was central in this scene, the historic kernel of it all, may have been the recognition on the part of John, - a clearsighted man, able to read human nature, - the recognition in this young, enthusiastic Nazarene of a power that should constitute him a leader in this movement among the people,