was not a pauper. He did not for one moment countenance (as Sakya Mouni did) the life of beggary, or say one word which could be perverted into a recommendation of that degrading squalor which some religious teachers have represented as the perfection of piety. He never received an alms from the tamchui or kupp, but He and the little company of His followers lived on their lawful possessions or the produce of their own industry, and even had a bag or cash-box of their own, both for their own use and for their charities to others. From this they provided the simple necessaries of the Paschal feast, and distributed what they could to the poor; only Christ does not Himself seem to have given money to the poor, because He gave them richer and nobler gifts than could be even compared with gold or silver. Yet even the little money which they wanted was not always forthcoming, and when the collectors of the trivial sum demanded from the very poorest for the service of the Temple came to Peter for the didrachma which was alone required, neither he nor his Master had the sum at hand. The Son of Man had no earthly possession besides the clothes He wore.

3. And it was, as we have seen, a life of toil—of toil from boyhood upwards, in the shop of the carpenter, to aid in maintaining Himself and His family by honest and noble labour; of toil afterwards to save the world. We have seen that "He went about doing good," and that this, which is the epitome of His public life, constitutes also its sublimest originality. The insight which we have gained already, and shall gain still further, into the manner in which His days were spent, shows us how overwhelming an amount of ever-active benevolence was crowded into the brief compass of the hours of light. At any moment He was at the service of any call, whether it came from an inquirer who longed to be taught, or from a sufferer who had faith to be healed. Teaching, preaching, travelling, doing works of mercy, bearing patiently with the fretful impatience of the stiffnecked and the ignorant, enduring without a murmur the incessant and selfish pressure of the multitude-work like this so absorbed His time and energy that we are told, more than once, that so many were coming and going as to leave no leisure even to eat. For Himself He seemed to claim no rest except the quiet hours of night and silence, when Ho retired so often to pray to His heavenly Father, amid the mountain solitudes which He loved so well.

4. And it was a life of health. Among its many sorrows and trials, sickness alone was absent. We hear of His healing multitudes of the

sick-we never hear that He was sick Himself.

It is true that "the

golden Passional of the Book of Isaiah says of Him: "Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed;" but the best explanation of that passage has been already supplied. from St. Matthew, that He suffered with those whom He saw suffer. He was touched with a feeling of our infirmities; His divine sympathy made those sufferings His own. Certain it is that the story of His life and death show exceptional powers of physical endurance. No one who was not endowed with perfect health could have stood out against the incessant and wearing demands of such daily life as the Gospels describe. Above all, He seems to have possessed that blessing of ready sleep which is the best natural antidote to fatigue, and the best influence to calm the over-wearied mind, and "knit up the ravelled sleeve of care." Even on the wave-lashed deck of the little fishing-boat as it was tossed on the stormy sea, He could sleep, with no better bed or pillow than the hard leather-covered boss that served as the steersman's cushion. And often in those nights spent under the starry sky, in the wilderness, and on the mountain-top, He could have had no softer resting-place than the grassy turf, no other covering than the tallith, or perhaps some striped abba, such as often forms the sole bed of the Arab at the present day. And we shall see in the last sad scene how the same strength of constitution and endurance, even after all that He had undergone, enabled Him to hold out-after a sleepless night and a most exhausting day-under fifteen hours of trial and torture and the long-protracted agony of a bitter death.

5. And, once more, it must have been a life of sorrow; for He is rightly called the "Man of Sorrows." And yet we think that there is a possibility of error here. The terms "sorrow" and "joy" are very relative, and we may be sure that if there was crushing sorrow— the sorrow of sympathy with those who suffered, the sorrow of rejection by those whom He loved, the sorrow of being hated by those whom He came to save, the sorrows of One on whom were laid the iniquities of the world, the sorrows of the last long agony upon the cross, when it seemed as if even His Father had forsaken Him-yet assuredly also there was an abounding joy. For the worst of all sorrows, the most maddening of all miseries-which is the consciousness of alienation from God, the sense of shame and guilt and inward

degradation, the frenzy of self-loathing by which, as by a scourge of fire, the abandoned soul is driven to an incurable despair—that was absent, not only in its extreme forms, but even in the faintest of its most transient assoilments; and, on the other hand, the joy of an unsullied conscience, the joy of a stainless life, the joy of a soul absolutely and infinitely removed from every shadow of baseness and every fleck of guilt, the joy of an existence wholly devoted to the service of God and the love of man-this was ever present to Him in its fullest influences. It is hardly what the world calls joy; it was not the merriment of the frivolous, like the transient flickering of April sunshine upon the shallow stream; it was not the laughter of fools, which is as the crackling of thorns under a pot-of this kind of joy, life has but little for a man who feels all that life truly means. But, as is said by the great Latin Father, "Crede mihi res severa est verum gaudium," and of that deep well-spring of life which lies in the heart of things noble, and pure, and permanent, and true, even the Man of Sorrows could drink large draughts. And though we are never told that He laughed, while we are told that once He wept, and that once He sighed, and that more than once He was troubled; yet He who threw no shadow of discountenance on social meetings and innocent festivity, could not have been without that inward happiness which sometimes shone even upon His countenance, and which we often trace in the tender and almost playful irony of His words. "In that hour," we are told of one occasion in His life, "Jesus rejoiced "or, as it should rather be, exulted-"in spirit." Can we believe that this rejoicing took place once alone ?

CHAPTER XXIII.

A GREAT DAY IN THE LIFE OF JESUS.

THE sequence of events in the narrative on which we are now about to enter is nearly the same in the first three Gospels. Without neglecting any clear indications given by the other Evangelists, we shall, in this part of the life of Jesus, mainly follow the chronological guidance of St. Luke. The order of St. Matthew and St. Mark appears to be

much guided by subjective considerations. Events in their Gospels are sometimes grouped together by their moral or religious bearings. St. Luke, as is evident, pays more attention to the natural sequence, although he also occasionally allows a unity of subject to supersede in his arrangement the order of time.

Immediately after the missionary journey which we have described, St. Luke adds that when Jesus saw Himself surrounded by a great multitude out of every city, He spake by a parable. We learn from the two other Evangelists the interesting circumstance that this was the first occasion on which He taught in parables, and that they were spoken to the multitude who lined the shore while our Lord sat in His favourite pulpit, the boat which was kept for Him on the Lake.

We might infer from St. Mark that this teaching was delivered on the afternoon of the day on which he healed the paralytic, but the inference is too precarious to be relied on. All that we can see is that this new form of teaching was felt to be necessary in consequence of the state of mind which had been produced in some, at least, of the hearers among the multitude. The one emphatic word "hearken:" with which He prefaced his address prepared them for something unusual and memorable in what He was going to say.

The great mass of hearers must now have been aware of the general features in the new Gospel which Jesus preached. Some selfexamination, some earnest careful thought of their own was now requisite, if they were indeed sincere in their desire to profit by His words. "Take heed how ye hear" was the great lesson which He would now impress. He would warn them against the otiose attention of curiosity or mere intellectual interest, and would fix upon their minds a sense of their moral responsibility for the effects produced by what they heard. He would teach them in such a way that the extent of each hearer's profit should depend largely upon his own faithfulness.

And, therefore, to show them that the only true fruit of good teaching is holiness of life, and that there were many dangers which might prevent its growth, He told them His first parable, the Parable of the Sower. The imagery of it was derived, as usual, from the objects immediately before his eyes-the sown fields of Gennesareth; the springing corn in them; the hard-trodden paths which ran through them, on which no corn could grow; the innumerable birds which fluttered over them ready to feed upon the grain; the weak and withering struggle for life on the stony places; the tangling growth of luxuriant thistles in neglected corners; the deep loam of tho

general soil, on which already the golden ears stood thie and strong, giving promise of a sixty and hundred fold return as they rippled under the balmy wind. To us, who from infancy have read the parable side by side with Christ's own interpretation of it, the meaning is singularly clear and plain, and we see in it the liveliest images of the danger incurred by the cold and indifferent, by the impulsive and shallow, by the worldly and ambitious, by the preoccupied and the luxurious, as they listen to the Word of God. But it was not so easy to those who heard it. Even the disciples failed to catch its full significance, although they reserved their request for an explanation till they and their Master should be alone. It is clear that parables like this, so luminous to us, but so difficult to these simple listeners, suggested thoughts which to them were wholly unfamiliar.

It seems clear that our Lord did not on this occasion deliver all of those seven parables-the parable of the tares of the field, of the grain of mustard-seed, of the leaven, of the hid treasure, of the pearl, and of the net-which, from a certain resemblance in their subjects and consecutiveness in their teaching, are here grouped together by St. Matthew. Seven parables delivered at once, and delivered without interpretation, to a promiscuous multitude which He was for the first time addressing in this form of teaching, would have only tended to bewilder and to distract. Indeed, the expression of St. Mark-"as they were able to hear it "-seems distinctly to imply a gradual and non-continuous course of teaching, which would have lost its value if it had given to the listeners more than they were able to remember and to understand. We may rather conclude, from a comparison of St. Mark and St. Luke, that the teaching of this particular afternoon contained no other parables, except perhaps the simple and closely analogous ones of the grain of mustard-seed, and of the blade, the ear, and the full corn in the ear, which might serve to encourage into patience those who were expecting too rapid a revelation of the kingdom of God in their own lives and in the world; and perhaps, with these, the similitude of the candle to warn them not to stifle the light they had received, but to remember that Great Light which should one day reveal all things, and so to let their light shine as to illuminate both their own paths in life, and to shed radiance on the souls of all around.

A method of instruction so rare, so stimulating, so full of interest method which, in its unapproachable beauty and finish, stands