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 is face to face with God (Luke
12:20). And there are 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
lucent 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, full, no doubt, supplied by pipes, and ministering its
gifts by pipe and tap, regulated, tiresome, and dead. "The water
that I shall give him," days Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (John 4:14),
"shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting
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 as possessed of authority himself" (Matt.
7:29). Who gave him that authority? asked the priests (Matt. 21:23)?
Who authorizes the living man to live? "All things are delivered
unto me of my Father" (Matt. 11:27). "My words shall not pass away"
(Mark 13:31).

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 readings "seeds" and "seed" (Gal.
3:16), is plainly racking language to the destruction of its real
sense; no one ever would have written "seeds" in that connexion; 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