rt upon him?" quotes the author of
"Job" in a great ironical passage (Job 7:17; from Psalm 8:4). The
elements and the stars come over us, as they came over George Fox in
the Vale of Beavor; what is man? Can one out of fifteen hundred
millions of human beings living on one planet matter to God, when
there are so many planets and stars, and there have been so many
generations? Can he matter? It all depends on how we conceive of
God. Here it is essential to give all the meaning to the term "God"
that Jesus gave to it, to believe in God as Jesus believed in God,
if we are to understand the fullness of Jesus' "good news." It all
depends on God--on whether Jesus was right about God; and after all
on Jesus himself. "A thing of price is man," wrote Synesius about
410 A.D., "because for him Christ died." The two things go
together--Jesus' death and Jesus' Theocentric thought of man.

It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young hearts, that
it is easy to idealize what one does not know. "Omne ignotum pro
magnifico" is the old epigram of Tacitus. It is not every believer
in man, nor every "Friend of man," who knows men as Jesus did. Like
Burns and Carlyle and others who have interpreted man to us to some
purpose, he grew up in the home of labouring people. He was a
working man himself, a carpenter. He must have learnt his carpentry
exactly as every boy learns it, by hammering his fingers instead of
the nail, sawing his own skin instead of the wood--and not doing it
again. He knew what it was to have an aching back and sweat on the
face; how hard money is to earn, and how quickly it goes. He makes
it clear that money is a temptation to men, and a great danger; but
he never joins the moralists and cranks in denouncing it. He always
talks sense--if the expression is not too lowly to apply to him. He
sees what can be done with money, what a tool it can be in a wise
man's hands--how he can make friends "by means of the mammon of
unrighteousness" (Luke 16:9), for example, by giving unexpectedly
generous wages to men who missed their chances (Matt. 20:15), by
feeding Lazarus at the gate, and perhaps by having his sores
properly attended to (Luke 16:20). That he understood how pitifully
the loss of a coin may affect a household of working people, one of
his most beautiful parables bears witness (Luke 15:8-10). With work
he had no quarrel. He draws many of his parables from labour, and he
implies throughout that it is the natu