ral and right thing for man.
To be holy in his sense, a man need not leave his work. Clement of
Alexandria, in his famous saying about the ploughman continuing to
plough, and knowing God as he ploughs, and the seafaring man,
sticking to his ship and calling on the heavenly pilot as he sails,
is in the vein of Jesus.[24] There were those whom he called to
leave all, to distribute their wealth, and to follow him; but he
chose them (Mark 3:13, 14); it was not his one command for all men
(cf. Mark 5:19). But, as we shall shortly see, it is implied by his
judgements of men that he believed in work and liked men who "put
their backs into it"--their backs, eyes, and their brains too.

Pain, the constant problem of man, and perhaps more, of woman--of
unmarried woman more especially--he never discussed as modern people
discuss it. He never made light of pain any more than of poverty; he
understood physical as well as moral distress. Nor did he, like some
of his contemporaries and some modern people, exaggerate the place
of pain in human experience. He shared pain, he sympathized with
suffering; and his understanding of pain, and, above all, his choice
of pain, taught men to reconsider it and to understand it, and
altered the attitude of the world toward it. His tenderness for the
suffering of others taught mankind a new sympathy, and the
"nosokomeion", the hospital for the sick, was one of the first of
Christian institutions to rise, when persecution stopped and
Christians could build. "And the blind and the lame came to him in
the temple, and he healed them," says Matthew (21:14) in a memorable
phrase. I have heard it suggested that it was irregular for them to
come into the temple courts; but they gravitated naturally to Jesus.

The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people's feelings and
sufferings; he is essentially an individualist; he must have his own
intercourse with God, and other people's affairs are apt to be an
interruption, an impertinence. "I have not been thinking of the
community; I have been thinking of Christ," said a Bengali to me,
who was wavering between the Brahmo Samaj and Christianity. The
blessed Angela of Foligno was rather glad to be relieved of her
husband and children, who died and left her leisure to enjoy the
love of God. All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the
historical Jesus. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our
sicknesses," was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively