urprised, if he had been told how often he illustrates his thought
from bird and beast and country life--and always with a certain
life-like precision and a perfectly clear sympathy.

In the Gospels we find again the same faithfulness to living nature,
another country-bred boy with the same love for bird and beast and
the wild, open countryside.

The Earth
And common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things.[9]

Nature is enough for Jesus as for Jeremiah; she needs no
remodelling, no heraldic paints--"long pinions of divers
colours"--she will do as she is; she is just splendid and lovable
and true as God made her; and she slides into his mind whenever he
is deeply moved. Think of all the parables he draws from Nature--the
similes, metaphors, and illustrations; every one of them will bear
examination, and means more the nearer we look into it, and the
better we know the living thing behind. The eagle, in Jesus'
sentence, plants no trees, but it has the living bird's instinct for
carrion; the ancient Greek historian and Lord Roberts at Delhi in
1858 remarked that "wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles
be gathered together" (Luke 17:37). In India that year, it was said,
they gathered from all over to Delhi. What brought them? Instinct,
we say; and we find Jesus, in that rather dark sentence, suggesting
somehow that there is an instinct which knows "where." And sheep and
cows and asses, and hens and sparrows, and red sunsets, fill men's
reminiscences of his talk; and we may safely conclude that, when
allusions are so many in fragments of conversation preserved as
these are, the man's speech and mind were attuned to the love of
bird and beast.

Is there another teacher of those times who is at all so sure that
God loves bird and flower? The Greek poet Meleager of Gadara--not so
very far removed from Jesus in space of time--has a good deal to say
about flowers, but not at all in the same sense as Jesus, not with
any feeling such as his for the immortal hand and eye that planned
their symmetry, and their colours and sweetness. St. Paul is
conspicuously a man of the town--"a citizen of no mean city" (Acts
21:39), and he dismisses the animals abruptly (1 Cor. 9:9); he has
hardly an allusion to the familiar and homely aspects of Nature, so
frequent and so pleasant in the speech of Jesus. He finds Nature, if
not quite "red in tooth and claw", yet groaning together, subject to