e such power?

Later on he told his friends what he had seen in this matter of
words. They come from within, and the speaker's whole personality,
false or true, is behind what he says--the good or bad treasure of
his heart. There are no grapes growing on the bramble bush. No
wonder that of every idle word men shall give account on the day of
Judgement (Matt. 12:36). The idle word--the word unstudied--comes
straight from the inmost man, the spontaneous overflow from the
spirit within, natural and inevitable, proof of his quality; and
they react with the life that brought them forth.[13]

So he grows up--in a real world and among real people. He goes to
school with the boys of his own age, and lives at home with mother
and brothers and sisters. He reads the Old Testament, and forms a
habit of going to the Synagogue (Luke 4:16). All points to a home
where religion was real. The first word he learnt to say was
probably "Abba", and it struck the keynote of his thoughts. But he
knew the world without as well,--turned on to it early the keen eyes
that saw all, and he recognized what he saw. Knowledge of men, but
without cynicism, a loving heart still in spite of his freedom from
illusions--these are among the gifts that his environment gave him,
or failed to take away from him.

CHAPTER III

THE MAN AND HIS MIND

It is a commonplace with those who take literature seriously that
what is to reach the heart must come from the heart; and the maxim
may be applied conversely--that what has reached a heart has come
from a heart--that what continues to reach the heart, among strange
peoples, in distant lands, after long ages, has come from a heart of
no common make. The Anglo-Saxon boy is at home in the Odyssey; and
when he is a man--if he has the luck to be guided into classical
paths--he finds himself in the Aeneid; and from this certain things
are deduced about the makers of those poems--that they knew life,
looked on it with bright, keen eyes, loved it, and lived it over
again as they shaped it into verse.

When we turn to the first three Gospels, we find the same thing.
Here are books with a more worldwide range than Homer or Virgil,
translated again and again from the first century of their existence
on to the latest--and then more than ever--into all sorts of
tongues, to reach men all over the globe; and that purpose they have
achieved. They have done it not so much for the literary graces of
the translators or eve