his habits of mind. His thought will occupy us in later chapters;
here we are concerned rather with the way in which his mind moves,
and the characteristics of his thinking.

First of all, we note a certain swiftness, a quick realization of a
situation, a character, or the meaning of a word. Men try to trap
him with a question, and he instantly "recognizes their trickery"
(Luke 20:23). When they ask for a sign, he is as quick to see what
they have in mind (Mark 8:11-13). He catches the word whispered to
Jairus--half hears, half divines it, in an instant (Mark 5:36). He
is surprised at slowness of mind in other men (Matt. 15:16; Mark
8:21). And in other things he is as quick--he sees "the kingdoms of
this world in a moment of time" (Luke 4:5); he beholds "Satan fallen
(aorist participle) from heaven like lightning" (Luke 10:18)--two
very striking passages, which illuminate his mind for us in a very
important phase of it. We ought to have been able to guess without
them that he saw things instantly and in a flash--that they stood
out for him in outline and colour and movement there and then. That
is plain in the parables from nature, and here it is confirmed. Is
there in all his parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the
focus wrong? The tone of the parables is due largely to this gift of
visualizing, to use an ugly modern word, and of doing it with
swiftness and precision.

Several things combine to make this faculty, or at least go along
with it--a combination not very common even among men of genius--an
unusual sense of fact, a very keen and vivid sympathy, and a gift of
bringing imagination to bear on the fact in the moment of its
discovery, and afterwards in his treatment of the fact.

On his sense of fact we have touched before, in dealing with his
close observation of Nature. It is an observation that needs no
note-book, that is hardly conscious of itself. There is, as we know,
a happy type of person who sees almost without looking, certainly
without noticing--and sees aright too. The temperament is described
by Wordsworth in the opening books of "The Prelude". The poet type
seems to lose so much and yet constantly surprises us by what it has
captured, and sometimes hardly itself realizes how much has been
done. The gains are not registered, but they are real and they are
never lost, and come flashing out all unexpectedly when the note is
struck that calls them. So one feels it was with Jesus' intimate
kn