owledge of Nature--it is not the knowledge of botanist or
naturalist, but that of the inmate and the companion, who by long
intimacy comes to know far more than he dreams. "Wise master
mariners," wrote the Greek poet, Pindar, long before, "know the wind
that shall blow on the third day, and are not wrecked for headlong
greed of gain." They know the weather, as we say, by instinct; and
instinct is the outcome of intimacy, of observation accurate but
sub-conscious.

It chimes in with this instinct for fact, that Jesus should lay so
much emphasis on truth of word and truth of thought. Any hypocrisy
is a leaven (Matt. 16:19; Luke 12:1); any system of two standards of
truth spoils the mind (Matt. 5:33-37). The divided mind fails
because it is not for one thing or the other. If it is impossible to
serve God and mammon, truth and God go together in one allegiance;
and a non-Theocentric element in a man's thought will be fatal
sooner or later to any aptitude he has by nature for God and truth.

We find this illustrated in Jesus' own case. At the heart of his
instinct for fact is his instinct for God. He goes to the permanent
and eternal at once in his quest of fact, because his instinct for
God is so sure and so compelling. Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in
Jesus' conversation "a constant progress from the arbitrary and
special to the essential and universal forms of thought," "a true
freedom from fastidiousness," "a singular largeness" in his
intellectual life. The small question is answered in the
larger--"the life is more than meat and the body is more than
raiment" (Luke 12:23). When he is challenged on divorce, he goes
past Moses to God (Matt. 19:4)--"He which made them at the beginning
made them male and female." Every question is settled for him by
reference to God, and to God's principles of action and to God's
laws and commands; and God, as we shall see in a later chapter, is
not for him a conception borrowed from others, a quotation from a
book. God is real, living, and personal; and all his teaching is
directed to drive his disciples into the real; he insists on the
open mind, the study of fact, the fresh, keen eye turned on the
actual doings of God.

When life and thought have such a centre, a simplicity and an
integrity follow beyond what we might readily guess. "When thine eye
is single, thy whole body also is full of light, ... if thy whole
body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole
shall