be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth
give thee light" (Luke 11:34-36). It is this fullness of light that
we find in Jesus; and as the light plays on one object and another,
how clear and simple everything grows! All round about him was
subtlety, cleverness, fastidiousness. His speech is lucid, drives
straight to the centre, to the principle, and is intelligible. We
may not see how far his word carries us, but it is abundantly plain
that simple and straightforward people do understand Jesus--not all
at once, but sufficiently for the moment, and with a sense that
there is more beyond. His thought is uncomplicated by distinctions
due to tradition and its accidents. His whole attitude to life is
simple--he has no taboos; he comes "eating and drinking" (Matt.
11:19); and he told his followers, when he sent them out to preach,
to eat what they were given (Luke 10:7); "give alms," he says, "of
such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you"
(Luke 11:41). If God gives the food, it will probably be clean; and
the old taboos will be mere tradition of men. He is not interested
in what men call "signs," in the exceptional thing; the ordinary
suffices when one sees God in it. One of Jesus' great lessons is to
get men to look for God in the commonplace things of which God makes
so many, as if Abraham Lincoln were right and God did make so many
common people, because he likes them best. The commonest
flowers--God thinks them out, says Jesus, and takes care of them
(Matt. 6:28-30). Hence there is little need of special machinery for
contact with God--priesthoods, trances, visions, or mystical
states--abnormal means for contact with the normal. When Jesus
speaks of the very highest and holiest things, he is as simple and
natural as when he is making a table in the carpenter-shop. Sense
and sanity are the marks of his religion.

"Sense of fact" is a phrase which does not exclude--perhaps it even
suggests--some hint of dullness. The matter-of-fact people are
valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because
they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case
there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy--he likes the birds
and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations. They are not the
"natural objects" with which dull people try to brighten their pages
and discourses. They are happy living things that come to his mind,
as it were, of themselves, because, shall