ns presented to him in his
ministry. His most radical sayings concerning the Sabbath followed a
criticism of his disciples for plucking ears of grain as they passed
through the fields on the Sabbath day (Mark ii. 23-28); his authority to
forgive sins was announced when a paralytic was brought to him for
healing (Mark ii. 1-12); so far as the gospels indicate, we should have
missed Jesus' clearest statement of the significance of his own death but
for the ambitious request of James and John (Mark x. 35-45). Examples of
the occasional character of his teaching might be greatly multiplied. He
did not seek to be the founder of a school; important as his teachings
were, they take a place in his work second to his personal influence on
his followers. He desired to win disciples whose faith in him would
withstand all shocks, rather than to train experts who would pass on his
ideas to others. His disciples did become experts, for we owe to them the
vivid presentation we have of the exalted and unique teaching of their
Master; but they were thus skilful because they surrendered themselves to
his personal mastery, and learned to know the springs of his own life and
thought.

235. Nothing in the teaching of Jesus is more remarkable than his
confidence that men who believed in him would adequately represent him and
his message to the world. The parable of the Leaven seems to have set
forth his own method. We owe our gospels to no injunction given by him to
write down what he said and did. He impressed himself on his followers,
filled them with a love to himself which made them sensitive to his ideas
as a photographic plate is to light, teaching them his truth in forms that
did not at first show any effect on their thought, but were developed into
strength and clearness by the experiences of the passing years. Christian
ethics and theology are far more than an orderly presentation of the
teaching of Jesus; in so far as they are purely Christian they are the
systematic setting forth of truth involved, though not expressed, in what
he said and did in his ministry among men. His ideas were radical and
thoroughly revolutionary. His method, however, had in it all the patience
of God's working in nature, and the hidden noiseless power of an evolution
is its characteristic. Hence it was that he chose to teach some things
exclusively in figure. So great and unfamiliar a truth as the gradual
development of God's kingdom was unwelcome to the t