all the
prophets had foretold, and of being fully equipped with authority and
power and the promise of unapproachable dignity. Of deep religious spirit
and great reverence for the scriptures of his people, he yet used these
scriptures as a master does his tools, to serve his work rather than to
instruct him in it. He drew his knowledge from within and from above, and
proclaimed his own fulfilment of the scriptures when he filled them with
new meaning. A man always devout, always at prayer, he is never seen, like
Isaiah, prostrate before the Most High, crying, "I am undone" (Isa. vi.
5). In his moments of greatest seriousness and most manifest communion
with heaven he looked to God as his nearest of kin, and felt himself a
stranger on the earth fulfilling his Father's will. He felt heaven to be
his home not simply by God's gracious promise, but by the right of
previous possession. His kinship with men was a condescension, his natural
fellowship was with God.

275. The miracles with which the gospels have filled the record of Jesus'
life have caused perplexity to many, and they belong with other mysterious
things recorded for us in the story of the past or occurring under the
incredulous observation of our scientific generation. They all pale,
however, before the unaccountable exception presented to universal human
experience by this Man of Nazareth. It confronts us when we think of the
unschooled Jew who, in his thought of God, rose not only above all of his
generation, but higher than all who had gone before him, or have come
after, one who built on the foundation of the past a superstructure of
religion new, and simple, and clearly heavenly. It confronts us when we
think of this Man who believed that it was given to him to establish the
kingdom that should fill the whole earth, and who had the boldness and the
faith to ignore the opposition of all the world's wisdom and of all its
enthroned power, and to fulfil his task as the woman does who hides her
leaven in the meal, content to wait for years, or millenniums, until his
truth shall conquer in the realization of God's will on earth even as it
is done in heaven. It confronts us when we consider that the Man who has
shown his brethren what obedience means, who has taught them to pray, who
has been for all these centuries the Way, the Truth, the Life, by whom
they come to God, habitually claimed without shadow of abashment or
slightest hint of conscious presumption, a na