ion. His earliest life was that of labor and
poverty, and it was labor and poverty in the poorest districts of
Palestine. The dignified, educated, and aristocratic part of the nation
dwelt in Judea, and the Athens of Palestine was Jerusalem. There Christ
spent the least part of his life, and that in perpetual discussions. But
in Galilee the most of his miracles, certainly the earlier, were
performed, and the most of his discourses that are contained bodily in
the gospels were uttered. He himself carried out the declaration that
the gospel was for the poor. The very miracles that Christ performed
were not philosophical enigmas, as we look at them. They were all of
them miracles of mercy. They were miracles to those who were suffering
helplessly where natural law and artificial means could not reach them.
In every case the miracles of Christ were mercies, though we look at
them in a spirit totally different from that in which he performed them.

In doing thus, Christ represented the best spirit of the Old Testament.
The Jewish Scriptures teach mercy, the very genius of Jewish
institutions was that of mercy, and especially to the poor, the weak,
the helpless. The crimes against which the prophets thundered their
severest denunciations were crimes upon the helpless. It was the avarice
of the rich, it was the unbounded lust and cruelty of the strong, that
were denounced by them. They did not preach against human nature in
general. They did not preach against total depravity and the original
condition of mankind. They singled out violations of the law in the
magistrate, in the king, in rich men, everywhere, and especially all
those wrongs committed by power either unconsciously or with purpose,
cruelty upon the helpless, the defenseless, the poor and the needy. When
Christ declared that this was his ministry, he took his text from the
Old Testament; he spoke in its spirit. It was to preach the gospel to
the poor that he was sent. He had come into the world to change the
condition of mankind. Beginning at the top? No; beginning at the bottom
and working up to the top from the bottom.

When this view of the gospel enters into our understanding and is fully
comprehended by us, how exactly it fits in with the order of nature, and
with the order of the unfolding of human life and human society! It
takes sides with the poor; and so the universal tendency of Providence
and of history, slowly unfolded, is on the whole going from low