agerness,--which will not suffer a
son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous
fruit,--all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this
tremendous expectation.

That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seems
due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements
which somehow mingle with human destiny. He was not thinking chiefly of
himself,--not even though he was to be God's vicegerent. What filled his
heart, was the destiny of men. He wept over Jerusalem,--he mourned for
those who would go away into darkness. The realities of human
experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him.

It seems plain--so far as anything can be plain in the details of the
story--that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual
idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established
religion. He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would
there take an acute form, with the gravest issues. At times the presage
rose of his own defeat and death. Suppose that were to happen?
Still--so spoke his victorious faith--God's cause would triumph. And it
would triumph speedily and visibly. So he heartened his followers for
any event. "Be prepared--you who are to me brothers and sisters and
mother--be prepared even for my death. All the same, my truth will
vindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!"

Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther. Gorgeous
buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a
mass of greed, formality, worldliness.

A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure. The disciples
childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes
him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one
stone be left upon another."

His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which
shall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state. He
goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and
merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade.
This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle
against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they
speedily bring about his ruin.

The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night. At the
supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing sel