From that time, Jesus being then about thirty years of age, He began to preach, and exhort to repentance as John had done before Him.  One day as He walked beside the sea of Galilee He saw two brothers named Simon-Peter and Andrew, fishing by the shore.  These men He called to Him and bade them follow Him for He would make them fishers of men, and they immediately left their nets and followed Him.  Presently, as they walked along the shore, they saw two other fishermen brothers—­James and John, the sons of Zebedee, in a boat with their father, mending the great, brown nets with which they caught fish on the Syrian coasts, and called them also, and they too left their nets and their father and followed Him.  They were the first four of the twelve disciples whom Jesus by degrees gathered about Him, and who were His companions and assistants in His future work.  With His disciples Christ travelled over the whole land of Syria, now called the Holy Land, teaching in the churches and preaching about the Kingdom of His Father, and healing all manner of diseases and sicknesses amongst the people, until the fame of His sayings and doings spread every where, and the sick and suffering and diseased were brought to Him from all quarters that He might heal them.  This He never refused to do, for His heart was so overflowing with divine love and pity for mankind that He could not see suffering or misery without healing it.

[Illustration:  Jesus is Baptized.]

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But so immense grew the multitude of people who began to follow and press about Him, that He had no room to teach or to preach, no opportunity to rest and talk quietly with His disciples either night or day.

Seeing this He went up a mountain side, and sat down, and His disciples came to Him, and there He began to instruct the people by preaching to them that most grand and beautiful sermon called the Sermon on the Mount, which contains not only the lessons taught by the series of blessings called “The Beatitudes”, at the commencement, but that prayer of prayers known to every child as the “Lord’s Prayer”, because it is the only one which Christ Himself taught word for word with His own lips, and which has remained unaltered through the nineteen hundred years which have gone by since He lived on earth.

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The people were very much astonished, not only at what Christ preached to them, but because He spoke as if He had direct authority for what He said, and this they could not understand, because they had not forgotten that He was the Son of Joseph the Carpenter of Nazareth.

When Jesus came down from the mountain side, great multitudes followed Him, many of whom were sick and entreated Him to heal them, and He not only did so, but performed many yet greater miracles, such as making the blind to see and the deaf to hear, and even restoring to life some that were dead, always however, impressing on those about Him, that it was not by His own power that He did these things, but by faith in the Spirit of God His Father who moved within Him.