Mark at the outset Christ’s own estimate of His words:  “The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life;” “If a man keep My word he shall never see death;” “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away;” “Every one which heareth these words of Mine and doeth them “—­with him Christ said it should be well; but “every one that heareth these words of Mine and doeth them not”—­upon him ruin should come to the uttermost.  Sayings like these are very remarkable, for this is not the way in which human teachers are wont to speak of their own words; or, if they do so speak, this wise world of ours knows better than to take them at their own valuation.  But the astonishing fact in the case of Jesus is that the world has admitted His claim.  Men who refuse utterly to share our faith concerning Him and the significance of His life and death, readily give to Him a place apart among the great teachers of mankind.  I have already quoted the judgment of John Stuart Mill.  “Jesus,” says Matthew Arnold, “as He appears in the Gospels ... is in the jargon of modern philosophy an absolute"[5]—­we cannot get beyond Him.  Such, likewise, is the verdict of Goethe:  “Let intellectual and spiritual culture progress, and the human mind expand, as much as it will; beyond the grandeur and the moral elevation of Christianity, as it sparkles and shines in the Gospels, the human mind will not advance."[6] It would be easy to multiply testimonies, but it is needless, since practically all whose judgment is of any account are of one mind.

But now if, with these facts in our minds, and knowing nothing else about the teaching of Jesus, we could suppose ourselves turning for the first time to the simple record of the Gospels, probably our first feeling would be one of surprise that Jesus the Teacher had won for Himself such an ascendency over the minds and hearts of men.  For consider some of the facts which the Gospels reveal to us.  To begin with, this Teacher, unlike most other teachers who have influenced mankind, contented Himself from first to last with merely oral instruction:  He left no book; He never wrote, save in the dust of the ground.  Not only so, but the words of Jesus that have been preserved by the evangelists are, comparatively speaking, extremely few.  Put them all together, they are less by one-half or two-thirds than the words which it will be necessary for me to use in order to set forth His teaching in this little book.  And further, the little we have is, for the most part, so casual, so unpremeditated, so unsystematic in its character.  Once and again, it is true, we get from the Evangelists something approaching what may be called a set discourse; but more often what they give us is reports of conversations—­conversations with His disciples, with chance acquaintances, or with His enemies.  Sometimes we find Him speaking in the synagogues; but He is quite as ready to teach reclining at the dinner-table; and, best of all, He