perfect freedom; so far from regarding him with that excessive fear which might have prevented them from receiving his doctrine intelligently, they learnt gradually to treat him, even while they acknowledged his extraordinary power, with a reckless animosity which they would have been afraid to show towards an ordinary enemy.  With curious inconsistency they openly charged him with being leagued with the devil; in other words, they acknowledged that he was capable of boundless mischief, and yet they were so little afraid of him that they were ready to provoke him to use his whole power against themselves.  The truth was that they believed him to be disarmed by his own deliberate resolution, and they judged rightly.  He punished their malice only by verbal reproofs, and they gradually gathered courage to attack the life of one whose miraculous powers they did not question.

Meantime, while this magnanimous self-restraint saved him from false friends and mercenary or servile flatterers, and saved the kingdom which he founded from the corruption of self-interest and worldliness, it gave him a power over the good such as nothing else could have given.  For the noblest and most amiable thing that can be seen is power mixed with gentleness, the reposing, self-restraining attitude of strength.  These are the “fine strains of honour,” these are “the graces of the gods”—­

        To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o’ the air. 
        And yet to charge the sulphur with a bolt
        That shall but rive an oak.

And while he did no mischief under any provocation, his power flowed in acts of beneficence on every side.  Men could approach near to him, could eat and drink with him, could listen to his talk and ask him questions, and they found him not accessible only, but warmhearted, and not occupied so much with his own plans that he could not attend to a case of distress or mental perplexity.  They found him full of sympathy and appreciation, dropping words of praise, ejaculations of admiration, tears.  He surrounded himself with those who had tasted of his bounty, sick people whom he had cured, lepers whose death-in-life, demoniacs whose hell-in-life, he had terminated with a single powerful word.  Among these came loving hearts who thanked him for friends and relatives rescued for them out of the jaws of premature death, and others whom he had saved, by a power which did not seem different, from vice and degradation.

This temperance in the use of supernatural power is the masterpiece of Christ.  It is a moral miracle superinduced upon a physical one.  This repose in greatness makes him surely the most sublime image ever offered to the human imagination.  And it is precisely this trait which gave him his immense and immediate ascendency over men.  If the question be put—­Why was Christ so successful?—­Why did men gather round him at his call, form themselves into a new society