Joseph knew the book less perhaps than any other book of the Scriptures; he had looked into it with Azariah, but for a reason which he could not now discover he had read it with little attention; and since his schooldays he had not looked into it again.  Peter and Andrew and John and James were listening intently to the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream for the sake of the story related and without thought of what might be Jesus’ purpose in relating it.  But to Joseph Jesus’ purpose was the chief interest of the relation; and the purpose became apparent when he began to tell how the great statue seen by Nebuchadnezzar in his dream, whose head was gold, whose arms and breast were silver, whose belly was brass, and whose legs and feet were iron and clay intermingled, was overthrown by a stone that hand had not cut out of the mountain.  This stone became forthwith as big as a mountain and filled the whole earth, and Joseph fell to thinking if this stone were the fifth kingdom which the Messiah would set up when the Roman kingdom had fallen to dust, or whether the stone were the Messiah himself.  And while Joseph sat thinking he heard suddenly that when Nebuchadnezzar looked into the furnace and saw the four men whom he had ordered to be thrown into it walking through the flames safely, he said:  and the form of the fourth is like the son of God.

The story wholly delighted the disciples; and they asked Jesus to tell them the further adventures of Daniel, and as if wishing to humour them he began to relate that a hand had appeared writing on the wall during the great feast at Babylon, a story to which Joseph could give but little heed, for his imagination was controlled by the words, “whose form is like the son of God”—­an inspiration on the part of the Babylonian king.  If ever a man had seemed since to another like the son of God, Jesus was that man; and Joseph asked himself how it was that these words had passed over the ears of the disciples—­over the ears of those who knew Jesus’ mind, if any could be said to know Jesus’ mind.  Jesus, though he lived near them and loved them, lived in the world of his own thoughts, which, so it seemed to Joseph, he could not share with anybody.  Not one of the men he had gathered about him, neither Peter, nor John, nor James, had noticed the notable words:  “And the form of the fourth is like the son of God.”  It was for these words, Joseph felt sure, that Jesus had related the story of Daniel in the furnace.  But his disciples had not apprehended the significance; and like one whose confidence was unmoved by the slowness or the quickness of his listeners, almost as if he knew that the real drift of his speech was beyond his hearers, Jesus began to tell that Darius’ counsellors had combined into a plot against Daniel and succeeded in it so well that Daniel and his companions were cast in a den of lions.  But there being nothing in the story that pointed to the setting up of the Kingdom of God upon earth, Joseph was puzzled to understand why Jesus