feels it was with Jesus’ intimate knowledge of Nature—­it is not the knowledge of botanist or naturalist, but that of the inmate and the companion, who by long intimacy comes to know far more than he dreams.  “Wise master mariners,” wrote the Greek poet, Pindar, long before, “know the wind that shall blow on the third day, and are not wrecked for headlong greed of gain.”  They know the weather, as we say, by instinct; and instinct is the outcome of intimacy, of observation accurate but sub-conscious.

It chimes in with this instinct for fact, that Jesus should lay so much emphasis on truth of word and truth of thought.  Any hypocrisy is a leaven (Matt. 16:19; Luke 12:1); any system of two standards of truth spoils the mind (Matt. 5:33-37).  The divided mind fails because it is not for one thing or the other.  If it is impossible to serve God and mammon, truth and God go together in one allegiance; and a non-Theocentric element in a man’s thought will be fatal sooner or later to any aptitude he has by nature for God and truth.

We find this illustrated in Jesus’ own case.  At the heart of his instinct for fact is his instinct for God.  He goes to the permanent and eternal at once in his quest of fact, because his instinct for God is so sure and so compelling.  Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in Jesus’ conversation “a constant progress from the arbitrary and special to the essential and universal forms of thought,” “a true freedom from fastidiousness,” “a singular largeness” in his intellectual life.  The small question is answered in the larger—­“the life is more than meat and the body is more than raiment” (Luke 12:23).  When he is challenged on divorce, he goes past Moses to God (Matt. 19:4)—­“He which made them at the beginning made them male and female.”  Every question is settled for him by reference to God, and to God’s principles of action and to God’s laws and commands; and God, as we shall see in a later chapter, is not for him a conception borrowed from others, a quotation from a book.  God is real, living, and personal; and all his teaching is directed to drive his disciples into the real; he insists on the open mind, the study of fact, the fresh, keen eye turned on the actual doings of God.

When life and thought have such a centre, a simplicity and an integrity follow beyond what we might readily guess.  “When thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light, ... if thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light” (Luke 11:34-36).  It is this fullness of light that we find in Jesus; and as the light plays on one object and another, how clear and simple everything grows!  All round about him was subtlety, cleverness, fastidiousness.  His speech is lucid, drives straight to the centre, to the principle, and is intelligible.  We may not see how far his word carries us, but it is abundantly plain that simple and straightforward people do understand