and the men with the net (Matt. 13:47), the sheep among the wolves (Matt. 10:16), the woman sweeping the house (Luke 15:8), the debtor going to prison accompanied by his creditor and the officer with the judge’s warrant (Luke 12:58), the shepherd separating his sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:32), the children playing in the market-place pretending to pipe or to mourn (Luke 7:32), the fall of the house (Matt. 7:27)—­or the ironical pictures of the blind leading the blind straight for the ditch (Matt. 15:14), the vintagers taking their baskets to the bramble bushes (Matt. 7:16), the candle burning away brightly under the bushel (Matt. 5:15; Luke 11:33), the offering of pearls to the pigs (Matt. 7:6)—­or his descriptions of what lay before himself as a cup and a baptism (Mark 10:38), and of his task as the setting fire to the world (Luke 12:49).  There is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these pictures—­not least about those touched with irony.

There are, however, pictures less realistic and more imaginative—­one or two of them, in the language of the fireside, quite “creepy.”  Here is a house—­a neat, trim little house—­and for the English reader there is of course a garden or a field round it, and a wood beyond.  Out of the wood comes something—­stealthily creeping up towards the house—­something not easy to make out, but weary and travel-stained and dusty—­and evil.  A strange feeling comes over one as one watches—­it is evil, one is certain of it.  Nearer and nearer to the house it creeps—­it is by the window—­it rises to look in, and one shudders to think of those inside who suddenly see that looking at them through the window.  But there is no one there.  Fatigue changes to triumph; caution is dropped; it goes and returns with seven worse than itself, and the last state of the place is worse than the first (Luke 11:24-26).  Is this leaving the real?  One critic will say it is, “No,” says another man, in a graver tone and speaking slowly, “it’s real enough; it’s my story.”  But have we left the text too far?  Then let us try another passage.  Here is a funeral procession, a bier with a dead man laid out on it, “wrapped in a linen cloth” (Matt. 27:59), “bound hand and foot with grave-clothes” (John 11:44)—­a common enough sight in the East; but who are they who are carrying him—­those silent, awful figures, bound like him hand and foot, and wound with the same linen cloth, moving swiftly and steadily along with their burden?  It is the dead burying the dead (Luke 9:60).  Add to these the account of the three Temptations—­stories in picture, which must come from Jesus himself, and illustrate another side of his experience.  For to the mind that sees and thinks in pictures, temptation comes in pictures which the mind makes for itself, or has presented to it and at once lights up—­pictures horrible and once seen hard to forget and to escape.  No wonder he warns men against the pictures they paint themselves in their minds (Matt. 5:28; cf.  Chapter