vii, p. 154).  Add also the other pictures of Satan fallen (Luke 10:18) and Satan pushing into God’s presence with a demand for the disciples (Luke 22:31).  Are we to call these “visions”—­the word is ambiguous—­or are they imaginative presentments of evil, as it thrusts itself on the soul, with all its allurements and all its ugliness?  “Visions” in the sense that is associated with trance, we shall hardly call them.  They are pictures showing his gift of imagination.

Lastly, on this part of our subject, let us remind ourselves of the many parables and pictures and sayings which put God himself before us.  Here is the bird’s nest, and one little sparrow fallen to the ground—­and God is there and he takes notice of it; he misses the little bird from the brood (Matt. 10:29; cf.  Luke 12:6).  Here again is quite another scene—­the rich and middle-aged man, who has prospered in everything and is just completing his plans to retire from business, when he feels a tap on his shoulder and hears a voice speaking to him, and he turns and is face to face with God (Luke 12:20).  And there are all the other stories of God’s goodness and kindness and care; is not the very phrase “Our Father in heaven” a picture in itself, if we can manage to give the word the value which Jesus meant it to carry?  When one studies the teaching of Jesus, and concentrates on what he draws us of God, God somehow becomes real and delightful, in a most wonderful way.

With all these faculties brought to bear on all he thinks, and lucent in all he says, there is little wonder that men recognized another note in Jesus from that familiar in their usual teachers.  Rabbi Eliezer of those times was praised as “a well-trough that loses not a drop of water.”  We all know that type of teacher—­the tank-mind, full, no doubt, supplied by pipes, and ministering its gifts by pipe and tap, regulated, tiresome, and dead.  “The water that I shall give him,” days Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (John 4:14), “shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”  The water metaphors of the New Testament are not of trough and tank.  Jesus taught men—­not from a reservoir of quotations, like a scribe or a Rabbi, “but as possessed of authority himself” (Matt. 7:29).  Who gave him that authority? asked the priests (Matt. 21:23)?  Who authorizes the living man to live?  “All things are delivered unto me of my Father” (Matt. 11:27).  “My words shall not pass away” (Mark 13:31).

He has proved right; his words have not passed away.  The great “Son of Fact,” he went to fact, drove his disciples to fact, and (in the striking phrase of Cromwell) “spoke things.”  And we can see in the record again and again the traces of the mental habits and the natural language of one who habitually based himself on experience and on fact.  Critics remark on his method of using the Old Testament and contrast it with contemporary ways.  St. Paul, for instance, in the passage where he weighs