they are imagining no such thing.  Anything, everything serves to reveal him.  They tramp all day, and ask some village people to shelter them for the night.  The villagers tell them to go away.  The men are hungry and fatigued.  “What a splendid thing it would be, if we could do like Elijah and burn them up with a word!” So the hot thought rose.  He turned and said, “You know not what manner of spirit you are of.”—­What a gentle rebuke!  “The Son of Man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:51-56).  Then follows one of the wonderful sentences of the Gospel, “they went unto another village”—­very obvious, but very significant.  A missionary from China told me how, thirty years ago or more, he was driven out of the town where he lived; how the gentlefolk egged on the mob, and they wrecked his house, and hounded him out of the place.  He told me how it felt—­the misery and the indignity of it.  Jesus took it undisturbed.  He taught a lesson in it which the Church has never forgotten.

Their life was full of experiences shared with him.  He has his reserve—­his secret; yet, in another sense, he gives himself to them without reserve; there is prodigality of self-impartation in his dealings with them.  He lets them have everything they can take.  He becomes theirs in a great intimacy, he gives himself to them.  Why?  Because he believes, as he put it, in seed.  Socrates saw that the teacher’s real work, his only work, is to implant the idea, like a seed; an idea, like a seed, will look after itself.  A king builds a temple or a palace.  The seed of a banyan drifts into a crack, and grows without asking anyone’s leave; there is life in it.  In the end the building comes down, but for what the banyan holds up.  The leaven in the meal is the most powerful thing there.  There is very little of it, but that does not matter; it is alive (Matt. 13:33).  Life is a very little thing but it is the only thing that counts.  That is why the farmer can sow his fields and sleep at nights without thinking of them; and the crop grows in spite of his sleeping, and he knows it (Mark 4:26).  That is why Jesus believes so thoroughly in his men, and in his message; God has made the one for the other, and there is no fear of mischance.

Look at his method of teaching.  People “marvelled at his words of charm” (Luke 4:22)—­“hung about him to hear him” (Luke 19:48).  He said that the word is the overflow of the heart.  “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matt. 12:34; Luke 6:45).  What a heart, then, his words reveal!  How easy and straightforward his language is!  To-day we all use abstract nouns to convey our meaning; we cannot do without words ending in -ality and -anon.  But there is no recorded saying of Jesus where he uses even “personality.”  He does not use abstract nouns.  He sticks to plain words.  When he speaks about God he does not say “the Great First Cause,” or “Providence,” or any other vague abstract.  Still less does