man’s notions (Mark 7:8).  What a source of rest and peace to him is the thought of God’s will!  When Dante writes:  “And His will is our peace,” it is the thought of Jesus.  And at the same time God’s judgements are as real to Jesus’ mind.  “I will tell you,” he says, “whom to fear, God—­yes, fear him!” (Luke 12:5).  He feels the tenderness and the awfulness of God at once.

In speaking of God, it is noticeable that Jesus chiefly emphasizes God’s interest in the individual, as giving the real clue to God’s nature.  On the whole, there is very little even implied, still less explicit, in the Gospels, about God as the great architect of Nature—­hardly anything on the lines familiar to us in the Psalms and in Isaiah—­“The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands formed the dry land” (Psalm 95:5)—­“He taketh up the isles as a very little thing” (Isaiah 40:15).  There is little of this in the Gospels; yet it is implied in the affair of the storm (Matt. 8:26).  The disciples in their anxiety wake him.  He does not understand their fear.  Whose sea is it?  Whose wind is it?  Whose children are you?  Cannot you trust your Father to control his wind and his sea?  Of course it is possible that he said more about God as the Author of Nature than our fragmentary reports give us; but it may be that it is because the emphasis on God’s care and love for the individual is hardest to believe, and at the same time best, gives the real value of God, that Jesus uses it so much.  Perhaps the Great Artificer is too far away for our minds.  He is too busy, we think; and yet, after all, if God is so great, why should he be so busy?  If he is a real Father, why should not he be at leisure for his children?  He is, says Jesus; a friend has leisure for his friends, and a father for his children; and God, Jesus suggests, always has leisure for you.

The great emphasis with Jesus falls on the love of God.  Thus he tells the story of the impossible creditor with two debtors (Luke 7:42).  One owed him ten pounds, and the other a hundred.  When they had nothing to pay, they both came to him and told him so.  The ordinary creditor, at the very best, would say:  “Well, I suppose I must put it down as a bad debt.”  Jesus says that this creditor took up quite another attitude.  He smiled and said to his two troubled friends:  “Is that all?  Don’t let anything like that worry you.  What is that between you and me?” He forgave them the debt with such a charm ("echarisato"), Jesus says, that they both loved him.  One feels that the end of the story must be, that they both paid him and loved him all the more for taking the money.  What a delightful story of charm, and friendship and forgiveness!  And it is a true picture of God, Jesus would have us believe, of God’s forgiveness and the response it wakes in men.