If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus’ opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God’s word for him.  If a man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life with seriousness and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish.  Such a man is prepared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little facts, and then God dawns on him in them.  This is put directly in the Fourth Gospel (7:17), and in parable in the Synoptists.  The leaven works, till the whole is leavened; the uneasy process is over and the result achieved.  Or, it comes more quietly still—­the seed grows while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade springs up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the ear; and the end is reached and God’s Kingdom is a reality.  Or, the knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash—­sudden, illuminative, decisive.  “The Son reveals” God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt. 11:27).  The Son of Man may be a disputable figure—­“Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him” (Matt. 12:32)—­but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the spirit of Truth.  So he taught, and all history shows he was right—­the refusal of truth is fatal.  “Jesus,” wrote Matthew Arnold, “never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon experience.”  It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his message.  The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky, and the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather (Matt. 16:2; Luke 12:55).

“Eyes and ears,” said the Greek thinker, Heraclitus, long before, “are bad witnesses for such as have barbarian souls.”  The Pharisees discredited Jesus—­he “cast out devils by Beelzebub.”  Did he, he asked, or was it “by the finger of God” (Luke 11:20)?  Is there no evidence of God in restored sanity?  But the strength of his position lies in the good news for the poor (Matt. 11:5), for those who labour and are heavy—­laden (Matt. 11:28)—­news of rest and refreshment—­as if the intuition of God, with the peace it brings, were its own proof.  Truth is reached less by ingenuity than by intensity.  To the simple mind, to the true heart, to the pure soul (Matt. 5:8), to those whose gift is peace, Truth comes flooding in—­new light on old fact, and new light from old fact—­and God is evident.  So Jesus judged; and here again, before we decide for or against his view, we have to make sure that we know his meaning, and realize the experience by which he reached his thought.  And then, perhaps, God will be more evident to us in our turn.  “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation” (Luke 17:20)—­it is “within” (Luke 17:21); so quietly it comes, that we may not guess how in any particular instance the realization of God came to a soul; but if we are candid and truth-loving we can know it when it has come to ourselves, and we can recognize it when it comes to another.  We can recognize it in its power and peace, we can see the greatness of the new knowledge in the new man it makes, in the new life, the man of the great spirit, of the great action, the man of the great quiet, the man who has the peace of God.