It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young hearts, that it is easy to idealize what one does not know.  “Omne ignotum pro magnifico” is the old epigram of Tacitus.  It is not every believer in man, nor every “Friend of man,” who knows men as Jesus did.  Like Burns and Carlyle and others who have interpreted man to us to some purpose, he grew up in the home of labouring people.  He was a working man himself, a carpenter.  He must have learnt his carpentry exactly as every boy learns it, by hammering his fingers instead of the nail, sawing his own skin instead of the wood—­and not doing it again.  He knew what it was to have an aching back and sweat on the face; how hard money is to earn, and how quickly it goes.  He makes it clear that money is a temptation to men, and a great danger; but he never joins the moralists and cranks in denouncing it.  He always talks sense—­if the expression is not too lowly to apply to him.  He sees what can be done with money, what a tool it can be in a wise man’s hands—­how he can make friends “by means of the mammon of unrighteousness” (Luke 16:9), for example, by giving unexpectedly generous wages to men who missed their chances (Matt. 20:15), by feeding Lazarus at the gate, and perhaps by having his sores properly attended to (Luke 16:20).  That he understood how pitifully the loss of a coin may affect a household of working people, one of his most beautiful parables bears witness (Luke 15:8-10).  With work he had no quarrel.  He draws many of his parables from labour, and he implies throughout that it is the natural and right thing for man.  To be holy in his sense, a man need not leave his work.  Clement of Alexandria, in his famous saying about the ploughman continuing to plough, and knowing God as he ploughs, and the seafaring man, sticking to his ship and calling on the heavenly pilot as he sails, is in the vein of Jesus.[24] There were those whom he called to leave all, to distribute their wealth, and to follow him; but he chose them (Mark 3:13, 14); it was not his one command for all men (cf.  Mark 5:19).  But, as we shall shortly see, it is implied by his judgements of men that he believed in work and liked men who “put their backs into it”—­their backs, eyes, and their brains too.

Pain, the constant problem of man, and perhaps more, of woman—­of unmarried woman more especially—­he never discussed as modern people discuss it.  He never made light of pain any more than of poverty; he understood physical as well as moral distress.  Nor did he, like some of his contemporaries and some modern people, exaggerate the place of pain in human experience.  He shared pain, he sympathized with suffering; and his understanding of pain, and, above all, his choice of pain, taught men to reconsider it and to understand it, and altered the attitude of the world toward it.  His tenderness for the suffering of others taught mankind a new sympathy, and the “nosokomeion”, the hospital for the sick, was one of the first of Christian institutions to rise, when persecution stopped and Christians could build.  “And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them,” says Matthew (21:14) in a memorable phrase.  I have heard it suggested that it was irregular for them to come into the temple courts; but they gravitated naturally to Jesus.