how fierce he is about the man who puts a stumbling-block in the way of even “a little one”—­“better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea”; no mere phrase—­for when he draws a picture, he sees it; he sees this scene, and “better so—­for him too!” is his comment (Mark 9:42).  There was, we may remember, a view current in antiquity that when a man was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though I do not know if the Jews held this opinion.  It is not likely that Jesus did.  What is God’s mind, God’s conduct, toward those people whom men think they can afford to despise?  “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).  And to whom did he say this?  To the most ordinary people—­to Peter and James and John; for all sorts of people he held up this impossible ideal of a perfection like God’s.  What a faith in man it implies!  “All things are possible to him that believes” (Mark 9:9.3).  Why should not you believe? he says.

His faith in the soul’s possibilities is boundless, and in marked contrast with what men think of themselves.  A man, for instance, will say that he has done his best; but nine times out of ten it means mere fatigue; he is not going to trouble to do any more.  How can a man know that he has done his best?  The Gospel of Jesus comes with its message of the grace of God, and the power of God, to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of their days; and Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service, perfectly incredible to them.  No man, he suggests, need be so inured to the stupidity of middle age but there may be a miraculous change in him.  A great many people need re-conversion at forty, however Christian they have been before.  This belief of his in the individual man and in the worth of the individual is the very charter of democracy.  The original writings of William Tyndale, who first translated the New Testament from Greek into English, contain the essential ideas of democracy already in 1526—­the outcome of familiar study of the Gospel.  Jesus himself said of Herod:  “Go and tell that fox” (Luke 13:32).  Herod was a king, but he was not above criticism; and Christians have not failed at times to make the criticism of the great that truth requires.

Jesus had no illusions about men; he sees the weak spots; he recognizes the “whited sepulchre” (Matt. 23:27).  He is astonished at the unbelief of men and women (Mark 6:6).  He does not understand why they cannot think (Mark 8:21), but he notes how they see and yet do not see, hear and do not understand (Matt. 13:13).  He is impressed by their falsity, even in religion (Matt. 15:8).  He knows perfectly well the evil of which the human heart is capable (Matt. 15:19).  A man who steadily looks forward to being crucified by the people he is trying to help is hardly one of the absent-minded enthusiasts, mis-called idealists.  There never was, we feel, one who so thoroughly looked through his friends, who loved them so much and yet without a shade of illusion.  This brings us to the subject of the next chapter.