literature so tragic a story as the Syracusan expedition—­and the writer did not feel!  Is it not the sternest and deepest feeling, after all, when a man will not “unpack his heart with words”?  Something of this kind we find in the Gospels.  There is not a word of condemnation for Herod or Pilate, for priest or Pharisee; not a touch of sympathy as the nails are driven through those hands; a blunt phrase about the soldiers, “And sitting down they watched him there” (Matt. 26:36)—­that is all. (From a literary point of view, what a triumph of awful, quiet objectivity! and they had no such aim.) Luke indeed has one slight touch that might be called irony[4]—­“And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will” (Luke 23:25)—­and yet the irony is in the story itself.  “Why callest thou me good?” So it is recorded that Jesus once answered a compliment (Matt. 19:17); and it looks as if the mood had passed over to his intimates, and from them to their friends who wrote the Gospels.  He meant too much for them to seek the facile relief of praise.  The words of praise die away, yes, and the words of affection too; and their silence and self-restraint are in themselves evidence of their truth; and more winning than words could have been.

Here and there the Gospels keep a phrase actually used by Jesus, and in his native Aramaic speech.  The Greek was not apt to use or quote foreign phrases—­unlike the Englishman who “has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.”  Why, then, do the Evangelists, writing for Greek readers, keep the Aramaic sentences?  It looks like a human instinct that made Peter—­if, as we are told, he had some part in the origination of Mark’s Gospel—­and the rest wish to keep the very words and tones of their Master, as most of us would wish to keep the accents and phrases of those we love.  Was there no satisfaction to the people who had lived with Jesus, when they read in Mark the very syllables they had heard him use, and caught his great accents again?  Is there not for Christians in every age a joy and an inspiration in knowing the very sounds his lips framed?  The first word that his mother taught him survives in Abba (Father)—­something of his own speech to let us begin at the beginning; something, again, that takes us to the very heart of him at the end, in his cry:  Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani (Mark 15:34).  Is it not true that we come nearer to him in that cry in the language strange to us, but his own?  Would not the story, again, be poorer without the little tender phrase that he used to the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:41).