‘But to believe in such a man,’ he might go on to say, ’with such a message, as I read of in the New Testament, is life from the dead.  I have yielded myself, to live no more in the idea of self, but with the life of God.  To him I commit the creature he has made, that he may live in it, and work out its life—­develop it according to the idea of it in his own creating mind.  I fall in with his ways for me.  I believe in him.  I trust him.  I try to obey him.  I look to be rendered capable of and receive a pure vision of his will, freedom from the prison-house of my limitation, from the bondage of a finite existence.  For the finite that dwells in the infinite and in which the infinite dwells, is finite no longer.  Those who are thus children indeed, are little Gods, the divine brood of the infinite Father.  No mere promise of deliverance from the consequences of sin, would be any gospel to me.  Less than the liberty of a holy heart, less than the freedom of the Lord himself, will never satisfy one human soul.  Father, set me free in the glory of thy will, so that I will only as thou willest.  Thy will be at once thy perfection and mine.  Thou alone art deliverance—­absolute safety from every cause and kind of trouble that ever existed, anywhere now exists, or ever can exist in thy universe.’

But the people of the Lord’s town, to whom he read, appropriating them, the gracious words of the prophet, were of the wise and prudent of their day.  With one and the same breath, they seem to cry, ’These things are good, it is true, but they must come after our way.  We must have the promise to our fathers fulfilled—­that we shall rule the world, the chosen of God, the children of Abraham and Israel.  We want to be a free people, manage our own affairs, live in plenty, and do as we please.  Liberty alone can ever cure the woes of which you speak.  We do not need to be better; we are well enough.  Give us riches and honour, and keep us content with ourselves, that we may be satisfied with our own likeness, and thou shalt be the Messiah.’  Never, perhaps, would such be men’s spoken words, but the prevailing condition of their minds might often well take form in such speech.  Whereon will they ground their complaint should God give them their hearts’ desire?  When that desire given closes in upon them with a torturing sense of slavery; when they find that what they have imagined their own will, was but a suggestion they knew not whence; when they discover that life is not good, yet they cannot die; will they not then turn and entreat their maker to save them after his own fashion?

Let us try to understand the brief, elliptical narrative of what took place in the synagogue of Nazareth on the occasion of our Lord’s announcement of his mission.