And all this, mark you keenly, is a bit of His wooing.  The wooing is ever the dominant thought in His heart.  So He was revealing to them who He was.  He claims to be the Son of God, their kingly Messiah.  And He lived His claim.  Power is the one universally recognized touchstone by which we judge God and man.  His power told who He was even more than His tremendous words did.  He was acting naturally.  His presence among them thus natural, true to the power native in Him,—­this was the wooing.

But there was more than power.  There was love.  There was a perfect blend of the two.  With the power went the love.  Nay, rather, with the love went the power.  Love was the dominating thing.  Jesus was love in shoes, God in action.  Always there was the tenderness, the gentleness, the patience, the purity, the unflinching ideals, yes, the courage, the utter fearlessness tempered with a wise prudence.  All these are the fuller spelling of love.

Always these went in closest touch with the resisted but resistless power.  These are the two traits of God, two traits that are one.  Men always think most of the power.  God Himself always emphasizes most the love.  But true power is simply love in action.  The power is the outcome of love, and under the control of love.

This is the second of John’s great impelling pictures.  The first shows us the Person, the Man Jesus, God with us, God making a world, and then, in homely human garb walking amongst its people, one of themselves.

This second shows us the wooing.  This Man, so tender in touch, so gentle in speech, so thoughtful in action, so pure in life, so unbending in ideals, so fearless in the thick of opposition, so faithful to the chosen faithless nation,—­this Man Himself is the wooing.  His words, His actions, His power, His persistence, His patience, this also is the wooing of this great God-Man-Lover.  This is God spelling Himself out into human speech, wooing men out and up and in to Himself.

Jesus Recognised by all the Race.

And it is most striking to sit still and think into how this Lover was recognized by men of all nations, and how His wooing was understood and yielded to by men of all sorts.  The intense Jew, the half-breed Samaritan, the aggressive Roman, the cultured refined Greek,—­that was all the world.  And all these recognized Him as some one kin to themselves, bound by closest spirit-ties, to whom they were drawn by the strong cords of His common kinship with themselves.  The waves of His personal influence were, geographically, like His last commandment to His disciples.  The movement was from Jerusalem to Judea, through Samaria, and out into the uttermost part of the earth and the innermost heart of the race.