g about quietly and accomplishing all manner of good. Why did He
give up the opportunities of a life that was so incalculably
serviceable, and apparently court death? Jesus was always conscientious
in what He did; He felt Himself bound to the lives about Him by the
firmest cords of obligation, and whatever He attempted He deemed He owed
men. If there was a Zacchaeus whose honesty and generosity had given way
under the faulty system of revenue-collecting then in vogue, Jesus
considered Himself involved in his moral ruin and obliged to do what He
could to restore him: "I _must_ abide at thy house." If there were sick
folk, their diseases were to Him, in part at least, morally wrong,
devil-caused (to use His First Century way of explaining what we ascribe
to inherited weakness or to blameworthy conditions); and demoniacal
control over lives in God's world was something for which He felt
Himself socially accountable: "_Ought_ not this woman, whom Satan hath
bound, to have been loosed?" If the Church of His day was unable to
reach large sections of the population with its appeal, if it succeeded
very imperfectly in making children of the Most High out of those whom
it did reach, if with its narrowness and bigotry it made of its converts
"children of hell," as Jesus Himself put it, if it exaggerated trifles
and laid too little stress on justice, mercy and fidelity, He, as a
member of that Church, was chargeable with its failures, and must strive
to put a new conscience into God's people: "I _must_ preach the good
tidings of the Kingdom of God." Ibsen, the dramatist, wrote to his
German translator, Ludwig Passarge, "In every new poem or play I have
aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification--for a man
shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he
belongs." Jesus felt implicated in all that was not as it should be
among the children of men, and cleared Himself from complicity with it
by setting Himself resolutely to change it. He considered that the human
brotherhood in its sinfulness exacted nothing less of Him.

It is commonly taught that the Lord's Prayer is a form that was
suggested by Jesus to His disciples, but that it could not have been a
prayer which He Himself used with them, because of its plea for
forgiveness. It is true that it is introduced in our Gospels as provided
by the Master for His followers, "When _ye_ pray, say." But millions of
Christians instinctively associate it with J