eat men out of petty. In all this we are not
stepping outside the Gospels nor borrowing from what he has done in
nineteen centuries. In Galilee and in Jerusalem men felt his power.
And finally, what of his calm, his sanity, his dignity, in the hour
of betrayal, in the so-called trials, before the priests, before
Pilate, on the Cross? The Pharisees, said Tertullian, ought to have
recognized who Christ was by his patience.

CHAPTER IV

THE TEACHER AND HIS DISCIPLES

It was as a teacher that Jesus of Nazareth first began to gather
disciples round him. But to understand the work of the Teacher, we
must have some general impression of the world to which he came. The
background will help us understand what had to be done, and what it
was he meant to do.

Bishop Gore, in a book recently published, suggested that the belief
that God is Love is not axiomatic. Many of us take it for granted,
as the point at which religion naturally begins; but, as he
emphasized, it is not an obvious truth; it is something of which we
have to be convinced, something that has to be made good to men.
Unless we bear this in mind, we shall miss a great deal of what
Jesus has really done, by assuming that he was not needed to do it.

"Out of a darker world than ours came this new spring." We must look
at the world as it was, when Jesus came. In a later chapter we shall
have to consider more fully the religions of the Roman world. One or
two points may be anticipated. First of all, we have to realize what
a hard world it was. Men and women are harder than we sometimes
think, and the natural hardness to which the human heart grows of
itself, needed more correction than it had in those days.

Among the many papyrus documents that have been found in late years
in Egypt--documents that have pictured for us the life of Egypt, and
have recorded for us also the language of the New Testament in a
most illuminative way--there is one that illustrates only too aptly
the unconscious hardness of the times. It is a letter--no literary
letter, no letter that any one would ordinarily have thought of
keeping; it has survived by accident. It was written by an Egyptian
Greek to his wife. She lived somewhere up the country, and he had
gone to Alexandria. She had been expecting a baby when he left, and
he wrote a rough, but not an unkind, letter to her. He writes:
"Hilarion to Alis . . . greetings.... Know that we are still even
now in Alexandria. Do not fidget,