ses, when they are
imagining no such thing. Anything, everything serves to reveal him.
They tramp all day, and ask some village people to shelter them for
the night. The villagers tell them to go away. The men are hungry
and fatigued. "What a splendid thing it would be, if we could do
like Elijah and burn them up with a word!" So the hot thought rose.
He turned and said, "You know not what manner of spirit you are
of."--What a gentle rebuke! "The Son of Man is not come to destroy
men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:51-56). Then follows one of
the wonderful sentences of the Gospel, "they went unto another
village"--very obvious, but very significant. A missionary from
China told me how, thirty years ago or more, he was driven out of
the town where he lived; how the gentlefolk egged on the mob, and
they wrecked his house, and hounded him out of the place. He told me
how it felt--the misery and the indignity of it. Jesus took it
undisturbed. He taught a lesson in it which the Church has never
forgotten.

Their life was full of experiences shared with him. He has his
reserve--his secret; yet, in another sense, he gives himself to them
without reserve; there is prodigality of self-impartation in his
dealings with them. He lets them have everything they can take. He
becomes theirs in a great intimacy, he gives himself to them. Why?
Because he believes, as he put it, in seed. Socrates saw that the
teacher's real work, his only work, is to implant the idea, like a
seed; an idea, like a seed, will look after itself. A king builds a
temple or a palace. The seed of a banyan drifts into a crack, and
grows without asking anyone's leave; there is life in it. In the end
the building comes down, but for what the banyan holds up. The
leaven in the meal is the most powerful thing there. There is very
little of it, but that does not matter; it is alive (Matt. 13:33).
Life is a very little thing but it is the only thing that counts.
That is why the farmer can sow his fields and sleep at nights
without thinking of them; and the crop grows in spite of his
sleeping, and he knows it (Mark 4:26). That is why Jesus believes so
thoroughly in his men, and in his message; God has made the one for
the other, and there is no fear of mischance.

Look at his method of teaching. People "marvelled at his words of
charm" (Luke 4:22)--"hung about him to hear him" (Luke 19:48). He
said that the word is the overflow of the heart. "Out of the
abundance