ond? Does he enlist absolutely on God's terms without a
bargain with God, prepared to accept God's will, whatever it is,
whether it squares with his liking or not? (cf. Luke 17:7-10). Are
his own desires finally out of the reckoning? Does he, in fact,
deny--negate--himself (Mark 8:34)? Jesus calls for disciples, with
questions so penetrating on his lips. What a demand to make of men!
What faith, too, in men it shows, that he can ask all this with no
hint of diminished seriousness!

Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in the choice of his
twelve. To that group of disciples he trusts the supremest task men
ever had assigned to them. Not many wise, not many mighty, Paul
found at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:26); and it has always been so. Is it not
still the gist of the Gospel that Jesus believes in the writer and
the reader of these lines--trusts them with the propagation of God's
Kingdom, incredible commission? Jesus was always at leisure for
individuals; this was the natural outcome of his faith in men. What
else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in giving the
utmost spiritual truth--no easy task, as experience shows us--even
to a solitary listener? If we accept what he tells us of God, we can
believe that the individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for
him, but hardly otherwise. His gift of discovering interest in
uninteresting people, says Phillips Brooks, was an intellectual
habit that he gave to his disciples. We think too much "like men";
he would have us "think like God," and think better of odd units and
items of humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to do. It
has been pointed out lately how fierce he is about the man who puts
a stumbling-block in the way of even "a little one"--"better for him
that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into
the sea"; no mere phrase--for when he draws a picture, he sees it;
he sees this scene, and "better so--for him too!" is his comment
(Mark 9:42). There was, we may remember, a view current in antiquity
that when a man was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though
I do not know if the Jews held this opinion. It is not likely that
Jesus did. What is God's mind, God's conduct, toward those people
whom men think they can afford to despise? "Be ye therefore perfect,
even as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). And to whom
did he say this? To the most ordinary people--to Peter and James and
John; for all sorts o