f people he held up this impossible ideal of a
perfection like God's. What a faith in man it implies! "All things
are possible to him that believes" (Mark 9:9.3). Why should not
_you_ believe? he says.

His faith in the soul's possibilities is boundless, and in marked
contrast with what men think of themselves. A man, for instance,
will say that he has done his best; but nine times out of ten it
means mere fatigue; he is not going to trouble to do any more. How
_can_ a man know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus
comes with its message of the grace of God, and the power of God, to
people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in
life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are
living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of
their days; and Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give
them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service,
perfectly incredible to them. No man, he suggests, need be so inured
to the stupidity of middle age but there may be a miraculous change
in him. A great many people need re-conversion at forty, however
Christian they have been before. This belief of his in the
individual man and in the worth of the individual is the very
charter of democracy. The original writings of William Tyndale, who
first translated the New Testament from Greek into English, contain
the essential ideas of democracy already in 1526--the outcome of
familiar study of the Gospel. Jesus himself said of Herod: "Go and
tell that fox" (Luke 13:32). Herod was a king, but he was not above
criticism; and Christians have not failed at times to make the
criticism of the great that truth requires.

Jesus had no illusions about men; he sees the weak spots; he
recognizes the "whited sepulchre" (Matt. 23:27). He is astonished at
the unbelief of men and women (Mark 6:6). He does not understand why
they cannot think (Mark 8:21), but he notes how they see and yet do
not see, hear and do not understand (Matt. 13:13). He is impressed
by their falsity, even in religion (Matt. 15:8). He knows perfectly
well the evil of which the human heart is capable (Matt. 15:19). A
man who steadily looks forward to being crucified by the people he
is trying to help is hardly one of the absent-minded enthusiasts,
mis-called idealists. There never was, we feel, one who so
thoroughly looked through his friends, who loved them so much and
yet without a shade of illusion. Thi