we say? they know they
will be welcome there; and they are welcome. His pity and sympathy
are unlike ours in having so much more intelligence and
fellow-feeling in them. He understands men and women, as his gift of
bright and winning speech shows. After all, as Carlyle has pointed
out in many places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding,
of sympathy, that gives the measure of our intellects.[14] It is the
faculty by which men touch fact and master it. It is the want of it
that makes so many clever and ingenious people so futile and
distressing.

The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy and the foundations, so
to speak, of the imagination which gives their quality to the
stories and pictures of Jesus. He thinks in pictures, as it were;
they fill his speech, and every one of them is alive and real.
Think, for example, of the Light of the world (Matt. 5:14), the
strait gate and the narrow way (Matt. 7:14), the pictures of the
bridegroom (Mark 2:19), sower (Matt. 13:3), pearl merchant (Matt.
13:45), and the men with the net (Matt. 13:47), the sheep among the
wolves (Matt. 10:16), the woman sweeping the house (Luke 15:8), the
debtor going to prison accompanied by his creditor and the officer
with the judge's warrant (Luke 12:58), the shepherd separating his
sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:32), the children playing in the
market-place pretending to pipe or to mourn (Luke 7:32), the fall of
the house (Matt. 7:27)--or the ironical pictures of the blind
leading the blind straight for the ditch (Matt. 15:14), the
vintagers taking their baskets to the bramble bushes (Matt. 7:16),
the candle burning away brightly under the bushel (Matt. 5:15; Luke
11:33), the offering of pearls to the pigs (Matt. 7:6)--or his
descriptions of what lay before himself as a cup and a baptism (Mark
10:38), and of his task as the setting fire to the world (Luke
12:49). There is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these
pictures--not least about those touched with irony.

There are, however, pictures less realistic and more
imaginative--one or two of them, in the language of the fireside,
quite "creepy." Here is a house--a neat, trim little house--and for
the English reader there is of course a garden or a field round it,
and a wood beyond. Out of the wood comes something--stealthily
creeping up towards the house--something not easy to make out, but
weary and travel-stained and dusty--and evil. A strange feeling
comes over one a