esus was enabled to resist all temptation to sin, and would
worship and serve none but the true God, the devil at length left Him,
and "Angels came and ministered unto Him."

[Illustration]

From that time, Jesus being then about thirty years of age, He began
to preach, and exhort to repentance as John had done before Him. One
day as He walked beside the sea of Galilee He saw two brothers named
Simon-Peter and Andrew, fishing by the shore. These men He called to Him
and bade them follow Him for He would make them fishers of men, and they
immediately left their nets and followed Him. Presently, as they walked
along the shore, they saw two other fishermen brothers--James and John,
the sons of Zebedee, in a boat with their father, mending the great,
brown nets with which they caught fish on the Syrian coasts, and called
them also, and they too left their nets and their father and followed
Him. They were the first four of the twelve disciples whom Jesus by
degrees gathered about Him, and who were His companions and assistants
in His future work. With His disciples Christ travelled over the whole
land of Syria, now called the Holy Land, teaching in the churches and
preaching about the Kingdom of His Father, and healing all manner of
diseases and sicknesses amongst the people, until the fame of His
sayings and doings spread every where, and the sick and suffering and
diseased were brought to Him from all quarters that He might heal them.
This He never refused to do, for His heart was so overflowing with
divine love and pity for mankind that He could not see suffering or
misery without healing it.

[Illustration: Jesus is Baptized.]

[Illustration]

But so immense grew the multitude of people who began to follow
and press about Him, that He had no room to teach or to preach, no
opportunity to rest and talk quietly with His disciples either night
or day.

Seeing this He went up a mountain side, and sat down, and His disciples
came to Him, and there He began to instruct the people by preaching
to them that most grand and beautiful sermon called the Sermon on the
Mount, which contains not only the lessons taught by the series of
blessings called "The Beatitudes", at the commencement, but that prayer
of prayers known to every child as the "Lord's Prayer", because it is
the only one which Christ Himself taught word for word with His own
lips, and which has remained unaltered through the nineteen hundred
years which have gon