, scorching
and burning in its denunciation of those who on the outside (in
their religious profession) were like whitened sepulchres, but on
the inside (in their actual lives) were full of dead men's bones and
corruption--nowhere, outside the twenty-third chapter of Matthew,
does language fall with such tremendous vibration of thunderous
indignation, and the accent of aroused and fully angered justice.
"Ye serpents," "ye generation of vipers," are some of the phrases;
and the words, "fools," "blind hypocrites," mingle again and again
with the far-sounding, judicial menace, "Woe, woe unto you."

He seemed to be dominated and controlled by one idea--the idea of
God. The God thought held and moved him. He could not go anywhere,
or see anything, or utter the shortest discourse, that he did not,
in some fashion, connect it with the infinite Father. Was a sower
sowing seed, he saw in that incident an illustration of the fact
that the true seed is the Word of God, and the true sower he who
casts it into the mightier ground of the human heart. Did a flock of
sheep lie at rest upon the hillside, guarded by a shepherd's care,
at once he would unfold the shepherding of a Father's love. A tiny
sparrow, flying an unnoticed speck in the distant sky, or falling
ground-ward with its weary flight, was a winged witness that the
Father knew and saw even the smallest details of human life. A lily
in its lowliness, and yet a lily in its beauty shaming a king's
array, a lily, toiling not, but upward growing, furnished him a text
from which to preach the providence of God; and a wandering beggar
boy far away from home and kindred, stained with sin and dark with
sorrow, gave occasion for the wondrous story of the Prodigal Son and
a father's changeless and tender love.

God! God! God! this was the supreme note of his life.

On the cross he gave utterance to words which reveal the inner
character of his soul.

When a man has been lied about, falsified, his good evil spoken of
and his reputation assailed (as was his before the Sanhedrin--in the
mock trial given him there), when such a man has been hounded from
one end of the town to the other, spit upon and jibed at and,
finally, nailed through hands and feet to a torturing cross; when
such a man with his heart bursting (because of the impeded
circulation, driving the surging, tumultuous blood back upon it),
with the sun scorching his bare temples, a crown of thorns stabbing
him at every h