to the sea.

When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it
needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt. Jesus found this
manifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works,"
partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.

These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always
and everywhere finds the divine presence. Man himself masters the forces
of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power
working through him. And he looks for a better future for himself and
for mankind.

But the peculiarity of Jesus--looked at from a modern standpoint--was
that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct
with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and
spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature
in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in God; and that
the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine
interposition. These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his
ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and
save the lost.

In his teaching, God feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds
and clothes the grass. There is no need that they should be anxious
about their physical wants. Their troubles will be banished if they will
pray in faith. Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before
the presence of the trusting child of God. All the injustice and wrong
of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of
God. It is the old anthropomorphic idea of God--the idea of the Prophet
and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender,
through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of
exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary
interpretation of the world.

What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most
attractive human analogy. If even an unjust human judge yields to the
importunity of a petitioner, much more will the divine judge listen to
the cry of the wronged and suffering. If a human father gives bread to
his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.

We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and
the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him
which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and subl