did love these people with an unconquerable passion. The
multitudes to whom He preached were composed, as all multitudes are, of
quite ordinary immemorable people. He also, to the eyes of those who
saw Him in the peasant garb of Galilee, and judged only by outward
appearance, was a common man. And so it would appear that if I did not
love men after the fashion in which Jesus loved them, it was very
unlikely that I should love Jesus Christ Himself if He once more
appeared in the habit in which men saw Him long ago in Galilee. A
Jesus, footsore, weary, travel-stained, wearing the raiment of a
village carpenter, speaking with the accent of an unconsidered
province, surrounded by a rabble of rude fishermen, among whom mingled
many persons of doubtful character--how should I regard Him? Should I
discern the Light and Life of men beneath His gray disguise of
circumstance? Should I have left my books, my studious calm, my
pleasant and sufficing tasks, to listen to One who seemed so little
likely to instruct me? Would not the same spirit of disdain which made
me think lightly and even scornfully of persons whose lives had no
resemblance to my own, have made me disdainful of the Man of Nazareth?
I knew the answer and I quailed before it. I saw that the temper of my
mind was the temper of the Pharisee, and had I lived two thousand years
ago in Jerusalem or Galilee, I should have rejected Jesus even as the
scribes and Pharisees rejected Him.

And I should have rejected Him for the same reason, because I had no
truly generous love of man as man. I should have been no better able
to perceive than they that it had pleased God to clothe Himself in the
flesh of one who united in His own person all those disabilities which
incur the scorn of those who account themselves superior and
cultivated, such as lowly and doubtful origin, poverty and the lack of
liberal education, and methods of life which outraged social use and
custom. Did not Jesus demand for the understanding of Himself
precisely that temper which enabled Him to understand others, the
temper which discerns the soul beneath all disguise of circumstance?
He discerned the splendid and divine beneath the sordid. He saw
beneath the drift of sin the buried magnificence of human nature as men
discover the hidden temple beneath the sand-drift of the desert. He
was able to love all men because all men were to Him living souls. And
His own manifestation to the world was s