I have been treating him almost as if he were an authority on pedagogy.  Fortunately, he never discussed pedagogy, never used the terms I have been using.  But he dealt with men, he taught and he influenced them, and it is worth our study to understand how he did it—­to master his methods.  “One loving spirit sets another on fire.”  As for the effects of his words at once, as Seeley put it, they were “seething effervescence . . . broodings, resolutions, travail of heart.”  Men were brought face to face with a new issue; it was a time of choice; things would not be as they were men must be “with him or against him”—­must accept or reject the new teaching, the new teacher, the new life.  As he said, “I came to send fire on the earth” (Luke 12:49), to divide families, to divide the individual soul against itself, till the great choice was made; and so it has always been, where men have really seen him.  We have to notice further the transformation of the disciples, who definitely accepted him.  “Very wonderful to me,” wrote Phillips Brooks, “to see how the disciples caught his method.”  The promise was made to them that they should become fishers of men (Mark 1:17), and it was fulfilled.  Jesus made them strong enough to defy the world and to capture the world.  There is something attractive about them; they have his secret, something of his charm; they are magnetic with his power.  A new impulse to win men marks them, a new power to do it, a new faith which grows in significance as you study it—­the faith of William Carey, a hundred years ago, was the same thing—­a perfectly incredible faith, that they actually will win men for God and Christ.  And they did—­and along his lines and by his methods of love—­even for Gentiles.  “Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel,” says St. Paul (1 Cor. 9:16), who to preach the Gospel shipwrecked his life and suffered the loss of all things (Phil. 3:8).  But these men are sure that it is worthwhile.  They have a new passion for men and women—­an interest not merely in the saving of their souls but in every real human need.  The early Church made a point of teaching men trades when they had none.  They learnt all this from him.  The greatest miracle in history seems to me the transformation that Jesus effected in those men.  Everything else in Christian or secular history, compared to it, seems easy and explicable; and it was achieved by the love of Jesus.

The Church spread over the world without social machinery.  The Gospel was preached instinctively, naturally.  The earliest Christians were persecuted in Jerusalem, and were driven out.  I picture one of them in flight; on his journey he falls in with a stranger.  Before he knows what he is doing, he is telling his fellow traveller about Jesus.  It follows from his explanation of why he is on the road; he warms up as he speaks.  He never really thought about the danger of doing so.  And the stranger wants to know more; he is captured by the message, and he too becomes a Christian.  And then this involuntary preacher of the Gospel is embarrassed to learn that the man is a Gentile; he had not thought of that.  I think that is how it began—­so naturally and spontaneously.  These people are so full of love of Jesus that they are bound to speak (Acts 8:4).  “One loving heart sets another on fire.”