dealing with the same occasion, says he was “in agony” (Luke 22:44), a strong phrase from a man of medical training.  Luke again, with the other evangelists, refers to the temptations of Jesus, and in a later passage records the poignant and revealing sentence—­“Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations” (Luke 22:28).  Finally, there is the last cry upon the Cross (Mark 15:37).  So frankly, and yet so unobtrusively, they lay bare his soul, as far as they saw it.

From what is given us it is possible to go further and see something of his habits of mind.  His thought will occupy us in later chapters; here we are concerned rather with the way in which his mind moves, and the characteristics of his thinking.

First of all, we note a certain swiftness, a quick realization of a situation, a character, or the meaning of a word.  Men try to trap him with a question, and he instantly “recognizes their trickery” (Luke 20:23).  When they ask for a sign, he is as quick to see what they have in mind (Mark 8:11-13).  He catches the word whispered to Jairus—­half hears, half divines it, in an instant (Mark 5:36).  He is surprised at slowness of mind in other men (Matt. 15:16; Mark 8:21).  And in other things he is as quick—­he sees “the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time” (Luke 4:5); he beholds “Satan fallen (aorist participle) from heaven like lightning” (Luke 10:18)—­two very striking passages, which illuminate his mind for us in a very important phase of it.  We ought to have been able to guess without them that he saw things instantly and in a flash—­that they stood out for him in outline and colour and movement there and then.  That is plain in the parables from nature, and here it is confirmed.  Is there in all his parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the focus wrong?  The tone of the parables is due largely to this gift of visualizing, to use an ugly modern word, and of doing it with swiftness and precision.

Several things combine to make this faculty, or at least go along with it—­a combination not very common even among men of genius—­an unusual sense of fact, a very keen and vivid sympathy, and a gift of bringing imagination to bear on the fact in the moment of its discovery, and afterwards in his treatment of the fact.

On his sense of fact we have touched before, in dealing with his close observation of Nature.  It is an observation that needs no note-book, that is hardly conscious of itself.  There is, as we know, a happy type of person who sees almost without looking, certainly without noticing—­and sees aright too.  The temperament is described by Wordsworth in the opening books of “The Prelude”.  The poet type seems to lose so much and yet constantly surprises us by what it has captured, and sometimes hardly itself realizes how much has been done.  The gains are not registered, but they are real and they are never lost, and come flashing out all unexpectedly when the note is struck that calls them.  So one