Jesus—­not all at once, but sufficiently for the moment, and with a sense that there is more beyond.  His thought is uncomplicated by distinctions due to tradition and its accidents.  His whole attitude to life is simple—­he has no taboos; he comes “eating and drinking” (Matt. 11:19); and he told his followers, when he sent them out to preach, to eat what they were given (Luke 10:7); “give alms,” he says, “of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you” (Luke 11:41).  If God gives the food, it will probably be clean; and the old taboos will be mere tradition of men.  He is not interested in what men call “signs,” in the exceptional thing; the ordinary suffices when one sees God in it.  One of Jesus’ great lessons is to get men to look for God in the commonplace things of which God makes so many, as if Abraham Lincoln were right and God did make so many common people, because he likes them best.  The commonest flowers—­God thinks them out, says Jesus, and takes care of them (Matt. 6:28-30).  Hence there is little need of special machinery for contact with God—­priesthoods, trances, visions, or mystical states—­abnormal means for contact with the normal.  When Jesus speaks of the very highest and holiest things, he is as simple and natural as when he is making a table in the carpenter-shop.  Sense and sanity are the marks of his religion.

“Sense of fact” is a phrase which does not exclude—­perhaps it even suggests—­some hint of dullness.  The matter-of-fact people are valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because they lack the imagination that means sympathy.  Now in Jesus’ case there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy—­he likes the birds and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations.  They are not the “natural objects” with which dull people try to brighten their pages and discourses.  They are happy living things that come to his mind, as it were, of themselves, because, shall we say? they know they will be welcome there; and they are welcome.  His pity and sympathy are unlike ours in having so much more intelligence and fellow-feeling in them.  He understands men and women, as his gift of bright and winning speech shows.  After all, as Carlyle has pointed out in many places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding, of sympathy, that gives the measure of our intellects.[14] It is the faculty by which men touch fact and master it.  It is the want of it that makes so many clever and ingenious people so futile and distressing.

The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy and the foundations, so to speak, of the imagination which gives their quality to the stories and pictures of Jesus.  He thinks in pictures, as it were; they fill his speech, and every one of them is alive and real.  Think, for example, of the Light of the world (Matt. 5:14), the strait gate and the narrow way (Matt. 7:14), the pictures of the bridegroom (Mark 2:19), sower (Matt. 13:3), pearl merchant (Matt. 13:45),