to know.  Where did our own thoughts of God begin?  What made them?  How did they come?  There is an inherited element in them, but how much else?  Whence came the inherited element?  How is it that to another man, with the same upbringing as ours, everything is different, everything means more?  Remark, at any rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mysticism of the type so much studied to-day.  There is nothing in the least “psychopathic” about him, nothing abnormal—­no mystical vision of God, no mystical absorption in God, no mystical union with God, no abstraction, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic.  Yet he speaks freely of “seeing God”; he lives a life of the closest union with God; and God is in all his thoughts.  A phrase like that of Clement of Alexandria, “deifying into apathy we become monadic,” is seas away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus.  That is not the way he preaches God.  He is far more natural; and that his followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, and gave his teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of the truthfulness of the Gospels.

Again, his knowledge of God is not a matter of quotation, as ours very often tends to be.  He is conscious always of the real nearness of God.  He seems to wonder how it is that man can forget God.  We do forget God.  Augustine in his “Confessions” (iv. 12, 18) has to tell us that “God did not make the world and then go away.”  The practical working religion of a great many of us rests on a feeling that God is a very long way off.  Our practical steps betray that we half think God did go away, when he had made the world.  Prayer to us is not a real thing—­it is not intercourse face to face; far too often it is like conversation over a telephone wire of infinite length which gets out of order.  Even if words travel along that wire, there is so much “buzzing” that they are hardly recognizable.  No, says Jesus, God is near, God is here—­so near, that Jesus never feels that men have any need of a priesthood to come between, or to help them to God; God does all that.  There is no common concern, no matter of food or clothing, no mere detail of the ordinary round of common duty and common life—­father and mother, son, wife, friend—­nothing of all that, but God is there; God knows about it; God is interested in it; God has taken care of it; God is enjoying it.  How is it that men can “reject the counsel of God,” refuse God’s plans and ideas (Luke 7:30)?  How is it that they forget God altogether?  Jesus is surprised at the dullness of men’s minds (Mark 8:17); it is a mystery to him.  The rich fool, as we call him, though it is hard to see why we should call him a fool, when he is so like ourselves, had forgotten God somehow, and was startled when God spoke, and spoke to him.  That story, seen so often among men,—­the story of the thorns choking the seed (Matt. 13:22)—­makes Jesus remark on the difficulty which a rich man finds in entering into the kingdom of God.