It was in large part upon the happiness which he was to bring to the poor that Jesus based his claim to be heard.  There is little reasonable ground for doubt that he healed diseases.  Of course we cannot definitely pronounce upon any individual case reported; the diagnosis might be too hasty, and the trouble other than was supposed; but it is well known that such healings do occur—­and that they occurred in Jesus’ ministry, we can well believe.  So when he was challenged as to his credentials, he pointed to misery relieved; and the culmination of everything, the crowning feature of his work, he found in his “good news for the poor.”  The phrase he borrowed from Isaiah (61:1), but he made it his own—­the splendid promises in Isaiah for “the poor, the broken-hearted, captives, blind and bruised,” appealed to him.  Time has laid its hand upon his word, and dulled its freshness.  “Gospel” and “evangelical” are no longer words of sheer happiness like Jesus’ “good news”—­they are technical terms, used in handbooks and in controversy; while for Jesus the “good news for the poor” was a new word of delight and inspiration.

The centre in all the thoughts of Jesus, as we have to remind ourselves again and again, is God.  If, as Dr. D. S. Cairns puts it, “Jesus Christ is the great believer in man,” it is—­if we are reading him aright at all—­because God believes in man.  Let us remind ourselves often of that.  “Thou hast made us for Thyself,” said Augustine in the famous sentence, of which we are apt to emphasize the latter half, “and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee” (Confessions, i. 1).  Jesus would have us emphasize the former clause as well, and believe it.  The keynote of his whole story is God’s love; the Father is a real father—­strange that one should have to write the small f to get the meaning!  All that Jesus has taught us of God, we must bring to bear on man.  For it is hard to believe in man—­“What is man that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him?” quotes the author of “Job” in a great ironical passage (Job 7:17; from Psalm 8:4).  The elements and the stars come over us, as they came over George Fox in the Vale of Beavor; what is man?  Can one out of fifteen hundred millions of human beings living on one planet matter to God, when there are so many planets and stars, and there have been so many generations?  Can he matter?  It all depends on how we conceive of God.  Here it is essential to give all the meaning to the term “God” that Jesus gave to it, to believe in God as Jesus believed in God, if we are to understand the fullness of Jesus’ “good news.”  It all depends on God—­on whether Jesus was right about God; and after all on Jesus himself.  “A thing of price is man,” wrote Synesius about 410 A.D., “because for him Christ died.”  The two things go together—­Jesus’ death and Jesus’ Theocentric thought of man.