family of strong capacity, which was not inherited by Jesus alone,' and the tradition was still vivid and shared by members of his family some generations later." He was an educated man, as education went in those days and among that people. That is, he read the classic language of his people, equivalent in our day to scholarship in the Greek and Latin classics;" he was deeply learned in the law and the prophets of the sacred writings of his race. He was very familiar with the conditions and surroundings of the common and poor people who made up the population of Galilee; but we have no definite knowledge of the financial status of his family. He

'James later became the head of the Christian community at Jerusalem, and according to Josephus (Antiq. XX, ix, 1; Eusebius II, xxiii,) like Jesus, was arrested, condemned by the Sanhedrin and put to death; conclusive evidence that he was an individual of force and character as otherwise he could not so have aroused the antagonism of the Jewish leaders. He was called "the Just" by the ancients (Eusebius, II, i, 2. Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius II, xxiii, 4-19) on account of his piety and many virtues, and has a place of his own in history. The authorship of the letters in the New Testament bearing the names of James and Jude has been disputed since the time of Eusebius, though probability supports their authenticity; but even if they should be considered apocryphal, the fact that their authors sought to give them standing by attributing them to James and Jude and that such assumption of authorship has secured their place in the Christian Canon, should be convincing evidence of the weight the two had among the early Christians and consequently of their exceptional ability and strength of character.

1o Eusebius, Bk III, c. 19, 20, tells that the Emperor Domitian called before him the grandchildren of Jude, the brother of Jesus, who, on being asked whether they were descendants of David, admitted that they were.

"Luke 4:16-20. The scriptures as read in the synagogue were written in Hebrew, which at that time was a dead language.

was not a member of the governing class or closely in touch with it; all during that short part of his life known to us he showed by his statements an unfamiliarity with the more intimate habits and customs of the ruling classes, as great as his familiarity with the experiences and motives of the common people of Galilee. But his appearance," his bearing, his education, combined to set him apart from the common people with whom he had grown up and made it easy for them to recognize him later as a member of the teaching class, and to call him by the title which recognized that superiority.

12There is no authentic portrait of Jesus, an entirely natural fact, as Jewish religious habit prevented such practice, and in his life he did not come into sufficiently prominent contact with Greeks or Romans to cause their artists to produce statuary preserving his physical appearance. Likewise there is no direct description of his personal appearance in the gospels or elsewhere in authentic documents. It is proper to infer, however, that he was of large and commanding presence, for the power of suggestion which he exercised is almost always connected with impressive physique. Also several incidents, notably his escape from the crowd at Nazareth, can best be understood by the assumption of great physical power. He lived in an age when leadership was almost invariably associated with exceptional physical size and power; his march to Jerusalem at the head of the multitude would have been extremely unlikely had he not been a man whose appearance suited the part he was taking. Had he not been personally attractive it is not probable that he could have held with him, in closest and most intimate contact, the twelve men who clung to him in the face of danger and failure, or the women who adhered so closely both in Galilee and Jerusalem. In thinking of his demeanor and appearance it is necessary to remember that they were such that after his death those who knew him most intimately found nothing incongruous in the conclusion that he was superhuman, a personage so great that he could not be held even by death itself. The conclusion is irresistible that he was a great, commanding. impressive figure.

He too was saturated with the Messianic conception of his time. Tremendously gifted, exceedingly earnest, he had, no doubt, thought more vigorously and with more penetration than most others of his time, upon the characteristics of this strange hope of his race. It held him with absorbing interest, so great that it assumed control of his thought and purpose, to the practical exclusion of other matters. Naturally he was acquainted with all the literature of Messianism. With the Messianic psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel especially he was familiar; likewise with that strange book which deals with the same theme, the Book of Enoch, the seventh from Adam." Time was to show that even in this expectation which he held in common with the others of his race, his remarkable personality had developed an individual conception, greater, deeper, and more far reaching in religious spirit, than that of the others of his time.

Extraordinarily gifted also he was in his conception of the nature of God, and his relation to Him. The idea of the immanence of God in all things is characteristic of the eastern mind, but in Jesus this idea reached a richness and fullness that has never been known in any other man. With him, God seemed always immediately present; not the hard, cruel, personally exacting God of the race of his fathers, but a God of love, whose relation to him

Scholars agree that the picture of the great Judgment given in Matthew 25:31ff is based directly on the judgment scene of Enoch xc, 20ff.

he loved to express by the term "Father." This conception and this attitude, present in some degree to many Jewish minds of his time, was in him developed into the controlling and dominating feature in his life.

John was a relative, if one of the traditions which later developed is to be believed." It seems probable that at least they were acquainted in the years before the beginning of John's preaching, and that John was familiar with his exceptional qualities, for when this carpenter of Nazareth came to the waters of Jordan with the multitudes from all over Palestine to be baptized in preparation for the Kingdom which they now were all convinced was about to appear, John immediately recognized him and at first declined to baptize him. "I have need to be baptized of you," he said, "and do you come to me?››1

14Luke, Chapter 1, especially v. 36.

15Matthew 3:14. Another possible explanation of John's remark, even more likely than the assumption of previous acquaintance, may be inferred from the considerations set out in Note 12, page 29, supra. The majestic figure which later overawed the temple authorities in Jerusalem could easily have elicited such a remark from John.

CHAPTER III.

THE VISION AND THE AWAKENING

As Jesus came up from the river, he had an extraordinary experience. Surcharged as he was with the belief that the prophecies were about to be fulfilled, that the Messiah was to come immediately and the unsatisfactory world with which he was surrounded was about to pass away to give place to the new world in which the will of God was to be supreme; filled with the consciousness of the intimate nearness of God, of a close relationship which he could express only by calling God his Father and speaking of himself as his Son;-all these powerful emotions, freshened and intensified by the meaning of the purifying and separative rite which he had just undergone at the hands of John, and the excitement in the crowds surrounding them, found sudden fruition in an intense consciousness which had the nature of a vision, and ripened into a subjective sense experience, an experience which took form in sight and sound, and which seemed to him to have an objective existence outside of himself.'

It seemed to him that he saw the heavens opened, and from the skies, which to him as to all others of

'Mark 1:10-11; Matthew 3:16,17; Luke 3:21, 22. Such an experience, while rare, is by no means without counterpart in other lives. Savonarola, Swedenborg, Joan of Arc, Socrates, Paul, will immediately recur to most minds as examples of great