He does not turn aside from His work of saving the
world, to deliver lectures on theology. These compre-
hensive words of His grow naturally out of the ordinary
circumstances and conversations into which He fell;
but in them there meet the currents of His thought,
and the great final truths of man and God lie open to
the mind that reverently tries to understand them.
Surely such words tempt and deserve our most reverent
and loving study.

It is one of these words of Jesus that I have chosen
for my text this morning. I choose it because it seems
to me to have something to say very directly to some
of the questions about the possibility of knowing about
God, and the way of knowing about God, which one
hears asked with most astonishing frequency and most
impressive earnestness in these days and places. In
this utterance Jesus, I think, makes it wonderfully clear
how man must hope to know those spiritual things,
without some knowledge of which the heart of man is
not and cannot be content; after which man is forever
struggling; and the despair of which makes the great
gloom which in these days seems, to some prophets, to
be settling down upon the human soul.

Jesus builds all His teaching upon an illustrative
figure which every one could then, and can always, un-
derstand. "The light of the body is the eye," He said.
Try to get the picture back before your mind. These
words are part of the Sermon on the Mount. On a
bright, fresh morning, Jesus is sitting half-way up a
hillside in Galilee, with a group of attentive hearers
clustered at his side. All around Him is the radiant
landscape. Almost at the mountain's foot the lake of

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