He found little in His environment to add strength to His hope. He lived under a government which was tyrannical and corrupt. The Jewish Church to which He belonged was formal and lifeless. He faced a society which was ruled by men like Herod, and by women like the shameless wife of Herod, who cut off a poor man's head for telling her the truth about herself. He saw the religious leaders of His day straining at gnats of difficulty in their formal worship and then swallowing camels of moral fault in their every-day conduct. The situation might well have frightened the boldest heart. It never frightened Him. "The spirit of the Lord is upon Me," He said at the beginning of His ministry, "because He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He hath sent Me to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, and to set at liberty them that are bruised." And when He came to the close of His ministry, He said, "Behold, I make all things new, a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." He was undaunted. He was an optimist. By that I do not mean one of those silly, short-sighted individuals who goes about saying, "Look always on the bright side." Jesus looked at both sides. He went about with His eyes open. He saw everything. He saw the struggle and the sorrow of human life and felt it as if it had been all His own. He looked upon the tired, sad, sin-stained face of the race. He knew it as He knew His own face, and He saw the heart of pain which had made it so. He was no schoolboy shouting himself hoarse in a thoughtless enthusiasm which had never tested its strength against the graver difficulties of life. He saw it all, felt it all, understood it all, yet He lived and died in a great, sweet, serene hope for the race. You cannot find one hateful, cynical or despairing word falling from His lips. He stood once where the shadow of the Cross was already drawing a black line across His path. He had twelve disciples to whom for the past two years He had given the best part of His time, His thought and His love. One of them had already betrayed Him, bargaining away his poor measure of loyalty for thirty pieces of silver. In the next hour another disciple would deny Him three times over with an oath. Another would doubt Him straight in the face of all those pledges of genuineness which they had received at first hand. And when the hour of trial struck His disciples would all show themselves cowards and quitters.