It is little wonder that the plain people of Galilee and Judea received the various angles of that message with a ready gladness. That this was God's world about which He cared and in which men were His children and could live as such, was immediately a liberating idea. It freed them from the tyranny of the current ecclesiastical establishment; it eliminated the significance of the Roman yoke. What mattered it what the emperor or governor did? They stood or fell by God's judgment. It killed the envy of the rich or privileged, for did not they have just as much worth before their common Father? And they found not just a nation but a world of brothers. My second point is, I suppose, in a sense, but a development of the first one; but it has such significance that it deserves separate emphasis. It is that this is man's world, as well as God's, or we might say, because it is God's. Because it is God's world, it is the scene of great possibilities for the individual man and for the whole social group. The best is possible at any moment and for every person, and God sees us in the light of what we may be. The bargain idea of religion as expressed by Jacob--if you will look after me and keep me then you can be my God and I will give my worship--is forever swept aside in the conception that God has made this a world where man can come to his best, and that when man responds to that vision and tries to live in the light of it, he is rendering the only service God cares about. The additional thought which brings the first one to completion is that this world of those great possibilities is put in man's keeping: it is for him to create the realities which potentially exist. It is man's world, for, as St. Paul says, we are God's fellow-workers. It is unnecessary to detail the expressions Jesus used to bring home to His hearers the understanding that it was for them to make real what was only potential. The thought is expressed in the large in the conception of the kingdom which was to be progressively realized. He announced it as at hand, outlined its characteristics as a new brotherly set of relationships and then told them how to bring it about. He was not one to open before them a fool's paradise. He recognized the evil, weakness and brutality in the world summed up in the fact that men generally were living on quite a different basis from that which He set forth. His was not the advice to shut their eyes to the actual situation and pretend that it was what they would like to have it. Many have thought that that was His message; but to give such a word is no more like Him than the supposition that He meant to encourage them to attempt what was impossible.