It is the same with his other sayings. They are almost dry, they are so accurate. “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart”; the analysis of emotion could hardly be carried farther. “How hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God”; here is neither exaggeration nor epigram. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”; a statement of fact. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you”; this is the summary of Christ’s whole life down to the time his teaching began. He had knocked and it had been opened to him. He had wished to make men better, and inasmuch as he wished it harder than anyone else before or since has wished it, he got farther than anyone toward an understanding of how to do it. The effectiveness of his thought has been due to its coherence. He was able to draw the sky together over any subject till all the light fell on one point. Then he said what he saw. Every question was shown to break up into the same crystals if subjected to the same pressure. Nor does his influence upon the world present any anomaly. It is entirely due to ordinary causes. Every man’s influence depends upon the depth of his will; for this determines his power of concentration. The controlled force that could contract Christ’s own mind to so small a focus, brings down to the same focus other minds of less coherence than his. This is will; this is leadership; this is power. Yet in spite of his will there were plenty of things that Christ himself could not do, as, for instance, change the world at once, or change it at all except through the slow process of personal influence. He could not heal people who had no faith, or get followers except by going into the highways and hedges after them. And his whole life is as valuable in showing what cannot be done, as in showing what can be done. If you love your fellow-men and wish to benefit them, you will find that the ways in which it is possible to do this are not many. You can do harm in many ways, good only in one. The world is full of people who want to do good, and men are constantly re-discovering Christ. This intelligence, superior to our own, possesses and utilizes us. There is always more danger of his influence being perverted than of its dying out; for as men begin to discover the scope and horizon of his thought they are tempted to becloud it with commentary. They wish to say what he meant, whereas he has said it himself. We think to explain something whose value is that it explains us. If we understood him, very likely we should say nothing.