The simple, rustic, coarse, humble people who followed Jesus were men whose lives were based on material things, men who could only understand spiritual things slowly, with great effort, through material proofs, signs and material symbols. They could not understand a spiritual truth without its material incarnation; without evidence simple enough for them to weigh, evidence stated in the terms of the everyday world. An illustrative fable can lead men to moral revelation; a prodigy is to them confirmation of a new truth, of a contested mission. Preaching, made up of abstract axioms and aphorisms, left these imaginative Orientals unsatisfied. Jesus had recourse to the marvelous and to poetry: he performed miracles and spoke in parables. For many moderns the miracles recounted by the Evangelists are a compelling reason for turning away from Jesus and the Bible. Their shriveled brains cannot take in the miraculous; therefore, they reason the Gospel lies, and if it lies in so many places none of it can be believed. It is out of the question that Jesus can ever have raised the dead: therefore, His words have no value. The people who reason in this way reason ill. They give to miracles a weight and a meaning much greater than that which Jesus gave them. If they had read the four Gospels they would have seen that Jesus is always reluctant to perform miracles, that He does not feel this divine power of His is of supreme importance. Every time that He finds a fair reason for refusing, He refuses; if He yields, it is to reward the faith of the sorrowing man or woman who calls on Him; but the Gospels show that for Himself, for His own salvation, He never performs miracles. He performs no miracles in the wilderness with Satan, none at Nazareth when they wish to kill Him, none at Gethsemane when they come to arrest Him, nor on the cross when they challenge Him to save Himself. His power is only for others, to benefit His mortal brothers.