I believe that the education of man to a knowledge of God is part of the Divine purpose running through God’s ways, and I detect in the narrative form in which our knowledge of Christ has been delivered to us, a wise tenderness for the spiritual freedom of man and a help to keep his faculties alive. I spoke just now of Laws of Christ’s conduct. The more we look at Christ’s life and teaching as a whole, the more we discern in it the observance of certain Laws, which give it unity and order. When we stand near some large painting, or masterpiece of Art, we are taken up with the portion of it just under our eye; we scan this or that group and admire its finish and its truth. But when we go a little way off, and again look, and give our minds to it, we become aware of a different order of perfections in it, namely those perfections which belong to it as a whole, as the completed conception of a gifted mind. So it is with the Gospel History. While we read chapter by chapter we see what answers to one group in the great picture; but when we have the whole in our mind, we see a consistent purpose holding it all together: we find that our Lord always acts along certain lines, and carries out certain principles. One of these, which lies at the root of His ways of dealing with men, is His carefulness to keep alive in each man the sense of his personal responsibility, and of the dignity of such responsibility. He would seem to say to each man, “It is no small thing to have been entrusted by God with the care of a soul which you may educate for fitness for eternal life.” We find in our Lord, indignation, once, at least, even anger,(2) towards men and their ways, but never contempt or scorn. A man is, merely as a man, entitled to be treated with respect. The enforcing of this on the world is, among all the “Gesta Christi,” perhaps the most noticeable now. The simple fact of His dealing directly with men _themselves_, shews that He owned their free agency more or less. If men had been merely puppets moved by strings, Christ could only have benefited them by swaying the powers who held these strings, and there would have been no meaning in His addressing Himself to the puppets themselves and giving His life for them. Now, if men are free they must be at liberty to go in a direction different from that which is best for them—that is to go wrong; and so it must needs be that “occasions of stumbling” come, and cause suffering. I mention these principles now, because they are the bases of the Laws of which I am going to speak. They will come before us again further on.