And if we regard our Lord as a leader looking to an immediate purpose and depending for success on His influence with those of His own day, his conduct is indeed inexplicable; but the whole tenour of it falls in well with the view which regards Him as setting afoot a movement which was to go on working to the end of the world. Hurry belongs to the mortal who wants to see the outcome of his work, while eternity is lavish of time.(27) We shall see later on that it is foreign to our Lord’s ways to inflame the feelings and blind the eyes of men by kindling speech. The overmastering influence of a great leader will “take the prisoned soul” of the people and make it follow his will. But Christ’s first care is to leave each man master of his own will—the man who is no longer so, ceases to count as a unit. Just as this is seen in our Lord’s teaching, so is it also in the miracles which set that teaching forth—they are not worked in the ways or the place that a Thaumaturge would have chosen—people are not invited to a spectacle—nor are the wonders so overwhelming as to cause a whole population to fall prostrate at our Lord’s feet. The rumour of them is sufficient to make those who “have ears to hear” enquire further and “come and see;” and a further function of “Signs” is then called into play. This function is that they should serve to select from the multitude those fitted to follow our Lord. (2) Selection. I have said in a previous chapter that education and selection are inseparable. Any process that unfolds the powers which lie within men, emphasizes, so to say, the differences between them. The witnessing of wonders, declared to be wrought by the finger of God, must have stirred men’s minds, and so brought about in them a species of education, well calculated to winnow out the chaff from the grain. But the quality, which this kind of education seizes upon and develops, is not intellectual ability, but the capacity for “savouring the things of God.” The miracles served as a touchstone for detecting this. Many would look, and wonder, and go their way—they had seen a strange sight, _that_ they would allow, but it did not touch their souls: while to a few others it would seem as if they had lighted on what they had been watching for all their lives. They had always seen dimly that there must be in the world a living power; not a dead God in the keeping of the scribes, but a living God who should speak _in_ their hearts and _to_ their hearts, and they had found Him now. The minds of those who were worth rousing were put on the alert, and the sense of God’s kingdom being near them, the sense that this every day world was His and worked by Him, was expanded within them. (3) Preparation.