Turning to the sources of Christianity in the first three Gospels we are struck by an immense contrast. There is no money in the purse, no victuals in the wallet, no munitions in the magazine, no baggage-train, no commissariat, no provision for trench warfare, and no thought of it. We are in the presence of elemental realities, more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory, more majestic than the successor of St Peter in all his pomp. We are in another atmosphere. All this apparatus of defence and apology, of preaching and propaganda, of church policies and chapel oppositions,--things which have given a form so strangely artificial to our conceptions of Christianity--are here either secondary or absent altogether. Religion, instead of being concentrated into strong Sunday doses, is here a pervasive, unobtrusive presence, that cometh not with observation, the luminous background of human conduct, the hiding-place of the light which irradiates the whole picture of man's life. Even the name of God, which comes to our lips so easily--too easily--was used by Jesus with a reverential rarity. You may read whole pages of the Gospels without finding it once. Jesus, we say, preached the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. But he was not _always_ preaching them, and as a matter of fact he never mentioned either of them in exactly those terms. He enforced them, illustrated them, revealed them, exemplified them, by living as though they were true, which is a very different thing from "preaching" them. His days were spent going about doing good, his preaching being little more than a comment that arose naturally from the good that he did. The Gospel is neither a sermon nor a treatise on religion; but a _story_, which tells how Christianity began in something that happened, in a deed that was done, in a life that was lived. It abounds in parables and is a parable itself, revealing things hidden from the foundation of the world. The order in which _we_ take these elements of religion--first, moral and religious propaganda, then performance to follow--is here reversed. The performance comes first; the propaganda, which reduces itself to the very simple form "Go and do thou likewise," comes afterwards. The proportions, too, are different. Instead of an immense campaign of preaching which leaves little energy for doing the things preached about, the work done, the life lived here overshadow everything else. The accusation of Carlyle against modern civilization, that it has run to seed in mere talk, parliamentary eloquence, stump oratory, and such like, has no application to the birth of the Christian religion. Something to talk about, something worth talking about, was furnished before the talking began.