Now, this unique relation of Jesus to the educational life of men is not accidental. Subtle as are the laws which determine it, those laws work effectively. They are elusive, but once in a while we glimpse their ways and meanings. The New Testament seems to feel their presence. It calls Christ a Teacher. Forty-three times it uses his name in connection with the word "teach" in its various forms. The world gets the same impression. It persists in calling Jesus the Greatest Teacher. It must note the schoolroom phrases with which the account of his life is filled. The prologue of his wonderful message on the Mount illustrates this. "And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him; and he opened his mouth, and taught them." The posture of Jesus was that of the teacher. His audience was made up of "disciples," that is, of pupils. He "taught" them. All this might be called a superficial play upon mere words. But we may go further and discover that the method of Jesus was the method of the teacher. He put his effort into other lives in order that these lives might, within their various limitations, duplicate his own. His work was largely devoted to the preparation of a select few. Often he left hundreds and thousands that he might be alone with Twelve. He poured himself into his disciples, his scholars. He thus did what every true teacher must do: He committed the cause of his life to those whom he schooled into faith and character and power. Nor did the teaching method halt here. The good teacher makes the things of the earth serve as approaches to the highest developments. This Jesus did supremely. Long before men made "nature study" an educational fad, Jesus made it an ethical and spiritual service. He pressed flowers, mustard seeds, grapes, wine, thistles, corn, figs, into the lessons of his roving school. He made nature study so effective that along a path of lilies men walked to God. When it was necessary to individualize in order to come to this high result, Jesus took up that burden of teaching. His school, like all other schools since its day, enrolled "a son of thunder." It took the love that suffered long to make John, the son of thunder and lightning and vaulting ambition, into the son of tender love. It took the patience that knows no failure to change the shifting sand of Simon's nature into the rock of Peter's character. All these considerations will convince us that we may go to Christ with the pedagogical, as well as with the religious motive. We do not wonder that a man should have crept to him in the darkness and should have said, "We know that thou art a teacher."