Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine kingdom on earth. The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels is pervaded by this idea. The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of teaching and event, the overstrained eagerness,--which will not suffer a son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous fruit,--all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this tremendous expectation. That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seems due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements which somehow mingle with human destiny. He was not thinking chiefly of himself,--not even though he was to be God's vicegerent. What filled his heart, was the destiny of men. He wept over Jerusalem,--he mourned for those who would go away into darkness. The realities of human experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him. It seems plain--so far as anything can be plain in the details of the story--that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established religion. He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would there take an acute form, with the gravest issues. At times the presage rose of his own defeat and death. Suppose that were to happen? Still--so spoke his victorious faith--God's cause would triumph. And it would triumph speedily and visibly. So he heartened his followers for any event. "Be prepared--you who are to me brothers and sisters and mother--be prepared even for my death. All the same, my truth will vindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!" Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther. Gorgeous buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a mass of greed, formality, worldliness. A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure. The disciples childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one stone be left upon another." His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which shall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state. He goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade. This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they speedily bring about his ruin.