Jesus had been bred in another atmosphere, in a school of realities. When he said "Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of heaven," his words were the record of experience--the paradox was the story of his life. He had known poverty and hand-labour; he had been "exposed to feel what wretches feel." Whatever criticism may make of the story of his feeding {125} multitudes, it remains that he was markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger--over and over he urged the feeding of the poor, the maimed and the blind; he suggested the payment of a day's wage for an hour's work, where a day's food was needed and only an hour's work could be had; he even reminded a too happy father that his little girl would be the better of food. No thinker of his day, or for long before and after, was so deeply conscious of the appeal of sheer misery, and this is one of the things on which his followers have never lost the mind of Jesus. Poverty was perhaps even for himself a key to the door into the Kingdom of God. At any rate, he always emphasizes the advantage of disadvantages, for they at least make a man in earnest with himself. There is a revelation of the seriousness of his whole mind and nature in his reply to the follower who would go away and return. "No man, having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is _fit_ for the Kingdom of God." This every one knows who has tried to drive a furrow, and all men of action know only too well that the man, whom Jesus so describes, is fit for no kind of Kingdom. It is only the sentimentalism of the church that supposes the flabby-minded to be at home in the Kingdom of God. Jesus did not. The same kind of energy is in the parables. The unjust steward was a knave, but he was in earnest; and so was the questionably honest man who found treasure in a field. The merchant let everything go for the one pearl of great price. Mary chose "the one thing needful." We may be sure that in one shop in Nazareth benches were made to stand on four feet and doors to open and shut. The parables from nature, as we have seen, are true to the facts of nature. They too stand on four feet. The church laid hold of a characteristic word, when it adopted for all time Jesus' _Amen_--"in truth." Jesus was always explicit with his followers--they should know from the first that their goal was the cross, and that meantime they would have no place where to lay their heads. They were to begin with hard realities, and to consort with him on the basis of the real.