The world in the age of Jesus was living a good deal upon its past, looking to old books and old cults, as we see in Plutarch and many others. The Jews no less lived upon their great books. Even Philo was fettered to the Old Testament, {126} except when he could dissolve his fetters by allegory, and even then he believed himself loyal to the higher meaning of the text. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in Jesus. His knowledge of Psalmist and Prophet excited wonder; but in all his quotations of the Old Testament that have reached us, there is no trace of servitude to the letter and no hint of allegory. He does not quote Scripture as his followers did. Here too he spoke as having authority. If sometimes he quoted words for their own sake, it was always as an _argumentum ad hominem_. But his own way was to grasp the writer's mind--a very difficult thing in his day, and little done--and to go straight to the root of the matter, regardless of authority and tradition. Like draws to like, and an intensely real man at once grasped his kinship with other intensely real men; and he found in the prophets, not reeds shaken with the wind, courtiers of king or of people, but men in touch with reality, with their eyes open for God, friends and fore-runners, whose experience illumined his own. This type of manhood needed no explanation for him. The other sort perplexed him--"Why can you not judge for yourselves?" how was it that men could see and yet not see? From his inner sympathy with the prophetic mind, came his freedom in dealing with the prophets. He read and understood, and decided for himself. No sincere man would ever wish his word to be final for another. Jesus was conscious of his own right to think and to see and to judge, and for him, as for the modern temper, the final thing was not opinion, nor scripture, nor authority, but reality and experience. There lay the road to God. Hence it is that Jesus is so tranquil,--he does "not strive nor cry"--for the man who has experienced in himself the power of the real has no doubts about it being able to maintain itself in a world, where at heart men want nothing else. [Sidenote: The temptations of Jesus]