It was in the new life and happiness in God that he was bringing to the common people that Jesus saw his firmest credentials. He laid stress indeed upon the expulsion of devils and the cure of disease--matters explained to-day by "suggestion." But the culmination was "the good news for the poor." "Gospel" and "Evangelical" have in time become technical terms, and have no longer the pulse of sheer happiness which Jesus felt in them, and which the early church likewise experienced. "Be of good cheer!" is the familiar English rendering of one of the words of Jesus, often on his lips--"Courage!" he said. One text of Luke represents him as saying it even on the cross, when he spoke to the penitent thief. Summing up what we have so far reached, we may remark the broad contrast between the attitude of Jesus to human life and the views of the world around him. A simple home with an atmosphere of love and truth and intelligence, where life was not lost sight of in its refinements, where ordinary needs and common duties were the daily facts, where God was a constant and friendly presence--this was his early environment. Later on it was the carpenter's bench, the fisherman's boat, wind on the mountain and storm on the lake, leaven in the meal and wheat in the field. Everywhere his life is rooted in the normal and the natural, and everywhere he finds God filling the meanest detail of man's life with glory and revelation. Philosophers were anxious to keep God clear of contact with matter; Marcus Aurelius found "decay in the substance {131} of all things--nothing but water, dust, bones, stench."[19] Jesus saw life in all things--God clothing the grass and watching over little birds. To-day the old antithesis of God and matter is gone, and it comes as a relief to find that Jesus anticipated its disappearance. The religious in his day looked for God in trance and ritual, in the abnormal and unusual, but for him, as for every man who has ever helped mankind, the ordinary and the commonplace were enough. The Kingdom of God is among you, or even within you--in the common people, of whom all the other teachers despaired.