But now I see, as I look back, that at the root of all my inconsistency there lay this one thing, I was not a lover of my kind. I did not love men as men, humanity as humanity, as Jesus did. Of course I loved individuals, and even groups of men and classes of men, who could understand my thoughts, recognize my qualities, and repay my affection with affection. But to feel love for men as men; for those whose vulgarity distressed me, whose ignorance offended me, whose method of life repelled me; love for the drudge, the helot, the social pariah; love for people who had no beauty that men should desire them, nor any grace of mind or person, nor any quality that kindled interest; love for the dull average, with their painful limitations of mind and ideal, the gray armies of featureless grief, whose very sorrows had nothing picturesque in them and no tragic fascination--no, for these I had no real love. I had a deep commiseration, but it was that kind of romantic or aesthetic pity which begins and ends in its own expression. I did not know them by actual contact; I could not honestly say that I wished to know them. And then the thought came to me, and grew in me, that Jesus did love these people with an unconquerable passion. The multitudes to whom He preached were composed, as all multitudes are, of quite ordinary immemorable people. He also, to the eyes of those who saw Him in the peasant garb of Galilee, and judged only by outward appearance, was a common man. And so it would appear that if I did not love men after the fashion in which Jesus loved them, it was very unlikely that I should love Jesus Christ Himself if He once more appeared in the habit in which men saw Him long ago in Galilee. A Jesus, footsore, weary, travel-stained, wearing the raiment of a village carpenter, speaking with the accent of an unconsidered province, surrounded by a rabble of rude fishermen, among whom mingled many persons of doubtful character--how should I regard Him? Should I discern the Light and Life of men beneath His gray disguise of circumstance? Should I have left my books, my studious calm, my pleasant and sufficing tasks, to listen to One who seemed so little likely to instruct me? Would not the same spirit of disdain which made me think lightly and even scornfully of persons whose lives had no resemblance to my own, have made me disdainful of the Man of Nazareth? I knew the answer and I quailed before it. I saw that the temper of my mind was the temper of the Pharisee, and had I lived two thousand years ago in Jerusalem or Galilee, I should have rejected Jesus even as the scribes and Pharisees rejected Him.