plain the gulf fixed between Himself and them. By conventionality our Lord seems never to have been bound. On the other hand, He did not wantonly overthrow the conventions of His day. When a social custom struck Him as injurious, He told those who gave in to it that it stood in the way of better things, substituting custom for conscience. On the other hand, He fell in with the usual ways of respectable people in a great many particulars, praying in a village place of worship beside Pharisees who stood up to bless themselves and publicans who dared not so much as lift their eyes to heaven, taking part in a service which was far enough removed from the sincere, spiritual, and wholly unsuperstitious worship to which He looked forward as He talked beside the well. Christ had a horror of tyranny in every form, and He seems to have regarded it as a peculiarly heathen vice. "The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them," He said. Some bold translators emphasise His meaning by saying "lord it" over them. Dekker was right. A true gentleman is not harsh, implacable, or capricious. The breaking of other men’s wills gives him no pleasure. Christ’s followers, He said, must avoid all selfish wish for ascendency. A ruler, He said, should regard himself as the servant of all. Where ruling is concerned the counsels of Christ seem, like all His most characteristic utterances, to be calculated rather to inspire aspiration in the minds of good men than definitely to regulate their action, for in more than one of the parables His words imply that an ambition to rule is a lawful ambition, and that increased responsibility may be looked to as a reward. Theoretically the Christian attitude towards power has always been the gentlemanlike attitude. Hall, the chronicler, writing in 1548, says in the "Chronicles of Henry VI.": "In this matter Lord Clyfford was accounted a tyrant, and no gentleman."