"Sense of fact" is a phrase which does not exclude--perhaps it even suggests--some hint of dullness. The matter-of-fact people are valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy--he likes the birds and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations. They are not the "natural objects" with which dull people try to brighten their pages and discourses. They are happy living things that come to his mind, as it were, of themselves, because, shall we say? they know they will be welcome there; and they are welcome. His pity and sympathy are unlike ours in having so much more intelligence and fellow-feeling in them. He understands men and women, as his gift of bright and winning speech shows. After all, as Carlyle has pointed out in many places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding, of sympathy, that gives the measure of our intellects.[14] It is the faculty by which men touch fact and master it. It is the want of it that makes so many clever and ingenious people so futile and distressing. The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy and the foundations, so to speak, of the imagination which gives their quality to the stories and pictures of Jesus. He thinks in pictures, as it were; they fill his speech, and every one of them is alive and real. Think, for example, of the Light of the world (Matt. 5:14), the strait gate and the narrow way (Matt. 7:14), the pictures of the bridegroom (Mark 2:19), sower (Matt. 13:3), pearl merchant (Matt. 13:45), and the men with the net (Matt. 13:47), the sheep among the wolves (Matt. 10:16), the woman sweeping the house (Luke 15:8), the debtor going to prison accompanied by his creditor and the officer with the judge's warrant (Luke 12:58), the shepherd separating his sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:32), the children playing in the market-place pretending to pipe or to mourn (Luke 7:32), the fall of the house (Matt. 7:27)--or the ironical pictures of the blind leading the blind straight for the ditch (Matt. 15:14), the vintagers taking their baskets to the bramble bushes (Matt. 7:16), the candle burning away brightly under the bushel (Matt. 5:15; Luke 11:33), the offering of pearls to the pigs (Matt. 7:6)--or his descriptions of what lay before himself as a cup and a baptism (Mark 10:38), and of his task as the setting fire to the world (Luke 12:49). There is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these pictures--not least about those touched with irony.