Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in the choice of his twelve. To that group of disciples he trusts the supremest task men ever had assigned to them. Not many wise, not many mighty, Paul found at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:26); and it has always been so. Is it not still the gist of the Gospel that Jesus believes in the writer and the reader of these lines--trusts them with the propagation of God's Kingdom, incredible commission? Jesus was always at leisure for individuals; this was the natural outcome of his faith in men. What else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in giving the utmost spiritual truth--no easy task, as experience shows us--even to a solitary listener? If we accept what he tells us of God, we can believe that the individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for him, but hardly otherwise. His gift of discovering interest in uninteresting people, says Phillips Brooks, was an intellectual habit that he gave to his disciples. We think too much "like men"; he would have us "think like God," and think better of odd units and items of humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to do. It has been pointed out lately how fierce he is about the man who puts a stumbling-block in the way of even "a little one"--"better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea"; no mere phrase--for when he draws a picture, he sees it; he sees this scene, and "better so--for him too!" is his comment (Mark 9:42). There was, we may remember, a view current in antiquity that when a man was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though I do not know if the Jews held this opinion. It is not likely that Jesus did. What is God's mind, God's conduct, toward those people whom men think they can afford to despise? "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). And to whom did he say this? To the most ordinary people--to Peter and James and John; for all sorts of people he held up this impossible ideal of a perfection like God's. What a faith in man it implies! "All things are possible to him that believes" (Mark 9:9.3). Why should not _you_ believe? he says.