2. Another characteristic trait of Christ’s conduct is seen in the means He used to establish the Kingdom of His Father. He could have made the colossal power of Rome His tool to effect that purpose, or have employed the wisdom of the philosophers or the elegance of the writers of that classic age. But instead He used ignorant and timid men, and first gathered into His fold the poor and despised of the earth, as St. Paul expressed it: “For see your vocation, brethren, that there are not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but the foolish things of the world hath God chosen that he may confound the wise, and the weak things of the world hath God chosen that he may confound the strong, and the base things of the world, and the things that are contemptible hath God chosen, and things that are not, that He might bring to naught things that are, that no flesh should glory in His sight” (I Cor. i, 26-29). Must we then, to imitate Christ, cast all human learning to the winds? By no means; but we must understand that merely natural means cannot produce supernatural effects, that all the learning and all the power of the world cannot save or sanctify a soul. And therefore we must trust in supernatural means. As to the natural means, Christ did not need them to accomplish His purpose; but we must use all the means, natural and supernatural, that God puts at our disposal; yet remembering all along that we must put our main confidence in the supernatural, in the help of grace, which is secured by the imitation of our King. We must then ever keep our eyes upon Him, study His example, and reproduce His virtues in ourselves. It will often happen that to act thus we must do things which seem foolish in the eyes of a worldly wisdom, as when St. Francis Borgia resigned his office of viceroy, in which he was doing so much good, to hide himself in the religious state; or when the Seven Holy Founders of the Servites of Mary gave up all their riches to become poor like Christ. A beautiful illustration of the way in which we are to imitate the Saviour is given us in the Book of Judges, where Gedeon and his three hundred followers rescued their people from oppression by means apparently most unwise, yet fully successful because they obeyed God with heroic fidelity. Gedeon was designed by Divine Providence to be a type of Christ. Jesus is our Gedeon, and we can learn how we must follow Him by studying the story of Gedeon in Holy Writ.