In his first public discourse in the synagogue of Nazareth we find him at once announcing the fulfilment of the hopes which all around him were cherishing. He proclaims, without any preface or hesitation, with the most perfect directness and confidence, the full gospel of the kingdom of heaven: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” He takes for the text of his first discourse the passage in Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord,” and proceeds to expound how “this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” And within the next few days he delivers his Sermon on the Mount, of which we have the full record, and in which we find the meaning, and character, and principles of the kingdom laid down once and for all. Mark, that there is no hesitation, no ambiguity, no doubt as to who he is, or what message he has to deliver. “I have not come to destroy but to fulfil the law which my Father and your Father has given you, and which you have misunderstood. This which I am now unfolding to you is the meaning of that law, this is the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Thus he springs at once, as it were, full-armed into the arena; and it is this thorough mastery of his own meaning and position from the first—this thorough insight into what he has to do, and the means by which it is to be done—upon which we should fix our thoughts if we want to understand, or to get any notion at all of, what must have been the training of those eighteen years. How had this perfect insight and confidence been reached? “This young peasant, preaching from a boat or on a hill-side, sweeps aside at once the traditions of our most learned doctors, telling us that this, which we and our fathers have been taught, is not what the God of Israel intended in these commandments of his; but that he, this young man, can tell us what God did really intend. He assumes to speak to us as one having authority. Who gave him this authority?” These, we know, are the kind of questionings with which Christ was met at once, and over and over again. And they are most natural and necessary questionings, and must have occurred to himself again and again, and been answered by him to himself, before he could have stood up to proclaim with the tone of absolute authority his good news to the village congregations in Galilee, or the crowds on the Mount, or by the lake.