But the Pharisees went out, and took counsel against him, how they might destroy him. And Jesus perceiving it withdrew from thence. - Matt. 12: 14, 15. XVII THE WITHDRAWAL OF JESUS When great truths are set before us in biographical expression they take hold of the imagination more strongly. The human life of Jesus of Nazareth cannot be studied too minutely. Its smallest details throb with meaning. There is as much significancy in his withdrawal from a place as in his abode there. To us who can see into the facts recorded in New Testament Writ more profoundly than the very people concerned in them, the withdrawal of Jesus is a pathetic and serious business. It means to us so much more than it meant to them. The personality of Jesus is to us so much greater than it was to these people who were plotting to destroy him. We judge of him in the light which has poured down the centuries. They judged of him simply as a disturbing element in their religious and social life. The withdrawal of Jesus must therefore have for us more significance than it had for them. It is a pictured truth. And all pictured truth has a double value it has value for the imagination and for the intelligence. On several occasions we read that Jesus withdrew himself, once because the people mobbed him, once because he was so wearied in body and mind that it was necessary he should rest himself, as he seems to have done by retirement into some quietude which he filled with prayer. For there is nothing so restful to jaded nerves as solitary prayer. On the occasion before us he withdrew himself in selfdefence. They were plotting to destroy him. The time had not yet come for that. Eventually it came. Through resurrection and ascension he withdrew himself and then everything in the nation went to pieces. Historians who look on the surface only and not into the spiritual depths of human character may refuse to recognize any connection between the crucifixion of Jesus and the national break-up; but men whose business it is to trace the connection between the failure in character and the failure in life, know that religious and moral deterioration has always been followed by civil and political disturbances of the most serious kind. And this leads to the truth which I am specially desirous to have you recognize: That to attack religion is not to destroy religion, but to attack and disorganize everything else. Man is incurably religious, as some great writer has said. And the reason of it is that he was so constituted. The God who first gave him of his own life could not do that without leaving his sign-manual in his nature. Whatever interpretation we put upon the words: "Made in his image, after his likeness," this must be admitted, that the impression of the divine was so deeply made in man's nature as to continue to hold itself in evidence. That statement may seem to demand justification. The evidence for a religious sense in many men seems so slight as to be almost worthless. There is, however, a vast difference to be recognized between a merely existent religious sense and a controlling religious sense. Faculties that are cultivated are pronouncedly more in evidence than neglected faculties. Darwin tells us that in early life he had a ready response in his nature to music and art, but that through neglect of cultivation he totally lost them. The religiousness of our nature needs cultivation as much as the mathematical in tellectuality of our nature. Religion denied its natural expression will withdraw itself into the inner regions of man's nature and abide there as a feeling, an aspiration, a mysterious whisper in a haunted chamber, or even as a discontent, or as a fear: "An aching void which nought on earth can fill." You recall that in the Jewish temple there was holy of holies, a curtained sanctuary, dedicated to silence and mystery into which only once a year the high priest entered. And in every man's nature there seems to be a kind of holy of holies, into which religion's self may retire and in unspeaking silence seem to be extinguished. I very much question whether in any man the extinction of that God-given light is ever complete. There have been so many signs of its awakening in the most hardened and vicious, that he would be a bold man who should dogmatically affirm the possibility of its total extinction, But as Jesus with |