who chose the chief seats at feasts. It is a common thing to hear it said by simple people in praise of some one they regard as pre-eminently a gentleman that "he is always the same." No doubt the publicans and sinners whose friendly advances Christ accepted without apparent condescension said this of Him. He was so entirely Himself among them that the vulgar-minded Pharisees whispered to one another that He must be ignorant of the sort of company He was in, or surely He would make plain the gulf fixed between Himself and them. By conventionality our Lord seems never to have been bound. On the other hand, He did not wantonly overthrow the conventions of His day. When a social custom struck Him as injurious, He told those who gave in to it that it stood in the way of better things, substituting custom for conscience. On the other hand, He fell in with the usual ways of respectable people in a great many particulars, praying in a village place of worship beside Pharisees who stood up to bless themselves and publicans who dared not so much as lift their eyes to heaven, taking part in a service which was far enough removed from the sincere, spiritual, and wholly unsuperstitious worship to which He looked forward as He talked beside the well.

Christ had a horror of tyranny in every form, and He seems to have regarded it as a peculiarly heathen vice. "The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them," He said. Some bold translators emphasise His meaning by saying "lord it" over them. Dekker was right. A true gentleman is not harsh, implacable, or capricious. The breaking of other men's wills gives him no pleasure. Christ's followers, He said, must avoid all selfish wish for ascendency. A ruler, He said, should regard himself as the servant of all. Where ruling is concerned the counsels of Christ seem, like all His most characteristic utterances, to be calculated rather to inspire aspiration in the minds of good men than definitely to regulate their action, for in more than one of the parables His words imply that an ambition to rule is a lawful ambition, and that increased responsibility may be looked to as a reward.

Theoretically the Christian attitude towards power has always been the gentlemanlike attitude. Hall, the chronicler, writing in 1548, says in the "Chronicles of Henry VI.": "In this matter Lord Clyfford was accounted a tyrant, and no gentleman."

It is commonly said to-day that Christianity has never been tried. Such a judgment is superficial in the extreme. The moral teaching of Christ has never been entirely carried out by any community nor perhaps by any man, but to speak as though it had no great influence is sheer affectation. The white people have wasted, it is true, their time and their blood in quarrelling about dogma; but every Christian sect has recognised in the divine character of the Nazarene Carpenter who suffered upon the Cross the perfectibility of the human race, and in their highest moments of aspiration and repentance peoples and rulers alike have pleaded His merits before God. Nothing but this recognition could have curbed the cruel pride of the ancient world, have undermined the barriers of race and caste with a sense of human brotherhood, have cast at least a suspicion upon the theory that might is right, and made respect for women a necessary part of every good man's creed. Entirely apart from what is usually called religion in England to-day, "truth, pity, freedom, and hardiness" are the ideals of the race because nineteen hundred years ago Christ was born in the stable of a Jewish inn.

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIRST TRUE GENTLEMAN ***