The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah Vol 1 - Predestination

stirred by a strange impulse, * they believed in His
Name * as the ^"^ Messiah. ^ A milk-faith,' as
Lather pithily calls it, which fed on, and required
for its sustenance, ' signs.' And like a vision it
passed with the thing seen. Not a faith to which the
sign was only the fingerpost, but a &ith of which
the sign, not the thing signified, was the substance ;
a faith which dazzled the mental sight, but reached
not down to the heart. And Jesus, Who with heartsearching
glance saw what was in man. Who
needed not any to tell Him, but with immediateness
knew all, did not commit Himself to them. They
were not like His first Galilean disciples, true of
heart and in heart. The Messiah Whom these found,
and He Whom those saw, met difierent
conceptions. The &ith of the Jerusalem sign-seers
would not have compassed what the Galileans
experienced; it would not have understood nor
endured, had He committed Himself to them. And
yet He did, in wondrous love, condescend and
speak to them in the only language they could
understand, in that of ^ signs.' Nor was it all in
vain.