lieved, "small and ill-favoured" (μixpòs xal dvoetdrjs); or whether, as Jerome and the Latin Fathers thought and argued, there was, and must have been, a "starry something" (sidereum quiddum) in His countenance, and an ethereal loveliness which hung about His earthly presence, and commanded the passionate devotion of all who believed in Him, while it often overawed the hatred of the opponents, and even the fury of the multitude. viii. It was only after the commencement of Christ's ministry that His life was summoned to assume an aspect which differs from the normal conditions of our human existence. "The trivial round and the common task" had now to be abandoned, and during the short remainder of His life He had to enter on conditions which are never represented as other than exceptional. The Apostles and the disciples were also summoned to follow Christ in His wandering homelessness; but myriads of Christians might have been saved from futile practices had they observed that such a call was special and individual in its character. The vast multitudes whom Christ addressed were never bidden to sell all that they had, but only to carry out in their ordinary lives the spirit of His teaching. The inner and essential meaning of Christ's example cannot be, in the most distant degree, apprehended by the impossible attempt to reproduce the external conditions of His life. We can only follow Him by suffering our souls to be pervaded by His Spirit. It should be remembered that if the brief ministry was devoted to teaching and preaching and working miracles, all the previous thirty years were spent among "brothers and sisters," in the poor provincial home, in the every-day routine of common daily duty. How could the Lord have better illustrated the sacred beauty of those holy homes which are, or may be, to suffering men, the most precious of heavenly boons? It is in the retirement of homes where Christ abides that Love his golden shafts employs, there lights His constant lamp and waves his purple wings, ix. One of the most material and perplexing facts of our human life is the burden of its trials. We all experience in turn that, because we are men, we cannot escape suffering, since " man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upwards." We may enjoy many years of peace, as doubtless Jesus did, in the village home, and during such years scarcely a single wave of trouble may roll over our breasts. But the day comes when all God's waves and storms seem to go over us. We suffer from accident, or bitter disappointment, or incessant care; or else we reap the fruits of our own misdeeds; or envy, and calumny, and hate, and pain molest us. Christ faced for us these manifold sorrows of mortal life, and taught us the blessed experience that "to suffer with Him is not to suffer." The first year of His ministry has been called "the Galilean Spring"; but after that golden year the fury of religious and political hatred. burst upon Him. The gladness of His early success was followed by a year of flight and persecution, and by long months of concealment and imminent peril, ended by a crisis of agony and a death of shame. The Lord Jesus not only endured all this for our sakes, but also to show us by His example how we may find not a curse but a beatitude in poverty, and humility, and persecution, and malediction. The record of Christ's trials has been for mankind a transfiguration of sorrow. It has also been a revelation of the Divineness of sympathy and compassion. Christ came not only to love as none ever loved before, but also to extend that love to those whom none had loved. The Pharisee would not notice even his own wife if he happened to pass her in the street, and he drew in his garments lest they should be defiled by touching such inferior creatures as he deemed women to be. Even the disciples were amazed that by the lonely well Jesus should talk to a woman! Yet not for women only, but for women who were sinners-the most friendless, the most fallen, the most degraded, even for the penitent harlot who washed His feet with her tears and wiped them with the hairs of her head, even for the miserable adulteress as, amid her tangled hair, she sobbed before him on the Temple floor-He had a wellspring of tender compassion. The Apostles rebuked those who brought little children to Christ, but He took them in His arms, laid His hands upon them and blessed them. He chose among His teachers not only one who had been a bigoted zealot, but, in most opposite contrast to him, the utterly despised and hated publican whom every rigid Jew regarded with immense disdain. None were too low, none too wretched, for the tender and loving care of Him who came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. x. One anguish, indeed, of human life our Lord did not and could not suffer. For the sting of all sorrow, as of death itself, is sin, and He came to show us a Sinless Ideal. Christ's sinlessness is the most unique proof that He was indeed the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. For of no other human being since time began can such sinlessness be predicated. Of all the hundreds of thousands of men who have lived, as Jesus did, in the blaze, not only of publicity, but of hostile publicity; of all the myriads, alike in public and private life, whose biographies have been recorded, or the facts of whose life are known, not one has ever ventured to say, "Which of you convinceth me of sin?" Of not one man has it ever been pretended, by his most enthusiastic admirers, that he was free from all human faults; nor has any human being, who has revealed to us the secrets of his own heart and life, ever pretended that he was not a sinner. But the life of the Saviour, in its fourfold record, has, for eighteen centuries, been subject to the most minute, intense, searching, and even indignant gaze, and yet no one has ever found in Him the shadow of any iniquity, or has been able to fix on Him even a trivial fault. He stands forth for example for ever "holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners." It has been said that 66 what we all want is some one Pearl of great price, into which all the dispersed preciousness and fragmentary brilliances that dazzle the eyes shall be gathered. We want a Person, a living Person, a present Person, a sufficient Person, who shall satisfy our hearts, our whole hearts, and that at one and the same time, or else we shall never be at rest." That was the need of the world, and God supplied it when "the Dayspring from on high" dawned upon us. The ancient Christians sometimes played on the assonance of Christos and Chrestos (“gracious" or "precious"), and St. Peter (1 Pet. ii. 7), perhaps in allusion to this, says, "to you that believe is the preciousness." xi. And is not the inestimableness of God's gift to us in Christ illustrated by the unspeakable change which His coming has wrought in the world? Crime after crime has been suppressed; wrong after wrong has died away, pierced through and through with the arrows of the Dawn. In the ancient world, as I have said before, the Gospel expelled cruelty; it curbed passion; it branded suicide; it punished and repressed the execrably frequent crime of infanticide; it drove the infamous yet shameless impurities of heathendom into congenial darkness. There was hardly a class whose wrongs it did not remedy. It rescued the gladiator; it freed the slave; it protected the captive; it nursed the sick; it sheltered the orphan; it elevated the woman; it shrouded as with a veil the sacred innocence of the tender years of the child. In every region of life its ameliorating influence was felt. Christianity changed pity from a weakness into a virtue. It elevated poverty from a curse into a beatitude; it ennobled labour from a degradation into a dignity and a virtue; it sanctified marriage from little more than a burdensome convention into little less than a blessed sacrament. In all lands it has created hearts so pure, and lives so peaceful, and homes so sweet, that angels seem to have whispered to men's despairing hearts, "Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove that is covered with silver wings, and her feathers like gold." xii. And all this is still going on. The dark places of the world, which were for so many years the abodes of cruelty, have one after another been illuminated into Christian brightness. This has generally been achieved by the irresistible strength of weakness, as illustrated by the lives of a handful of poor and despised missionaries. The Gospel conquered Greece-her intellect, her philosophy, her satire, her glory; it conquered Rome-her immemorial traditions, her trebly hundred triumphs, the diadems of her all-powerful Cæsars, the swords of her thirty legions; it conquered Jerusalem with her fifteen centuries of gorgeous worship and sacred memories; it conquered the rushing tide of warlike barbarians; it won the Goths by the Bible of Wulfila; it made Attila, and Genseric, and Totila respect unarmed priests; it said to the warlike Clovis, flushed as he was with his great victory at Tolbiac, "Sicambrian, burn what thou hast adored, adore what thou hast burned." But the triumphs of the Gospel ceased not there. The same Christianity afterwards won Northern and Central Europe; and then as the centuries went on-thanks to men like Las Casas, and St. Francis Xavier, and Brainerd, and John Eliot, and Adoniram Judson, and Marsden, and Carey, and Martyn, and Morrison, and Hannington, and Coleridge Patteson-it prevailed among Red Indians, and Hindoos, and Chinese, and Japanese, and Burmese, and Kaffirs, and Zulus, and the far-off cannibals of the Pacific Isles. And as we watch its still unceasing progress, can we for a moment doubt that the olden prophecy shall be fulfilled, and that at last "the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea"? II. But now we turn from the facts of Christ's life to the characteristics of His teaching. 66 i. One of these was its tone of majestic authority. Christ had never passed through the training which in His days was regarded as indispensable for the position of a teacher. How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" asked the amazed and disgusted Pharisees. But they were impotent to resist the truth of His words, and the power and graciousness with which He spake, in spite of the furious taunts which they hurled at His poor adherents, whom they scornfully described as |