full and graciously from them. "I am the Resurrection and the Life," this sublime enunciation falls on the earth-bound soul like a stream from the skies; it hovers over and around us, a voice as of the Lord God, heard of old among the trees in Eden, a majestic presence, we cannot dispel. But why multiply these citations? The whole life of Christ is enveloped in the same holy mystery. He dwells constantly in a supernal region, face to face with the living God. Take any one of those sublime utterances: “He that confesseth me before men, him will I also confess before my Father in heaven." "When the Son of man cometh in the glory of the Father with the holy angels." How they lift us at once above earth and its earthiness, and encircle us with an unutterable dignity and majesty! And there is nothing either pompous or strained in the language. In Seneca or Plato, in Moses or Paul, or even in the loved and elevated John, this language would seem presumptuous and arrogant, not to say impious. But in Christ it seems entirely befitting, in harmony with His whole demeanour. There is a vastness in all His conceptions, a grandeur of feeling, a breadth of purpose, which show Him to be truly one with the Father; show it as clearly as the stilling of the waves and the raising of the dead. When He addresses those around Him, He manifests a knowledge of the human heart, which, if it were not so familiar to us, would startle and overwhelm us. He does not speak to the words of men, nor to their acts and professions, but to their most secret motives, thoughts, and feelings. His penetration into character discloses a power like that of the great Searcher of hearts. As we listen to Him, we seem to hear the distant roar of the mighty ocean breaking on some far-off shore. As He pierces in and still in, a light which no darkness can hide,--vain, we feel, are all attempts to deceive that almost omniscient One. The Son knoweth all mortals, but "no man knoweth the Son." Offices and powers we usually ascribe to God He often takes to Himself, and without the slightest apparent assumption; He calls Himself the "Light of the world;" He speaks of judging the world, of giving everlasting life, and of awarding their opposite conditions to the righteous and the wicked; and that, not as a strange work, but one accordant with His whole conduct, character, and life. He had not our human love of approbation; compare Him in this respect with John, Paul, and the best of mere men. He was not selfish like us, but disinterested like

God Himself. His magnanimity is not human, but Divine; His tenderness to the afflicted is like that of the all-pitying Father; and His love of the fallen, the oppressed, the erring and lost, is broad as the globe, and high as heaven. "God," we read in the Scriptures, "is love;" how deep is the well! Verily, without Christ we could not draw its life-giving, never-failing waters. The incomprehensibleness of Christ is seen, furthermore, in His relations to the Holy Spirit. This mighty power I suppose no one professes to have entirely fathomed. We know not whence it cometh, whither it goeth, nor indeed what it is. By its effects we know it exists, and ever operates, and that is all. But Jesus Christ was thoroughly conversant with it. He not only received it from God, but imparted it to others. "The Comforter, whom I will send unto you from the Father." He breathed on His disciples and said, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit." This Divine energy dwelt in Him in its fulness; He was saturated with its essence. We may note that as His crucifixion drew near, and especially after His resurrection, the effluence of the Spirit through Him became more and more copious and quickening. His humanity faded away like a vanishing bow, and was lost in His Divinity. So great and overmastering were His communications of the Spirit, that on the wayside, in the garden, in the chamber, or on the seashore, as He drew near and spake, many hearts must have burned within themselves. There was a conscious Divinity in His air and bearing which overpowered the multitude; a word, a look, would sometimes strike them with awe. It was "God," the Ineffable, the Holy Spirit, "manifest in the flesh."'

The Rev. Dr. Kennedy, in an essay on the Personal Claims asserted by Jesus Christ, and how to account for them, entitled 'Pilate's Question,' says, p. 41: 'The moral representation which Christ gives of Himself throughout His life, is as peculiar as the impression which His words uniformly produce of His conscious personal superhuman greatness. In several writings of His followers He is expressly declared to have been without sin (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. vii. 26; 1 John iii. 5; 1 Pet. ii. 22). But our present argument has only to do with the fact that He asserted His own sinlessness, and acted spiritually on the assumption of His sinlessness. On one occasion we find Him charging the Jews, in very severe language, with being the servants of sin and the children of the devil (John viii. 44), and in

the same breath claiming to be Himself without sin, therefore incapable of saying aught but the truth, and for this reason entitled to be heard and believed; for this seems to be the force of His reasoning in saying, “Because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?” (John viii. 45, 46). "The proof of the sinlessness of Jesus furnished by this passage," says Meyer, "is purely subjective, so far as it rests on the decided expression of His own moral consciousness in the presence of His enemies; but, at the same time, it is, as such, all the more striking in that the confirmation of His own testimony is added to the testimony of others, and to the necessity of His sinlessness for the work of redemption and for the function of judge." In the conversation recorded in the eighth chapter of St. John, Jesus asserts His absolute separation from the Jews around Him in respect of character: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world. I said therefore ye shall die in your sins; if ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins. He that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please Him" (vers. 23, 24, 29). More than this Jesus intimated on the same occasion, in words which we can understand better than His hearers did, that on Him, the sinless One, lay the hope of their deliverance from the bondage of their sinfulness: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (vers. 34–37). At a later period we find Jesus saying, "Hereafter I will not talk much with you for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me" (John xiv. 30). It is not, however, so much in His express utterances as in His whole manner and spirit that we discern His consciousness of being without sin. He called on men to repent, but we see no sign or trace of repentance in Himself. He said, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God;" but He, the King, though a man, was consciously not a man that needed a second birth. Even Strauss cannot conceal from himself the fact that the nature of Christ—" unlike those of a Paul, an Augustine, or a Luther, which were purified by means of a struggle and a violent rupture, and retained the scars of it ever after"—was

uninterrupted and harmoniously unfolded, and that His "inner development took place without violent crises." Jesus represented a publican as saying, "God be merciful to me, a sinner;" but we do not find that He Himself ever said, "God be merciful to me, a sinner." He taught His disciples to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses," but He never offered this prayer for Himself. There is one long prayer of His on record,-in the seventeenth chapter of St. John, but there is not a breath of contrition in it from beginning to end, not a sigh of conscious shortcoming or imperfection; but, on the contrary, "I have glorified Thee on the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do." Within a few hours after we find Him in Gethsemane, praying to the Father with strong crying and tears, but all His agony fails to wring from Him one word of confession of sin. The mystery of the trouble of His soul in that terrible hour is not relieved or explained by the slightest indication of conscious demerit. "We feel that in this one life," says Godet, "remorse has no place. And this fact is so much the more remarkable and decisive, in proportion as Jesus was more humble than other men, and His conscience more sensitive than theirs. more advanced we are in the life of holiness, the more painfully do we feel the stains of sin. If the slightest defilement had existed in Him, He would have been more affected by it than we are by the gravest faults into which we fall."'

The

My next extract is from F. W. Robertson's Sermons, second series, third edition, p. 216. The author is speaking of 'Christ's estimate of Sin,' the text being Luke xix. 10: 'The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.' Mr. Robertson says he perceives in the text three peculiarities distinguishing Christ from ordinary men, the first of which is a peculiarity in the constitution of the Redeemer's moral nature, as manifested in that peculiar title which He assumed, 'the Son of man.' He goes on to say: 'It implies fairly His Divine origin; for it is an emphatic expression, and, as we may so say, an unnatural one. Imagine an apostle, St. Paul or St. John, insisting upon it perpetually that he himself was human. It would almost provoke a smile to hear either of them averring and affirming, "I am a son of man :" it would be unnatural, the affectation of condescension would be intolerable. Therefore, when we hear these words from Christ, we are compelled to think of

them as contrasted with a higher nature. None could without presumption remind men that he was their brother and a son of man, except one who was also something higher, even the Son of God. It implies the catholicity of His Brotherhood. Nothing in the judgment of historians stands out so sharply distinct as race— national character: nothing is more ineffaceable. The Hebrew was marked from all mankind. The Roman was perfectly distinct from the Grecian character; as markedly different as the rough English truthfulness is from Celtic brilliancy of talent. Now these peculiar nationalities are seldom combined. You rarely find the stern, old Jewish sense of holiness going together with the Athenian sensitiveness of what is beautiful. Not often do you find together severe truth and refined tenderness. Brilliancy seems opposed to perseverance. Exquisiteness of taste commonly goes along with a certain amount of untruthfulness. By Humanity, as a whole, we mean the aggregate of all these separate excellences. Only in two places are they all found together—in the universal human race; and in Jesus Christ. He having, as it were, a whole humanity in Himself, combines them all. Now this is the universality of the Nature of Jesus Christ. There was in Him no national peculiarity or individual idiosyncrasy. He was not the Son of the Jew, nor the Son of the carpenter; nor the offspring of the modes of living and thinking of that particular century. He was the Son of man. Once in the world's history was born a man. Once in the roll of ages, out of innumerable failures, from the stock of human nature, one Bud developed itself into a faultless Flower. One perfect specimen of humanity has God exhibited on earth. The best and most catholic of Englishmen has his prejudices. All the world over our greatest writer would be recognised as having the English cast of thought. The pattern Jew would seem Jewish everywhere but in Judea. Take Abraham, St. John, St. Paul, place them where you will, in China or in Peru, they are Hebrews: they could not command all sympathies; their life could not be imitable except in part. They are foreigners in every land, and out of place in every country but their own. But Christ is the King of men, and "draws all men," because all character is in Him, separate from nationalities and limitations. As if the life-blood of every nation were in His veins, and that which is best and truest in every man, and that which is tenderest, and