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of the Bible, as He is also the perfect example of conveying to man the very words God would have Him speak. What has been done by the Head of the Church has also been done by members of the Church specially chosen and fitted by God for this purpose.

Are we Christians? Jesus has left us His test of His true followers. “O Father, . . . . I manifested Thy name unto the men whom Thou gavest me out of the world: Thine they were, and Thou gavest them to me, and they have kept Thy word. Now they know that all things whatsoever Thou hast given me are from Thee: for the words which Thou gavest me I have given unto them; and they received them, and knew of a truth that I came forth from Thee, and they believed that Thou didst send ine."

THE MORAL GLORY OF JESUS A PROOF OF

INSPIRATION.

W. G. MOOREHEAD, D.D.

THE glories of the Lord Jesus Christ are threefoldessential, official, and moral. 1. His essential glory is that which pertains to Him as the eternal Son of God, coequal with the Father, Himself God. To His personal and uncreated glory, Jesus himself refers when He says: "And now, O Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was" (John xvii. 5). To it the Spirit bears witness when He says: "Who is the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of His person" (Heb. i. 3), words which suggested the phrase of the Nicene Creed, "Light of Light."

2. His official glory is that which belongs to Him as the God-man, the Mediator. It is the reward conferred upon Him, the august promotion He received when He had brought His great work to a final, satisfactory, and triumphant conclusion. And with what clusters of official dignities is the Son of Man now invested. All power in heaven and on earth is given Him (Matt. xxviii. 18); God hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name (Phil. ii. 9); He is crowned with glory and honor (Heb. ii. 9). Once He trod this earth, the poor Man, despised and rejected, His face covered with shame, a stranger to His brethren, an alien to His mother's children, the song of the drunkard (Ps. lxix. 7, 8, 12; Jno. i. 10, 11). Earth once cast Him out as unfit to live here. But God raised Him from the dead,

and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and dominion and might, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come; and hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all (Eph. i. 20-23). No name is surrounded with such splendor, or commands such veneration as His. He has no superior and no rival. No sphere, however high or distant, is exempted from His control: no creature, however mighty, has a co-ordinate jurisdiction. And other glories await Him when He shall come to be glorified in His saints, and to be admired in all them that believe (2 Thess. i. 10).

3. The moral glory of the Lord Jesus consists of the perfections which marked His entire life on earth; perfections which attached to every circumstance in which He was found, to every relation He sustained whether toward God or man. His essential and official glories were commonly hid as He passed on through His earthly course. He did not walk through the land either as the Divine Son from the bosom of the Father, or as the authoritative Son of David. These glories He veiled, save where faith discovered them, or occasion demanded their display. But His moral glory could not be hid: He could not be less than perfect in everything: it belonged to Him: it was Himself. It now illumines every page of the evangelists, as once it did every path He trod here on earth.

This moral glory of Jesus, as it is exhibited in the four Gospels, we are to contemplate-not as an example most worthy of our imitation, nor to call forth our devout admiration and love, nor yet as an evidence of Christianity, though to all these ends it is most admirably fitted-but for a single purpose, viz., as a proof of the inspiration of the Scriptures.

In this discussion the Lord's person is assumed-God and man in one Lord Jesus Christ. His work is also assumed-His atoning sacrifice by which reconciliation was effected, and which is now preached for the acceptance and joy of faith.

The proposition which we undertake to illustrate and establish is this: That the character of Jesus Christ, as delineated in the Gospels, cannot be the product of the unaided human mind.

The portrait of Him which the authors of the Gospels have drawn is that of a subject too majestic and too sublime ever to have been idealized by uninspired men. He stands before us arrayed in a beauty and a grandeur which dwarf "the starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us." He shincs forth with the self-evidencing light of the noonday sun. He is too great, too pure, too perfect, to have been invented by any sinful and erring man or set of men. His moral glories, which glow through all the pages of the Gospels with a deathless lustre, tell us of the presence of One in this dark and tearful world who is more than man; and they tell us, also, that the pen which traced them was an inspired pen. We shall have occasion to verify the words of the infidel Rousseau: "It is more inconceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a history, than that one should furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality, contained in the Gospel. The marks of its truth are so striking and inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero." Manifold are the external proofs in favor of the integrity of the evangelistic narratives; but greater far and more manifold are the internal evidences of their inspiration. Jesus Christ herein portrayed as a divinely perfect character; perfect as a Child and as a Man; perfect in all His

ways, and words, and service; in wisdom and knowledge, in grace and holiness, in nearness and distance, among friends and enemies, in life and death: Jesus Christ, in all that He was while sojourning in the flesh, and in all that He now is in the highest heavens, is the one unfailing and unanswerable proof that the Gospel is from God, that it reveals God.

The discussion of this great theme falls into two parts: I. A brief survey of Christ's character, as disclosed in the Gospels. II. The application of the argument.

"

("The character," and "The moral glory of Jesus,' are not quite convertible terms. We consider the latter as the more comprehensive; but to avoid repetition both are used.)

1. The moral glory of Jesus appears in His development as Son of Man. The nature in which He appeared among men was our nature with all its needs, weaknesses, and limitations, sin and sinful propensities only excepted. His was a true and real humanity. As man, He possessed a perfect and penetrating community of nature with the lot of humankind. He displayed a genuine humanity which could deem nothing human, strangewhich must pass through the various stages of growth like any other member of the race.

It has been said of the Lord that "His manhood was perfectly natural in its development." The words of Luke justify the statement: "And the child grew, and waxed strong (in spirit), filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him" (Lu. ii. 40, 52). Man is not at once what he must be, but becomes so by slow gradations and He who in His matchless grace came down into all the circumstances of our actual humanity voluntarily subjected Himself to the same laws of growth. From infancy to youth, from youth to manhood, there was steady increase both of the powers of His human

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