that are essentially evil, because they are not natural, but factitious, and are expressions of the eccentricities of sin. His natural appetites, also, may be perverted so as to take on a radically evil character. The natural appetites, when unperverted, are thus sinless. Yet, while sinless, they are possible occasions of sin. As, for example, circumstances. may arise when, to gratify an appetite legitimate in itself, involves a failure to obey some higher impulse, or some injunction of duty. The physical appetites are to be serv. ants of the moral nature. This truth lies at the base, and is the occasion, of that self-denial which is at once an expression and a constitutive element of moral character.

Jesus, being sinless, had no factitious or perverted appetites; yet he had all the natural, legitimate appetites of human nature. His control over these was complete. One great element of his moral grandeur was his constant and entire subordination of these appetites to the behests of the Father's will. The first temptation which Satan presented to Christ was in the form of a solicitation to gratify one of the most common and most evidently legitimate appetites of man-namely, the desire for food. Jesus was made by his long fast extremely susceptible to the temptation couched in the words: "Command that these stones be made bread." The appetite appealed to was not evil; it was legitimate, and its gratification pure. The possible evil connected with it lay in the fact that the gratification of this appetite according to Satan's suggestion could not be accomplished except by the temporary devotion to self-service. of that power which Christ, as the Redeemer of men, might exercise only in the execution of the Father's will. The suggestion of the tempter was, that Christ should subordinate the spiritual to the physical, should make the will of God secondary to the desires of the flesh.

The Savior's answer reveals his unexampled moral elevation, and, at the same time, the truth that the highest requisites of life are not material, but spiritual. "It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every

word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Thus, in the first stage of his contest with evil Christ subjected even his physical appetites entirely to the Father's will.

The two succeeding temptations, while not addressed to mere physical cravings, were yet addressed to desires which, with proper definition and limitation, are fundamental' in human nature, and, of themselves, pure and innocent. The temptation was, in every case, really a suggestion that self be ministered to at the expense of moral obligation. The Savior's victory over the enticements of the evil one was, in every step, an unfolding illustration of his complete subjection to God. Throughout his entire life righteousness was supreme, and each successive event in that life brings out into clearer view the luminous purity and flawless perfection of his character,

Again, there are incident to human nature certain instinctive shrinkings from apprehended danger or suffering. These revulsions of feeling at the prospect of that which is painful are not evil. It is right, in the abstract, to avoid pain and ward off peril. Especially is it right to avoid death. The instinctive fear which every one experiences at the proximity of pain or death is our natural guardian from the threatened evil, leading us to take such measures as lie in our power to protect the life that God has given us.

Yet it is easy to conceive of circumstances in which suffering can be avoided or death escaped, only by a violation of the highest obligations which God has imposed upon us. Under such circumstances there can be no question as to the duty of sacrificing comfort, and even life. John Huss did not wish to die, yet, to escape death, he must blacken his soul with a foul falsehood. Life, purchased at such a cost, would be too dear, and he went with noble heroism to the stake. The victims of Torquemada and the Inquisition contemplated the rack and the thumb-screw, the red-hot pincers and the iron boot with the acutest anticipatory pain. Yet truth was more precious to them than com

fort and peace secured at its expense, and they groaned out their long days of agony in the hands of their tormentors. Jesus had all the natural human shrinkings from pain and death. We are justified by the extreme delicacy and sensitiveness of a nature so utterly free from the debasing and callousing influences of sin as was his, in supposing that suffering and death were even more repugnant to him than they could be to mere men. We have, in the Gospels, occasional glimpses given us of the strong recoil of his nature from anticipated pain. At one time he said: "I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." His prophetic eye already saw the billows of sorrow rolling up their dark mass in which he was erelong to be overwhelmed, and the sight filled his soul with anguish. When he met the Greeks on the day of the last great feast before his death, the deep gloom of his coming conflict seemed to settle pall-like upon him, and his oppressed heart finds utterance in the cry: "Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour?" pated suffering had raised a great debate in his soul, and for a moment he questions: Shall I say this? "Father, save me from this hour?" But the question is scarcely suggested before his soul, set in brief oscillation, springs to its true poise, and the question is answered. "For this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name." Once more, when he is in the garden alone, for his disciples have fallen asleep, the awful trial, toward which the flying hours hurry him on, flings forward its black shadow upon him. A nameless dread, a great darkness of brooding horror envelops him, and his soul wrestles in an agony so poignant that the wailing prayer is wrung from his lips, while his body is bedewed with a bloody sweat: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.' Yet, not for a moment is he driven from his steadfast purpose. Three times the anguished cry thrills up to heaven, and three times his deathless loyalty speaks out in triumph over

It was as if the antici

his pain: "O my Father, if this cup pass not away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done."

How complete was the subjection of our Lord and Savior to the will of God! Every desire, every affection, every sensibility, was brought with unswerving hand into subordination to the one purpose which filled his heart, the one will which he owned as supreme.

3. In the third place, Christ's subjection of himself to the Father was complete, in the sphere of thought and utterHis intellect as well as his sensibility acquiesced in that obedience to the supreme will which he, as man's representative, had assumed.

ance.

We not infrequently hear it said of this or of that man, that his heart is better than his head. There are those who, in the realm of practical piety, are very devoted and loving servants of God, who yet, in the realm of speculative theology, hold to doctrines which, if carried out to their logical results in daily conduct, would lead to any thing but genuine godliness. There are some distinguished examples of those whose lives are better than their creed; while, on the other hand, in every community, there are those whose religious conduct is at marked and reprehensible variance with their avowed doctrines. Such anomalies could not exist if men were sinless; and one of the most characteristic results and evidences of human sinfulness is the antagonism between feeling and thought, or between theory and practice, which is so often exemplified in men.

In Christ there was no trace of this antagonism. In him was no sin, and, consequently, in him

"Mind and soul according well,

Did make one music."

The loyalty to the Father's will which was manifested by his deeds, and which was carried out with such fine fidelity in the complete subordination of every appetite and desire and impulse, was exhibited in the workings of his intellect and the utterances of his lips.

VOL. V, No. 17-3

Christ did not come into the world as a peripatetic philosopher, laying down a system of morals. He came with no merely personal theory of life. He did not expound a series of doctrines which he alone had elaborated. All his words he stamps with this declaration: “According as the Father taught me, these things I speak." There was in his teachings a constant allusion to the Father as the source of all that he taught. All of those strong asseverations which he uses, as: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep my saying, he shall never see death," are to be interpreted in the light of such utterances as the following: "I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father who sent me." "My doctrine [or teaching] is not mine, but his that sent me." Says Godet: "Just as Christ's holiness consisted in the care with which he kept his will free from every influence proceeding from himself only, in order to keep it ever open to the impulses of the divine will, so, in his teaching, his whole art consisted in allowing no thought originating in self to rule his intelligence, and in keeping that faculty in a state of absolute dependence upon the divine mind. He listened with the inward ear, and did not open his lips to give expression to his thoughts till he had received the answer of the Father to the silent questioning which his heart had addressed to him."*

But will not some say, in view of this entire subordination by Christ of conduct, feeling, thought, and speech to the Father's will, that Christ thereby shows an essential inferiority of nature to the Father? And will they not say, further, that therefore Christ was something less than really and properly divine? Not if they rightly read God's Word, and rightly interpret Christ's nature and office. While he says: "I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father who sent me," and, "From myself I do nothing;" he says also: "I and my Father are one;" "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." We can not mistake the significance of these words. Christ's oneness

"New Testament Studies," page 105.