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sonalized righteousness, our human virtues articulated, revealed, made to live a life ideally perfect, while entirely real.

He was truth, chastity, gentleness, love, faith, hope; all the graces law most loves and man most admires, active, vital, and embodied. In relation to man, He was simply incarnate beneficence, an embodiment of the love that can bear, and dare, and do all things that it may promote human good. He was the spirit of human brotherhood personalized. The men who sinned against Him did not provoke Him into retaliatory sinning, their hatred only evoked His pity, their vengeance but supplied occasion for the exercise of His forgiving love. The great things that possessed His spirit, the sorrows that broke His heart, did not turn Him from the service of His kind. As He was in all His thoughts benevolent, He was in all His actions beneficent. For man He lived, and for man He died. Then in relation to God He was perfectly obedient; the first-born Son of the Eternal. came to do His Father's will, and He did it. suffered indeed, but only that He might the more learn and manifest obedience, and stand to all time as one who possessed and made manifest a double Sonship, at once "Son of God" and "Son of Man."

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Now think how these elements of His personality have acted upon the thought of man, have influenced and affected the life of the world within as without the Christian society. His relation to law has constituted a new and more perfect moral ideal for the race, has created a new order of beneficent virtues, has made the noblest to be not simply the bravest man, but the gentlest, the humanest, the chastest, and the most charitable. It exalted conscience, it ennobled freedom,

making men feel that whatever touched man's conscience and stood between him and his duty, or the law of his God, was an attempt at an unholy bondage of the spirit. His relation to man, with the brotherhood it expressed, created the idea of fraternity, ended the deep degradation of the slave, the deeper degradation of the autocrat, introduced the time when man was to be the brother of man the world over, and all lands and distant isles of the sea were to be bound in sympathy and love. The great thought of our humanity as a brotherhood, and all the beneficent work it has done in the world, has been His. Then out of his relation to God came the idea of man's common sonship and the equality of all the sons before the eternal Father; and the glory of the equality that came through Him is this-it did not abase, it exalted; it did not simply humble the proud, it lifted the lowly, thrilling the poorest with the idea of kinship with God. It is in traits like these that the quality of Christ's conception stands revealed. It was an almost infinite elevation of the idea of man. It levelled nothing but the evil or vain; it raised the highest to a loftier height than he had ever dreamed of. Mankind became consciously a family, with God as their common Father; men found the distinctions of earth vanish before the sublime equality which came of their common sonship to Heaven.

2. And these have not been allowed to be barren ideas; the energies of their Creator have made them. our most potent spiritual forces. For one thing His person showed them in organic unity; in harmonious and reciprocal activity. He made it evident that law exists for man inside and in behalf of humanity; our

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best obedience is true beneficence. Then His love of God was expressed in service of man; His service of man was obedience to God. And this, while it widened the range, exalted the end of human service. Men in serving man served God; good was done to our kind for the greater glory of God. And this worked a wonderful change alike in the motives and objects of action; it made the most ideal duties practicable. You have found love of man one of the hardest things possible; there are men it is impossible to love. You cannot love badness-how can you love the person who incorporates it? A lie is hateful; is the liar loveable? You cannot love a mean act; can you love the man who incarnates meanness? You hate lust; can you love the lustful, the man whose uncleanness makes the very atmosphere around him an offence and a shame to you? Christ brings an answer to these questions. It is not the actual man you love, it is God's ideal. You do not seek to save him for his own sake merely, but for the sake of the God that made him, and made him to be good, and means him still to become what He made him to be. The size of the ruin proves the grandeur of the ruined nature. You love the nature the ruin marred. there is a possible god.

In every actual devil Christ made us to see the

possible god in the actual devil, made us so to see it that we might love this Divine image, though lost, yet latent in the very worst, and labour that it might be restored. Once love of God becomes love of humanity, religion becomes a mass of ameliorative energies, the civilized agencies of the world concentrated, organized, glorified. Missionary enterprise, home and foreign, becomes possible, for to us the savage, however

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debased, is more akin to the angel than to the brute; the man possessed of passions that are but demons may yet be the home of holiest enthusiasms. So we do and must believe while Jesus Christ remains "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

3. As with his thought of God, so with his realization of the ideal of man-the world cannot escape from it, cannot expel the ideas, the inspiration, the consciousness it has created. It holds and commands the men who think they have most completely superseded Christ. There lives in our midst a so-called religion of humanity, which seems the very negation of the Christian. It knows no Creator; its only God is le Grand Être, the collective race. Yet the race it has deified it seeks to love, to serve, to make more godlike in its good, less demoniac in its evil, to build into a mighty organism whose every unit shall contribute to the good of the whole, and the good of the whole become the possession and the joy of all the units. Yet whence came the thought of humanity as a whole, a delicate yet stupendous organism, a concrete and finely articulated being, with all its component units in ceaseless interactivity, so subtly and sympathetically related that no good or ill could come to one without touching and affecting all? Many centuries before Comte there lived a man named Paul, the most famed interpreter of the Christ. He thought of Adam as so bound to the race, and the race as so bound to Adam, that the good of the one, or the evil of the one, was the good or evil of all; thought, too, of Christ as so bound to humanity, and humanity as so bound to Christ, that He represented, incarnated, contained it, that it lived, moved, acted through Him.

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His good was its; its good His. To serve Him was service of man; and every man He saved helped to sanctify humanity. And so Paul thought that by living for Christ he only the more lived for man. Το work for Him was not to work for transient reforms, or variable and imperfect policies, but for the ends of the Creator, the eternal purpose of God regarding To obey His law was not to be guided by the generalized experiences of the race, but to follow out the plan after which humanity had been built, that the mind of the Builder might be perfectly fulfilled. And he conceived his action and the action of every other individual as affecting not simply man and man's whole future, but also the immense universe that sleeps in the bosom of space, the principalities and powers in heavenly places that learn through the Church the manifold wisdom of God. That was an idea of related and interactive being such as never glimmered on the soul of Comte; and if Positivism says: "See how noble and humane our religion; it bids you worship and serve humanity as le Grand Être," we shall only make answer-"We have a grander and sublimer truth. To us humanity articulates the thought of God, and we worship God by serving man, according to the ideal of Him realized in Jesus Christ, who is 'the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.'

IV.

1. So much for Christ's ideal and the energies, all contained in and proceeding from Himself, that were to realize it. But the discussion of these questions has brought us to another-"How, or in what way, did