God. Jesus' path is very plain. His incarnation was simply the expression in time and space of God's eternal and infinite yearning toward His children. The salient point of Christ's character was His pitifulness. But it is to be noticed that it was pity for sin rather than pity for suffering. One should not miss the fact that His miracles of healing, and feeding the hungry, were incidental. He never regarded them as His chief work. He passed away from them to something else the instant He was able. His physical deeds of might were few, His moral miracles of healing were continuous. The sinner had an infinite attraction for Him as a sinner.

Now, it is not easy to imitate Him here. Two things are easy. The one is to have one's pity melted at the sight of suffering; the other is to blaze out in indignation at the sight of wrong being done. It is much easier, for instance, to pity Antonio, the easy-going fool who thoughtlessly imperiled a pound of his own flesh for no higher purpose than to furnish gewgaws for a feather-headed spendthrift, than to follow the mind of the poet, and give one's sympathy to Shylock. But Shylock it is who merits the pity. He was to be pitied because he was devoured by his own greed. He was to be pitied because he was outraged, despoiled of his goods, of the love of his daughter, the only pledge of his lost Leah; because he was blind and raging with anguish; because he was devouring his own soul.

When one sees a brutal, brutal, poverty-stricken mother beating her helpless child, one's indignation blazes out at the mother, and the pity goes out toward the child. Christ, however, would probably have judged in both cases differently. His pity would have gone to Shylock, who was the sinner, rather than to Antonio, who was the fool. It would have gone to the brutal mother, who was storing up for herself anguish for the years to come, rather than to the child, whose sufferings were physical and would be forgotten in an hour.

Again, it is easy to pity a whole class of offenders, any individual of whom would fill us with indignation and loathing. Many a man and woman is active in prison reform associations, Magdalene societies, in enterprises of all sorts which have for their object the betterment of a whole class of individuals, who would find it excessively difficult to enter into Christ's feeling toward the individuals which constitute the very class they are trying to benefit.

But the difficulties are to be overcome; they are not to be regarded as final. The path of the Christian is not hard to see, however difficult it is to be walked in. "To be grieved and worried with the burden of one's own sins" is only the starting place of a Christian pilgrimage. "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou

also be tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ."

Bear one another's burdens. The burdens here spoken of are moral burdens. The injunction is not primarily to lift off one's fellow the load of his poverty or the load of his pain, but, as far as may be, to lift from him the load of his sin and to lighten it by taking part of it upon one's own emotions. It is vastly easy to fall into cant here "Hate the sin and love the sinner," "Deal gently with the erring" and such commonplaces. These may be the expressions of a divine impulse, but they may also be the veriest rot. It is possible to hate the sin and to love the sinner, but it is not by any means the easy thing to do which the fat-witted moralist imagines. One must preserve his power to make moral discriminations. If he lose his capacity to recognize evil when he sees it, and fall into the way of thinking that there is, after all, but little difference between good and evil, he has diverged entirely from the pathway of Christ.

Bearing in mind this, then, how shall one act in the premises? The commonest method probably is to cast the sinner out of one's life altogether. He has been condemned by public opinion. She has been placed under the ban. What shall we do? We have his name quietly removed from the club books. We strike her name from our visiting list. So far as we have the power we cast him or her into outer darkness.

That is to say, we imitate the action of Christ sitting upon His judgment throne, rather than the action of Jesus going up and down doing good. It may be right to do so. There are cases where the condemnation of the Christian must be visited upon the sin and the sinner together. In these cases they are so bound together that there is no possibility of separating them. But such cases are rare, and, when they do occur, should be dealt with with the utmost charity.

The way of Jesus is the way of the physician. The doctor knows no disgusts. He sees and handles and experiences things from which the layman shrinks with horror. His instinct of healing overcomes his sensibility. "Let the same mind be in you, therefore, which was also in Christ." In another degree, of course, but "be ye like minded with Him.' As one comes into His spirit, little by little he becomes capable of dealing with the evil which is in the world. In the same degree that he comes into this spirit, the instinct of the sinner comes to recognize in him a friend to his person, while he is at the same time the stern judge of his sin. This divine combination of moral pity and moral indignation is the thing which has attracted the generations to the Master. It will also attract the individuals of each generation to the disciple, in proportion as he shows that the same mind is in him which was also in Christ.

XXXI.

SOME FELL AMONG THORNS.

"That which fell among thorns, are they, which, wben they bave beard, go forth, and are choked with the cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection."—Luke viii. 14.

THE biographer says that people from every city went out to hear Him. He sat in an elevated place and overlooked the crowd. His mind seems to have dwelt upon the thought: How will my teaching operate upon this mass of people? He thought of His teaching constantly as seed, but in the present instance he concerned himself not so much with the nature of the seed itself as with that of the soil upon which it should fall. Out of this thought arose the Parable of the Sower. This good seed scattered broadcast fell in all sorts of places and conditions. What would the harvest be? He recognized that the outcome would depend largely upon the soil itself. However good the seed might be, the nature of the ground had still to be considered. He saw then at the outset that much of his work would be thrown away altogether. Some fell upon the wayside. The seed found no lodgment. The birds of the