gent sympathy for men, while being at the same time the Son and transcript of Almighty God. It is with His humanity we have to deal to-day. He was the most humane of men. He was the most social of men. It is true that occasionally He went apart by Himself into a solitary place to commune with His Father in heaven, but He quickly returns to commune with His brothers. He was the most devoted of friends; He bound His friends to Himself. The only instance of anything like repining at His own lot was His pathetic lament that "the foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests," while the Son of Man has no home. Now, this intelligent sympathy with all human necessities becomes the more remarkable when you consider the narrow range of His own actual experiences. It was not by passing through all the experiences of human life that He learned what human life is. For instance, He was not a woman; He never was a father, nor a mother; He was never a husband, nor a lover, nor a man of business, nor a soldier. Experimentally He was ignorant of all the emotions and trials which spring out of these human relationships. Nor is it a sufficient answer to say He knew all these things "because He was divine." It was not because He was divine. That way of thinking, apparently simple as it is, is utterly unscriptural and empties the Incarnation of all its meaning. Being absolutely the Son of Man, in this fact He

rests His right to judge men, and the apostle declares that His judgment will be accurate, for that it will be based upon a knowledge of all the facts.

I ask you now to note the bearing of this truth upon the estimate of human nature. The best sample, because the truest example, of human nature that has ever been was Jesus Christ. This fact has been obscured by a curious theological dogma which has separated the Man Christ from natural human nature. It has vilified human nature, and has not hesitated to declare that it is totally depraved. It is hard to say how such a charge can be brought against human nature without savoring of blasphemy. Christ was not ashamed of His race. He even goes so far as to attribute His qualities to the nature which He shared with all men.

With an equal right to the title, Son of God, He habitually put it to one side and spoke of Himself as the Son of Man. It would seem to be that He felt the necessity of saving men from their low opinions of themselves. He wished to lift them up into higher things by inspiring them in advance with a confidence in the possibilities of their own nature. He identified Himself so completely with men that He takes as a personal kindness the proffer of a cup of cold water to the most abject of human beggars.

It may be objected, "If He so completely represents humanity, why was He not recognized

by them for what He was? Why was He dėspised, rejected, and driven out?" I reply, He was not rejected by human nature; He was rejected by something which in its very essence is inhuman. That something is sin. The teaching of Scripture from beginning to end is that sin is not natural, but unnatural. It is not part of human nature. It can be rooted out without damaging the human structure. It is an abnormal growth, a fungus. It has by right no place in humanity at all. And this is humanity's own judgment of the situation. Why is it that Christendom has passed the stern and relentless condemnation which it has passed upon the Jews? It has condemned them because it has pronounced them false to their own kind. Their offense was not primarily that they rejected God, but that they did not know what man is when they had an opportunity to see. Their offense was against humanity. Humanity has visited upon the race a vindictive, and even an inexcusable, penalty. But no one should mistake the reason for it.

The moral uplift of this principle is unspeakable. What He was we are capable of becoming. The whole process of practical Christianity is simply the attempt to remove obscurities from the soul of a natural man, to bring the overloaded, and therefore helpless, faculties of an individual up to "the measure of the stature of a perfect man in Christ." This should be set

about intelligently. Men in attempting to be this, should understand what they are doing. Hugh Miller observes somewhere, that when he was working with other stone cutters in a marble yard he discerned a fundamental difference among the workers. There were some of them, always poor workers, who approached the statue within the block by mechanical and unintelligent methods. There were others who seemed to have the faculty to discern within the block a statue complete and symmetrical. Every blow of the hammer of such a one was addressed simply to clearing away the rough marble which hid the figure. They saw the statue within and set about to free it. Their labor thus became economical and the result certain.

There is an image of God in every man. When a man "comes to himself" he shows himself to be a son of God. In the case of Jesus one sees a full and complete personality. It was given to Him alone to hold fast with one hand to the Eternal God, while He laid the other in benediction upon the fevered brow of men.

XXXV.

SOWING AND REAPING.

"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall be also reap.”—GALATIANS Vi. 7.

ST. PAUL here uses what appears to be a very simple metaphor until one attempts to unfold it and see what it implies. He then discerns the tremendous truth which it contains. There is nothing more familiar than the phenomena of sowing and reaping. The husbandman flings a handful of grain upon the upturned soil and then goes about his business. The gardener dibbles a hole and drops a seed in, and, for the present, that is the end of it. But both the farmer and the gardener unconsciously trust to the operation of two of the most wonderful and inscrutable forces in nature. The first of these is that curious power which lodges in nature herself, which seizes hold upon the seed that has been intrusted to it and compels it to grow. Nature receives the bare grain at the hands of the farmer. She does the rest herself. By a curious and secret method of coercion she compels the seed to unfold integument after integument. She urges the little germ at the center to vegetate and sprout. Her rains fall upon it, her dews