support of our souls should we have lost, had this been so! We are not only told briefly that he took our nature upon him, that he lived upon earth for more than thirty years: but we are made, in a manner, the witnesses of his birth, the companions of his ripened manhood: we may go about with him to the synagogue, through the streets, into houses; we may sit down with him at the table, and journey with him in the roads; we may stand by him amidst the assembled multitudes in Jerusalem, and go with him to the desert places, where he spent the night in prayer after the day had been spent in charity. Nor are we told simply, as of his servant Moses, that he died in the mount according to the word of the Lord; but death, in all its character, is shown as assailing him. We may see how the image of it affected his mind. when distant, and how it affected him when near. We see him, if I may so speak, on the most gradual death-bed of the gentlest disease, when the mind, fully alive to the certainty of its fate, collects its faculties, undisturbed by pain, unclouded by the wanderings of weakness, to receive its awful change. This we witness in his conversation with his disciples on the evening on which he was

betrayed; but because he knew that few of the children of men die thus peacefully, but that the passage is mostly amidst pains and fears, many times amidst indifference and unkindness, sometimes amidst hatred hatred and scorn,-it was his will that we should also see how he bore himself amidst all these. We see him forsaken; we see him insulted; we see him enduring the extremity of bodily pain; we see him, and it is the divinest mercy of all, suffering the extremity of inward trouble, of desolateness, and fear. We see him in all these, and we see him triumph over them all and we hear him, when all were overpast, giving up his spirit into the hands of God, to show that, "in all things we, too, may be more than conquerors through him who loved us."

The book in which we may read this is in our hands, and we can use it when we will. It hardly matters what particular chapter of the Gospels we open, for Christ's life is in every part of it more or less our pattern. Some may possibly be puzzled how this can be, when there are so many points of difference between him and us. For, not to speak of smaller differences, of time and place, and therefore of habits of living, is it not a great

difference that Christ went about from place to place, with no other business than to instruct the people and to cure their sicknesses, while we, for the most part, have a fixed home of our own, and are not, and cannot be, engaged either in teaching or in healing diseases, but have each of us our own regular business. It is so; and therefore Christ's example is so much the more needed. Is there one of us who might not apply to himself Christ's words: "I must work the work of Him who sent me while it is day: the night cometh when no man can work?" Now it is the principle here contained which is the great matter of example. There are many of us who perform one part of what is here said well enough; many who work while it is day, because they know that the night is coming; many, in other words, who are not slothful or idle, but working industriously in their calling, and knowing that time once lost cannot be recalled. Now these persons should learn of Christ to fulfil his words altogether; not only to "work while it is day," but to look upon their work as "the work of Him who sent them." For so it is, let its nature be what it will the work of our calling, whatever it be, is the work of God; and the words of Christ

apply to whatever is the business of our lives, as well as to that especial work which was the particular business of his. But this we need to remember, and for this very purpose Christ's life is so useful to us. For we see that God was constantly in his thoughts; that the desire of his life was to do God's will. He mixed with other men freely, but he never forgot whose he was, and whose work he had to do. But we do forget it constantly; we think that our work is our own work, and will bring with it its earthly fruit; we rise up to it early, and we late take rest; but it may be that, except a few short prayers in the morning, and a few more at evening, nothing has recalled to us the thought of our heavenly Master, no part of our work has been hallowed by being done in his name.

And what is the consequence? This goes on day after day, and week after week, and our eyes and thoughts are fixed alike upon things visible and earthly. This gives the colour to our minds; all our impressions come from the things around us; the things of another world become utterly strange to us. Now things with which we are not familiar are slow in winning our belief; it does not follow that we should believe them to be false,

but their very strangeness will not let us fully receive them and enter into them as true. Any wonderful story belonging to a subject which we have not very often thought about seems incredible to us; because we do not know what there is to make that which seems so wonderful agreeable in reality to truth and reason. And so it is, above all, with the truths concerning God and Christ. If we keep them generally out of our minds, our belief in them waxes fainter and fainter; we all know how vague and powerless is the fear of God's judgments to restrain us, when the temptation is strong to indulge in our own ways and desires. It is powerless, because it comes across our minds as a sort of stray thought, and finds nothing in our habitual views and notions ready to entertain and sympathize with it. Our hearts say with Pharaoh, "Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice?" We may well ask, for we, in fact, do not know him. Who is the Lord? Try and think of him as a spirit, as one who has neither beginning nor end; who is every where, yet with no bodily form. Think of him in this way, and can we find him out by searching? Nay, he is, and will be, for ever hidden; they are but words with which we deceive ourselves,