of one who had once been rich. He was rich once—with an amplitude of wealth we cannot comprehend. He needed not ever to have been poor. Stones would have turned into bread at a word from Him. But for our sakes He became poor, and remained poor, that we through His poverty might become rich.

2. Again, there was a temptation to use His supernatural power. He had taken the resolution neither to court danger in reliance upon superhuman power, nor needlessly to free Himself from it. And we find instances of this in the sequel. For example, when His enemies sought to kill Him, He quietly departed. He did not suffer them to touch Him. And how merciful was this, for, had they touched Him before the time, they would have fallen dead as they did who profanely handled the ark of God. No one could take His life from Him; but when His time came, He surrendered Himself to the human wills that so blindly destroyed Him. But until then He was safe; yet not safe by undue use of His divine power. When Peter took Him aside, and said, "Be it far from Thee, Lord: this shall not be unto Thee," He replied, "Get thee behind me, Satan," treating the words of the apostle as another suggestion of the baffled spirit.

3. Again, He rejected a false Messiahship, accordant with the worldly spirit of Judaism, in favor of an inward kingdom to be developed by the power of the divine Spirit. All the kingdoms of the world, and all the glory of them, were to be His at last, but He would not grasp His sceptre too soon. When they sought to make Him a king by force, He left them and went into solitude. It was better to be alone than to be the creature of such creatures. He would not please His disciples by taking a temporal kingship, which they should share in Jerusalem. He becomes King by dying. His cross is His throne. His cross was at once the intense superlative of all temptations and the final answer to the tempter. When He died, His feet like fine brass bruised the head of the great enemy of mankind.

In conclusion, we do not forget that He had to wrestle with the evil one at the end. The struggle was one of peculiar intensity. He was tried by pain, as He had been aforetime by pleasure. His consistency was tested by agony of body and mind. But as He had overcome the tempter at the first, so He overcame him at the last. Still this does not lead us to forget that He Himself describes the space between the wilderness temp

tation and the temptation at the end as "my temptations." Not "my sorrows," "my difficulties," "my pains," but "my temptations." His virtue was not cloistered and untried. It was subjected to the hottest fire of the struggle, and came out unscathed. He was victorious in the end; and yet how significant it is, that when He describes His life, it should come before Him as "my temptations "!1

1 See Note C.

CHAPTER VI.

The Object and Claims of Christ.

"This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners."

"He did not come to judge the world, He did not come to blame;

He did not only come to seek,—it was to save He came: And when we call Him Saviour, then we call Him by His

name."

DORA GREENWELL.

HE object of Christ was defined in different

THE

ways by Himself, but ultimately is perhaps most fully expressed in the saying: "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." In the apostolic Church the saying was current in this form: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." Who first expressed it so we cannot tell. Like many of the most beautiful things and thoughts, it is the work of an unknown soul. It immediately found welcome, and was passed from mouth to mouth, and lodged in memory after memory. At last the apostle took it up and indorsed it with his

authority, declaring it to be a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation. We take it as an infallible guide in teaching us the purpose of the eternal God, entering into time and submitting to the bonds of flesh.

1

The description of man, as lost, claims our attention first. Lost means lost to God. God had lost man, and He was grieved by the loss,-how deeply grieved we should not have dared to imagine, had not the Saviour Himself explained it in three of His most touching parables. Man was missed by God as a shepherd misses one sheep out of a hundred -as a woman misses one silver piece out of a little hoard of ten; or, to put it more adequately, as a father misses his younger son in a house where there are but two. Man's fall is God's loss. In another aspect man's fall is man's sin. The sin of man in wandering from God is depicted in the very darkest hues. It is a mark of a revelation from God that it does not extenuate the guilt of sin, or minimize the awfulness of its consequences. He who came to save sinners was He who spake the most terrible things of sin. Further, this wandering from God

The small intrinsic value makes the emblems a better type of the despised publicans and sinners.