On the Emotional Life of Man

We say that life is made up of joy and pain. But it is not really so. At least, when we

speak in those words, we are talking of life only in its most superficial sense. Joy and pain are the expressions of life, but not life itself, not its true substance. Far down beneath them both lie the real processes of which they try to tell the tale. And even the tale they try to tell they 7 cannot tell with certainty. The same essential life which makes one man happy makes another man sad. And so even as symptoms they perpetually mislead us. If I am really trying to get at the quality of a man’s living, it means very little to me at first to know that he is a happy man. -I must know a great deal more about him before I can make any use of the fact that he is happy. And when we are trying to test not the quality of another man’s life but the quality of our own, all of us who are thoughtful discover very early that happiness or unhappiness may mean very much or very little, that there is a consciousness underneath sorrow and joy into which we must penetrate, in which we must live, before we can know our true lives. And yet it is by joy and pain that lives mostly communicate with one another. The man who lacks emotion lacks expression. That which is in him remains within him, and he cannot utter it or make it influential And on the other hand the man who lacks emotion lacks receptiveness. That which other men are, if it does

not make him glad or sorry, if it gives him neither joy nor pain, does not become his. The emotion of lives is the magnetism that they emit, something closely associated with their substance and yet distinct from it, in which they communicate with one another. There is a condition conceivable in which the emotions should be so delicately and perfectly true to the quality of the lives from which they issue that they should furnish a perfect medium of communication. That would be a state of existence

—< in which truth and goodness should inevitably shine forth in gladness from the man who was true and good, and should instantly be answered in gladness from every other man on whom they struck, The poet sings, — “Serene shall be our days, and bright And happy shall our nature be,

When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own security.”

The prophecy declares itself not yet fulfilled. It is a noble, truthful condition for which we are waiting. Until it comes he who would find life must look behind joy and sorrow, and, while He questions them, can never let their answers pass unchallenged, must always cross-question and examine them, and see what this especial joy or sorrow means.

I am to speak to-day about the influence of Jesus through joy and sorrow, — the way, that is, in which the life that was in Him came forth from Him through His evident happiness and. suffering, and entered into other men through the happiness and suffering that He awoke in them. It is the study of a subtle history, a crowded with pathetic interest, which is going

on through all these years of the Gospels. As

I took up the subject it seemed to me to be necessary that I should say first of all what I have said, that both in Jesus and in those who come under His influence there is something behind the suffering and happiness in which they meet each other, and that the happiness and suffering are but the light or the aroma which come from the life behind. “Can ‘any connection be traced between the chemical nature of a substance, or the conditions under

which it burns, and the nature of the light

which it emits?” That is the statement of one of the most interesting problems which natural science has met in this day of its many triumphs, the problem whose study has led on to the spectrum analysis and all its wonders.

Can any true connection be reliably traced between the way that a man lives and the joy —

or sorrow that his life emits? That is the cor-

responding question in moral science for which no man has yet devised its spectroscope, but which, as it finds its solution more and more, must deepen a hundred-fold the intercourse of man with man and man’s understanding of himself.

What, then, was it that lay behind the phenomena of pleasure and pain in Jesus? First of all, no doubt, experience, the simple doing ‘of acts and undergoing of contacts, without regard to the emotions they produced. It is a striking fact that many of the words which, in long use of them, have become exclusively appropriated to faz originally belonged simply to experience without reference to whether it brought distress or pleasure. The old Greek and Latin words from which our words for suffering come simply meant “to undergo,” and were used of the contact with happy as well as with unhappy things. It was to touch and be touched by the furniture of the great crowded world. And even our English words which are stained all through with the associations of pain, the very word “suffering” itself, and “patience” and “submission” and that hard word “bear,” — they all essentially mean nothing but experience. It is something taken on the

back and carried, but that may be either a burden under which the bent back groans, or an inspiration and delight under which the shoulders leap and grow buoyant as the proud mother’s arms do, when she carries her first-born child. Is it not a sign that human misery overweighs human joy, or at least a sign that men have come to think that there is far more of pain than of happiness to be suffered in the world, that the words of experience have come to be words of sadness, as if the touch of life must wound us all and make us sore? At any rate, the history of such words bears witness that there is a conception of experience back of pain and pleasure, in a region where the conception of them has not yet been born, that the life, which shows itself in enjoyment or distress, consists in the actions and contacts out of which the enjoyment or distress proceeds. And so our first step is to trace the real influential life of Jesus back into the actual experiences of His life. It is not essentially because He was happy or was sad that He has such power over men to-day. It is because of what He did.

It is because of His part in our human lot and the way in which He bore that part. If He had borne pain somewhere else, in some region of transcendental experience which we could not understand, whatever mysterious power might have been attributed to that pain in influencing the currents of the universe and its government, it never could have come to any direct influence upon the hearts and lives of men. And on the other hand, if it had been possible for Him to live our life and share our lot completely and yet have known no pain, have passed in sunny joy from Bethlehem to Olivet, His life would still have been the influential power of the world. That was not possible. To live a life like His in such a world as ours, by a deep inevitable necessity involved the pain. The cross was the predestined seal on that experience. But yet the experience is separable from the pain, and it was in the experience, not in the pain, that the true life abode.

This is the first step backward. But we cannot rest here. The mere experiences which make up any man’s career cannot really constitute his life. They are too incoherent. Our histories are not our lives. The idea of life is unity. Experiences are manifold. Underneath their superficial variety they must find unity in some controlling law. They have no character save what they get from it; and without character there is no true life. The next step back, then, in the true life of Jesus is to the law which lies behind the experiences, in which must rest the reason and the meaning of His going hither and thither and meeting this and that man, — now up to Jerusalem, now down to Galilee, now sitting arguing with Nicodemus, now pouring out His heart to His disciples, now in calm dignity replying to the taunts of*the Pharisees. His own conception of the law of life is clear enough. ‘‘My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me,” He once said. It) was God’s will, not His own choice, not their own fitness, not even directly the good of the

men about Him, that made him do the acts and incur the contacts that filled up His days.

.. bd; God willed these things. That was the unity )

in which all His experiences found their con- sistency. That was the soil in which their roots were set, from which they drew their nourish- ment. That, in the deeper meaning, was His life; the Law by which He lived, the will of God.

And yet there is another step. <A law is not the final life. It cannot be. Law is external, but life is something which must fill every inmost part of a man’s being. It must think in his brain, throb in his heart, and make the will leap like a resolute muscle to its task. A law cannot do that. It is not intimate enough. That must be done by something which is part of the man himself, something that is his own, some form in which the world outside himself has passed into his being and given itself to him, some conception which is a fountain of force and inspiration. Now, all that can only be fulfilled in some controlling and inspiring idea, some idea or conception which, taking possession of the intelligence, has then set fire to the affections, and so possesses the whole man. When you get back to that you can go back no farther. Here, then, we are, where we have started in each of our lectures. Here we are, once again at the idea of Jesus, That idea, as I conceive it, as I am sure you know by this time that I conceive it, is the fatherhood of God to man, to be made known by Jesus to mankind through the clear manifestation of His own sonship to God. Ideas make for themselves laws by their own inherent and divine creativeness. The law which Christ’s sonship to God makes is obedience to God. The way in which Christ’s obedience to God enters into Him and becomes more than a rule of action, becomes the very element in which He lives, is by its being perpetually fastened to, perpetually fed out of, His idea that He was the Son of God. In that idea, that fundamental conception of His mind, that fundamental affection of His soul, you find at last what you have been seeking, His real life. You can go back no farther. You have laid your hand upon the Man of the Gospels, where His being becomes one with the uncaused Existence of eternity. At last you have found the true life of Jesus.

I think that it is like that marvel and mystery of nature, so familiar and yet so strange, so perpetually repeated in our sight and yet so far away from the apprehension of anything in us save our imagination, — the wonder that fills the woods and will burst forth between the very bricks of city streets, — the ever old, ever new mystery of the growing and flowering of a plant. The flower opens on the stalk; but the flower is not the life, for you may pluck it off leaf by leaf, and the plant still lives. The stalk builds its strong fibre; but its fibres are not life, for they may all be perfect and the plant be dead. The hungry roots reach out into the fertile ground; but the roots are not life, only wonderful channels to bear the life that has been given them. Not — until you see the earth give itself to the plant,

and, turning into sap, send itself through the wait- 2 ing veins until it flushes into color far up in the air, — not until then have you gone back where you can go back no farther, and really found the life. So here is the perfect flower of the life of Jesus. It is the blood-red flower of the cross. Is that pain life? Surely not. The thief beside him bears pain too, and we can call it only death. Is life, then, the experience that brings the pain? The injustice of the rulers, the mocking of the people, the brutality of the soldiers, — is that His life? No, surely not. The deadest soul might have encountered all of these experiences. Is it, then, that deep compulsion that lay underneath it all? Is it that necessity which has been on Him all His days that He should do His Father’s will, that compulsion which has brought Him to the cross? Not yet have we attained

the life, for mere obedience may be mere death.

But behind all there lies the idea of Jesus, that God is His Father, and that He may make these men know that He is their Father too. When that is touched, behold the miracle! See how the dry roots of obedience fill themselves with love; see how the hard stalk of experience grows soft and pliable with purpose; and then see how the flower of pain utters a life profoundly deeper than itself, and tells the world that story which it is the struggle of all pain and pleasure in the career of Christ to tell, which all healthy pain or pleasure in the career of man is tempting him to learn, — of man’s unbroken sonship to his Father, of the belonging of his soul to the soul of God.

I have dwelt long upon this analysis of the real seat of influential life in Jesus, because only by understanding this can we truly understand the position and meaning which He would give to suffering and enjoyment in His life or in ours, I trust that the importance of what I have been saying will appear as I goon. It will be enough at present to suggest as the principle which governs all Christ’s treatment of these phenomena of life that in His thought of them they are phenomena. They are not essential, they are accidental. Consequently they are neither to be sought nor shunned, but to be accepted as they come, with a welcome which goes below them and deals with the conditions out of which they spring. Jesus always thinks of Himself as undergoing the will of God, because God is His Father. The pain and pleasure which come to Him in undergoing that will come not simply with their own inherent qualities of comfort or — discomfort, but with the values which they get from that obedience of which they are the signs and consequences. This is the key to all His attitude towards them. And of this principle all the special study to which we now proceed will be in illustration.

Our subject properly divides itself into two parts: 1. What is the position and meaning of enjoyment and sorrow in the life of Jesus? 2. What is the position and meaning of enjoyment and sorrow in the life of His disciples? It is once more a Biblical study in which we are to engage, and the ground over which we are to range is the rich field of the four Gospels.

I ask you to recall as simply as you can, as much as possible as if you read it for the first time, the story of the life of Jesus. One of the things which, if we can do that, will, I think, impress us most, will be the constant presence of the emotions of pleasure and of pain in the experience of Him whose history we are reading, whose person in those graphic pages stands before us. We shall have occasion in a few moments to go over in detail the series of special instances; but just now remember merely the general impression which the story makes. It is a country with an atmosphere. Clouds and sunshine are playing across its surface all the time. The actual features of the varied landscape are always changing their aspect with the light that falls upon them. The special events which happen have an additional character as they lie in the light or in the shade. What a landscape would be which had no atmosphere above it, which received no shadow and no sunlight on it, that would a life be which was made up of events but knew no emotions. A dreadful place! Hills, valleys, oceans, rivers, fields, all perfect, all grouped with one another in completest symmetry, but all bathed in one monotonous, unchanging light; all the same every day and every hour; no soft transitions from the solemn gloom into the happy brilliance, none of that change of smile and frown with one another that makes us feel the fitness when we talk about the “face of nature”! A dreadful world! A world in which no character could grow, no manhood ripen. The life of Jesus shows us no such world as that. It is changing every moment with the light and shade. A sensitiveness whose quickness to impressions we feel almost painfully trembles in every line. Only — and here is where the principles which I have just been stating show their influence in His life — Jesus, with all His sensitiveness to pain and joy, still

never allows pain or joy to be either the purpose

of life or the test of life with Him. The country, to renew our figure, is bright with sunshine or serious with shadow, and gets its ever-changing beauty from their constant alternation; but it never sets itself to work to make the clouds whose shadows are to rest upon it, nor does it judge its landscape by the special gloom or glory which is cast on it at any moment. So, to speak not in figure, the sensitiveness of Jesus to pain and joy never leads Him for a moment to try to be sad or happy with direct endeavor; nor is there any sign that He ever judges the real character of Himself or any other man by the sadness or the happiness that for the moment covers His life. He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from His living, and cast their brightness and their gloominess back upon His life; but there is no sorrow and no joy that He ever sought for itself, and He always kept a self-knowledge underneath

the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment’s happiness or unhappiness. They were like ripples on the surface of the stream, made by its flow, and, we are ready to imagine, enjoyed by the stream that made them, not sought by the stream for themselves, nor ever obscuring the stream’s consciousness of its deeper currents. The supreme sorrow of the cross was never sought because it was sorrowful, and even while

“He hung in agony it never obscured the certainty

of His own holiness in the great Sufferer’s soul. These are the perpetual characteristics of the emotional life of Jesus, which our theology has often conjured out of sight, but which are of unspeakable value, as I think; for a clear understanding of them puts the Man who suffered and enjoyed more than any other man that ever lived in a noble and true relation to His suffering and joy, and makes His pain and pleasure a gospel to men in their sadness and their gladness everywhere.

I turn to a more minute examination of the illustrations of this. The pleasures and sufferings of Jesus lie in three different classes, and each of them demands our careful study.

The first class is composed of those which belonged to His physical nature, — those which could not have come to Him, which could not come to any man, except through the medium of a human body. It is good to see how manifold these joys and sorrows are. They begin in that strange, half-conscious life of infancy, where it is always so hard to estimate pleasure and pain, where it is so hard to tell what value to give to a cry that issues from an infant’s lips or a smile that plays across his face. And yet the pain and delight of childhood we know are realities, inextricably snarled in with the first possession of a mortal body which breathes the breath of this alert and exacting world. The poverty and privation of the inn at Bethlehem and the forced and hurried journey into Egypt are instances of what I mean. They are not events on which we need to dwell. What they were to Jesus we cannot tell. They touch the outmost rim of the capacity of pain; but they open the way, for what comes afterwards. They declare what life is going to mean to this new mortal who has come into its power. They are the first few notes, not clearly intelligible in themselves, but giving us the key in which the opening life is to be lived. But as soon as the dim thicket of infancy opens into the clear path of manly life it becomes apparent that all the spiritual experiences of Jesus have an almost unexampled association with His physical life. Very few men’s souls are so bound in with their bodies as was His with the frame He wore. At the very outset of His public career, when His self-understanding was gathering itself up for the work He had to do, He went away into the desert and was tempted. What happened there is at once one of the most mysterious and one of the most intelligible passages in the life of Jesus. To any man who has been young, who has faced life, who has listened while many voices called him to turn aside into plausible paths, and the one great voice of the God of Duty called him right onward to whatever might await him, — to every such man the essential meaning of the Temptation is beyond all doubt. At the same time its special scenery and action is very vague. Material fact and impalpable vision shoot through each other and cannot be unsnarled. But this, at least, is plain, — the body shared in the experience. Long, painful hunger went before the spiritual trial, and it is out of lips at once weak and tense with physical exhaustion that the pattern answers of all tempted souls proceed. By and by came another event which brings something of the same confusion of the mysterious and the intelligible. Jesus goes up into another mountain, and is transfigured. Indeed, in many respects this story belongs beside the story of the Temptation. The two mountains are the complements of one another. As the Temptation was the typical utterance of the perplexed conditions of human living, so the Transfiguration was the irrepressible utterance of the essential glory of human nature filled with divinity, reclaimed and openly asserted to be the Son of God. And in the Transfiguration, as in the Temptation, the body has its share. Not merely does the soul enjoy sublime converse with God and with the past. A sweet and awful gladness shines out from the face and hands, and

even pierces from the hidden limbs through the coarse garments which shine “white as the light.” I do not know the meaning of it all, but I know that what came to the spiritual came in some echo to the physical, and the body shared the gladness of the soul. And when we turn the page again and look into Gethsemane, the same completeness of the human life is there. “Being in an agony, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood.” However it may be swathed about and purified and glorified by the suffering of the consecrated soul, there was physical pain there in the Garden on the night before the cross. The next day came the cross itself, and the struggle of the devoutest souls with themselves has always been to keep the sight of the body’s agony from monopolizing all their pity, and hiding from their sight the nobler and deeper suffering of the tortured spirit of the Crucified. In all of these scenes, is it not striking to see how the body bore the spirit company, how there came no spiritual delight or misery but that the physical chords were struck and could be heard sounding through the finer

and more subtle music?

Again, it is not possible for one who really wants to know the sort of life that Jesus lived to turn away indifferently from what the people said about Him who used to see Him every day. Morning by morning, night by night, He went about those strange old streets where men looked at Him curiously, exactly as we should look at any wondrous life that came and set itself in the familiar framing of these streets which we know so well. All the more, often, because they had no keen spiritual sympathy with Him, the outward life which He lived photographed itself upon their watchful observation. They were like reporters, not like disciples, and so their superficial account of what He did was perhaps all the more true. What did they say? One day He told them what He had often overheard: “The Son of man is come eating and drinking, and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man and awine-bibber.” Coarse, brutal, full of hostile caricature, no doubt the words are; but still they give us the sort of picture which we would like to have, from his foe’s pencil, of any man whom we desired to know. At least there must be an indication in what direction His life was lived. No man with callous, stolid body, that could not suffer and could not enjoy, could ever have been taunted with that peculiar tone of mockery.

But there is something else in Jesus that always gives me a profound and vivid sense of how that human body which He wore was full of the capacity of suffering, and of how large a part of His total experience its emotions made. The fear of death, or rather, perhaps, the fear of dying, is something almost wholly physical. I know it is not conscience, — it is not the dread of meeting, as we feebly say, a God with whom she has lived in tenderest and most trusting communion for these forty years, — I know it is not these that make a true, pure saint turn white-cheeked and tremble when you go and tell her that she is to die. ‘The emotion really has its birth where you behold its symptoms, in the body. It is the flesh that shrinks from the thought of dissolution with as truly a physical instinct as that with which the finger draws back from the knife that pricks it. Now through the Gospels there runs, almost from the beginning, a Via Dolorosa whose stones you can almost feel still tremble under the feet of Jesus walking to His more and more clearly realized death. One day at Caesarea Philippi we can begin to trace it first. “From that day forth began Jesus to shew unto His disciples how that He must suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed.” Then down in Galilee, “Jesus said unto them, The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men, and they shall kill Him.” Then, on the way up to the city where the cross was waiting, “Behold we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of man shall be betrayed, and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles to crucify Him.” It is a horror that belongs to a man whose body loves to live. “If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” It was the

cup of death, long watched and waited for, at

last felt pressing with its cold rim on the lips. “It is finished.” It was the same cup, drained at last, and the body giving itself over to the peace of death which lay on the other side of the dreadfulness of dying.

It is an unnatural, a somehow unhumanized eye that does not find these signs of the physical sensibility of Jesus scattered all through the Gospels. A poor sick woman crawls up and lays her finger on His garment’s hem. Instantly He turns and asks, “Who touched Me?” He has felt her finger through the sensitive body and the sensitive soul together. Who can picture the pain and pleasure which always must have been beating into His nature through the sensitive substance of a body such as that?

But there is another region in which the physical conditions are unmistakably active, while it yet lies close on the borders of the purely spiritual being. Into that region we must follow Jesus before we can understand all the susceptibility to pain and joy that was bound up with the body that He wore. It is the region in which man feels the influences of external nature, and gathers delight or sorrow, is exalted or depressed, by the touches of the world around him. How wide and rich that region is in the best and completest men, all of us know; and I do not believe that any one can consider the way in which Jesus treated the world of nature, and especially can read His parables, without being sure that He lived in that region and was open to its influences always. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,” He cried, as they walked together, treading the autumnal crocus under foot. “Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest.” So He caught the picture of His truth as He sat-by the well at Sichem and gazed down the bright open valley that leads toward Jerusalem. “When it is evening ye say, Fair weather, for the sky is red; and in the morning, Foul weather to-day, for the sky is red and lowering.” So the influence of the sky overhead flowed down into His teaching. And in one parable — so short, so perfect, the exquisite jewel among the parables — all the work that He was doing, all the promise of God for humanity, shone out in the picture which had sunk into His soul in countless quiet walks through peaceful fields. “So is the kingdom of God as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow he knoweth not how.’ In all these there is pleasure. Joy comes in through the quick, delighted eyes, and runs through all the physical frame, which is part of that natural beauty to which it responds, — a joy that interprets to the healthy man the happiness of the happy brutes, as there is another joy that gives him some understanding of the bliss of God.

“How good is man’s life, the mere living; how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in

joy! 2 This is the joy that sings itself under the deep lessons of the parables, like the music under the pathos of a hymn, or the tingle of blood under the solemn consecration of the soldier who rushes to the fight.

And now what is the meaning of this sensi: bility to pain and pleasure which belonged to His body? What did it mean to Jesus? It is not hard to read. It is a witness of the completeness of human life in Him. Pure health it is which answers instantly to external physical conditions with their appropriate reply. True healthiness is always sensitive. To go into any

Gethsemane and not to feel the body sympathize with the soul, is not completeness but meagreness of life. To stand where food is spread before us and either morosely to hate it or greedily to clutch it, both are morbid. Both the ascetic and the glutton are self-conscious. The true human being forgets the body, not because the body is detached and cast away, but because the body is doing its work perfectly, — as the passenger on the great ship forgets the engine only because the engine’s healthy pulse has become part and parcel of his shipboard life.

And again, the physical sensibility of Jesus bore testimony to the condition of the world He dwelt in. How wonderfully interesting it becomes in this regard! The perfect health registers disorder by its pain as truly as it proclaims and praises order by its happiness. And here was Jesus, standing with His representative human body in this manifold and complicated world. How will the world utter itself on Him? Behold, now a quick pain leaps through Him as He treads on some serpent in the way; now a sweet joy” falls through the body on the spirit, as the breath of heaven blows upon His cheek. Pain and joy, joy and pain, in quick succession! What shall we say? What can we say, but that here in the centre of the Bible the philosophy that runs through the Bible, the philosophy which makes man the centre and registering test of nature, comes to its perfection? The Old Testament ° had told of how nature to obedient man had been all good; how nature to man disobedient had declared its sympathy in thorns and thistles and angry beasts. The New Testament was to tell of a whole creation groaning and travailing, waiting for the redemption of the human body. Here in the midst of Scripture stands the sensitive body of the Son of Man, fully in the present lot of His brother men; and to Him the mottled world, the world that was God’s child, and yet was full of selfishness and sin, the world whose name, as He Himself gave it, was the Prodigal Son, — a son, but prodigal; prodigal, yet a son, — to Him this mingled world declared itself in mingled pain and pleasure, and wrote the story of its own condition in what He suffered and enjoyed.;

And yet once more. The physical sensitiveness of Jesus no doubt helped, as no other medium could have helped, that deep, mysterious process, the development of the self-consciousness of Jesus. Why should I not believe that out of the physical difficulties which tore His hands He plucked the full flower of His knowledge of His own soul, and, wrapped up at the heart of that, His knowledge of the soul of His Father? Why should I not believe that His gratitude for the pure joy of physical living was one of the doors through which He entered into the complete sense of how His soul’s life issued from and belonged to God? That which is the

sign of any condition always, by a subtle law,

deepens and ripens and confirms that condition. And so when Jesus said to Pilate, who was threatening Him with the physical pain of crucifixion, “Thou couldst have no power at all against Me except it were given thee from above,” it was not merely a testimony that He felt already the holding of His soul in His Father’s everlasting hand, it was also a nestling of the soul yet more deeply and tenderly into the hollow of the hand that held it.

This was what the succession of physical pain and pleasure meant to Jesus. It was the witness of His complete human life; it was the register of the disordered world; and it was the instrument for the development of His spiritual consciousness. And now have we not the answer to our second question upon this first point? What did He intend that pain and joy should mean to His disciples? These same three things, no doubt. Think of the times when He distinctly recognized the susceptibilities of their bodily life. Once on the Sabbath day he walked through a cornfield, and the hungry men plucked the ripe ears and rubbed them in their hands and ate them. Jesus said, “The Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath.” MHis recognition of human nature and its needs lay behind the positive institution which He did not dishonor. Even in Gethsemane the tired friends who were keeping Him company fell asleep; and it was only with the wonder of one who for the moment was out of the power or hope of rest that He dropped His gentle reproach upon them. When the crowd - followed Him across the lake, He was as quick to see their starved faces as He was to read their sinful hearts. “I have compassion upon the multitude,” He said, “because they continue with Me now three days and have nothing to eat.” It is simply to Him the sign that they are men. He touches the fact of their humanity in helping them, and that seems to give Him joy. The same appeared when men came to Him and complained that His disciples were not ascetics like the disciples of John. “Why do the disciples of John fast often, but Thine eat and drink?” “Can ye make the children of the bridechamber fast while the bridegroom is with them?” He replied. That physical pleasure should be the accompaniment of spiritual joy, He accepted as part of the harmony of the universe.

Nor is it less true that Jesus accepted the pain of other men, like His own pain, as an utterance of the condition of the world in which they all were living together. When, as He put His fingers in the deaf man’s ears and looked up to heaven before He gave the poor creature hearing, He sent a sigh up with the prayer, it must have been that He felt through this one crack the

oat whole tumult of the disturbed creation in which all deformity and suffering had their deep roots. And we may almost turn at random to His miracles: see Him with the nobleman who came from Capernaum to Cana, cultivating his faith at the same time that He cured his son; stand with Him in the boat and see Him send calm into the tempest and into His disciples’ frightened hearts at once; look across the stormy water and see Him lift Peter out of the waves and out of his doubt at the same time, — to recognize how He always used the body’s sensibilities to develop the soul’s consciousness, how by physical pain and joy He helped the spirit to know itself and to know its Father.

To Jesus, and to His disciples, and to all men who know the bodily life as He knew it and taught them to know it, the pain and happiness of which the human body is capable must be very noble messages. When I suffer or when I enjoy, — when down these nerves the quick agony shoots and leaves me trembling like a poor tree which the blast has shivered, or when through the healthy blood peace runs like the sunlight on a flowing river, — when, in the aggregate of life, beneath affections, thoughts, dreams, memories, desires, there is always felt this human body with its pangs and blisses, what a noble meaning there is in it all as it lies open to the influence of Jesus! “Lo,Iamhuman!” And all the dignity and pathos of humanity surrounds me. “Behold in what a disturbed and struggling world I live!” And hope and fear, — twin captains of the soul, — patience and expectation, spring to life. “See here, touching this very flesh of mine, the fingers of the hand whose heart is my Father’s,” and through the passions which the body feels opens a way into the deepest woes and loftiest pleasures, which can belong only to the sons of God.

I must pass on to the joys and sorrows of the next deeper grade, to those which have their roots not in the senses but in the affections. They area great deal deeper. The way in which the body’s pains will easily be borne or the body’s pleasures easily be sacrificed in order that we may delight ourselves in the indulgence of the affections or escape their wounds, is proof enough how we all feel that the heart is the true seat of life, and not the body. “When the numbness comes up to my heart, then I shall depart,” said Socrates, after he had drunk the poison. ‘The passions of the body may mean much, but they can never mean life or death. Only in the loves we have for others than ourselves can we truly live or die.

When we come to study this region of the life of Jesus, the field that opens to us is very wide. We can do hardly more than just point out its features. And the most prominent among them all must be the absorbing affection of His life, the pure love that He had for His Father, God. We go about and about this centre of the life of Jesus, we talk of what it made Him do, we talk of how He tried to communicate it to those whom He taught. But it very often seems to me as if those of us who have read the Gospels most have but seldom grasped the love which Jesus had for His Father and understood it as a simple consciousness; not as a motive, but as a pure atmosphere of pleasure, the perpetual bright flower of the absolute unity of will which was between them. There are some simple expressions of this in the Gospel, hs ieee, The Influence of Fesus

which get their profoundest beauty only as we think of them with the most absolute simplicity. Jesus one evening went away by Himself into a mountain and “continued all night in prayer to God.” We say that He was seeking preparation for the solemn task of selecting His disciples, which He undertook the next day. Certainly the communion of that night must have prepared Him for the task, but in itself what was it but the simple resting of one nature on the bosom of the nature which it loved, and in the fact of loving which it found its perfect joy? I think that if we go behind that simplicity we lose the beauty and majesty of it all. The most majestic is always, the simple, not the complicated. And so it is not what I may picture to myself that Jesus asked of His Father in those sacred hours; it is simply that Jesus was with His Father, every interference of the daytime being completely set aside; that life touched life in the complete communion of love, — that is the final fact on which the mind which is seeking the happiness of Jesus in the life of the affections rests without asking for analysis.

That is only one instance. Another comes before us in that deep and eager cry which broke forth from the lips of Jesus on the cross. “My God, My God,” He cried out, “why hast Thou forsaken Me?” TI do not pretend to understand all the meaning of that cry. Nobody understands it. What wonder is it if, when the last words of any faithful man finishing his noble life have always something in them which the most true and lifelong sympathy that stands about his bed cannot comprehend, the dying words of Jesus should have mystery in them and suggest strange questions which we cannot answer? But though - I do not understand it fully, I know that I come nearest to its meaning when its meaning seems to me mostsimple. It is pure love, — love thwarted, hindered, and perplexed, but yet pure love, with that triumph which love always carries in its very existence whether it reach its object and call back response or not. Jesus does not beg for release. He does not even ask for vindication. He only utters love. And that cry after His Father lets us look down into His heart and see that in loving His Father and being loved by Him was His perpetual joy.

And yet see how this cry of Jesus illustrates what I said about the position which pleasure and pain always took in His life. They are always subordinated to the doing of a will, which will in its turn gets its value from the idea which inspires it. So here. The joy of loving and the pain which only love can bring beat tumultuously together in this cry. But underneath them both there is obedience, and the idea from which

obedience proceeds. Not for one moment does He think of coming down from the cross to find

His Father. Whether He find Him or lose Him, whether the issue of His love be the perfect joy

of union or the exquisite suffering that separa-

tion brings, He must obey Him first. Even if

His doing of His Father’s will seems to shut

Him out of His Father’s presence, there cannot be a question; the will must be done. Oh, how often souls have forgotten, as they weighed the raptures, the ecstasies of faith against its hard and present duties when the two seemed to be not compatible with one another, — how often they have forgotten that the question which was greater and more sacred of the two, the rapture

aD or the obedience, was settled once forever on the cross!

We pass from this supreme affection of Jesus to the others which are included in it. I had occasion in my last lecture to speak of the relations which Jesus held to those persons who were immediately connected with Him by the ties of kindred. I refer again to the family life in which He lived, only to notice what was the kind of pleasure and suffering that it brought to Him which He could not otherwise have met. That it did bring Him both there can be no doubt. In all his intercourse with John the Baptist we never can lose remembrance of the relationship between them. The old pictures which have grouped them as children by the Virgin’s knee express a feeling which we can never cast aside. It is impossible to make their connection simply official When John baptizes Jesus, it is a kinsman’s hand that leads the exalted youth into the water. And by and by, when the disciples went to the prison and took the body of the murdered Baptist and buried it, and came and told their Master, it

a ee was for one of His own family blood as well as for one of His own divine spirit that Jesus mourned. And there is another passage which aiways seems to me to open a glimpse of the family affection which was in the heart of Jesus, He had avoided Judea because it was not safe for Him to work there. He was laboring in Galilee. And his brethren came to Him and said, “Depart hence and go into Judea. If Thou do these things, show Thyself unto the world.” It was almost a jeering mockery. “Neither did His brethren believe in Him,” the writer adds. The pain of having those doubt Him who ought to know Him best, of having His own flesh and blood turn on Him and mock Him, — it is evident that Jesus knew what that pain was, and that it was something peculiar to Him, something different from the unbelief and hostility of the promiscuous crowd. Then turn for another instance to the crucifixion, to those few hours of distress which sometimes seem to epitomize all that there was in His entire life. “There stood by the cross of Jesus His mother and His mother’s sister,”

and just as He was dying the Sufferer turned and gave His mother to the care of His disciple. “Woman, behold thy son!” “Son, behold thy mother!” It was a pang within all the other pangs, a woe that perceptibly added to their wretchedness, when among the faces that pitied Him He saw her face who bore Him, the face into which He had looked up from His cradle. When I think over these three stories, it seems to me that I discover what the real meaning was of that additional element of joy and pain which came to Jesus through His family affections. In each I seem to see that the family relationship was representative of something deeper that lay in behind. His special connection with those special lives was, as it were, the manifestation point of His relationship to all the world. What He was to those brethren who had always lived in the same house with Him he was essentially to all mankind, In them He realized with peculiar vividness what was true of all the world. All men were sons of God along with Him, but that sonship shone forth in a peculiar clearness in these men, who were also of Mary’s blood as well as He. It gave him joy when any of His brethren in the most remote degree realized the sonship which was revealed in Him or (as He himself expressed it) came to the Father through Him. But that joy was. vividest when one of His brethren in the nearest and most special sense attained that high belief. The pain of any human being touched Him, but in His mother’s pain humanity pressed itself closest to His sensibility and gave Him a special distress proportioned to His special love. In general, the woes and pleasures through His family affections were those which belonged to His whole contact with humanity, only deepened and emphasized and vivified by the particular dearness in which these kindred lives stood to His own.

And yet I hasten on to say that such an account of the emotions which belong to Christ’s domestic life does not in the least conflict with that spontaneous character which is - of the every essence of such emotions always. Indeed, the best and noblest natures, as I think, are marked by hardly anything so much as this, — the simultaneous spontaneousness and reasonableness of the lives they live. One kind of man is all spontaneous, and can furnish no account of what he feels and does. Another kind of man is all reasonable, and lets no impulsive action slip from his will till it has accounted for itself to his conscious understanding. Both of these men are partial. There is a man who is more complete than either, who is as impulsive as a child and yet in the heart of whose impulsive action there always lies the true reasonableness of manhood. He does the natural human acts because he must do them, and yet he knows why he does them. The spontaneousness does not obscure the reason, and the reason does not hamper and clog the spontaneousness. So it always seems to me that it is with Jesus. He presses His brother’s hand with brotherly affection. His brother’s sneer wounds Him as no stranger’s can. His’ mother’s sorrow enters into its own secret chamber of sympathy in Him where no other sorrow can intrude. And yet all the while, with all the instinctive value which He gave to them for their own sake, these home affections all are ties to bind Him to humanity, windows through which He looks into the depths of human life, interpretations to His soul of the wider brotherhood in the vaster family.

Surely there is here a noble indication of what the family affections as sources of suffering and happiness may be to all men, of what they must be to all men who dwell in them within the larger family which Jesus shows. It is dreadful if we lose their spontaneousness. Beyond all analysis there lies the relation which every true son holds to a true father. It is a final fact. You cannot dissolve it in any abstract theory. It issues from the mysterious sympathy of the two lives, one of which gave birth to the other. It has ripened and mellowed through all the rich intercourse of dependent childhood and imitative youth and sympathetic manhood. It is an eternal fact. Death cannot destroy it. The grown-up man feels his father’s life beating from beyond the grave, and is sure that in his own eternity the child relation to that life will be in some mysterious and perfect way resumed and glorified, that he will be something to that dear life and it to him forever. All this remains. Its bright spontaneousness nothing is allowed to tarnish. And yet the adult son delights to learn how, through his intimacy with that nature out of which his sprang, he is introduced into an understanding of the whole human race. In a deeper sense than we are apt to use the words, his father “brings him into the world.” His father’s life is to him the illumination point of all humanity. In loving his father he loves his race. And all the joy and pain, all the richness and pathos of his home life, while they keep their freshness and peculiar sanctity, have in them and below them all the multitudinous happiness and sorrow of the larger life in the great household of the world. The child feels something of this truth by instinct. The thoughtful man delights to realize it more and more as he grows older.

To come back, however, to the life of Jesus, we are aware that His relations to those who held the ties of kinship with Him, while they were clear and real, were not a large or promi-

he (a Seo; ‘ nent element in His life. He quickly went beyond the household of the carpenter in His eagerness to attain the household of God. He was the brother of all men. And the truth of all the emotion which filled the social life of Jesus, when we sum it up, seems to be this: that all multiplied and deepened relationships with men bring mingled joy and sorrow; a joy and a sorrow which it is not possible to separate and weigh against each other, because they are so subtly and intricately mingled that the joy makes part of the sorrow and the sorrow makes part of the joy, and you cannot take away either without finding that the other has eluded you; a joy and sorrow also which no man can ever gain by directly and deliberately seeking them, but which come unsought to every man who, regardless of the pleasure or the pain they bring, enters into profound connections with his fellow-men. These are the two key truths of any social life which goes beyond a club acquaintance or a parlor friendship. He will certainly fail who hopes to know men deeply and only to get happiness — never to get anxiety, distress, disappointment —

A viutunt ath ree out of knowing them; and he has mistaken the first idea of human companionship who seeks friendships and contacts with mankind directly and simply for the pleasures they will give him. Now Jesus quietly and steadily met both these laws. He calmly deepened His relations to mankind as much as possible, accepting all the pain that such profound relationships might bring; and always with Him the happiness or unhappiness of His associations were but accidents, and not the final purposes for which He won His friends or encountered the hostility of His enemies. Here is one of His disciples, Simon Peter. Two picturesque moments stand out in the history of the intercourse of Jesus with that interesting man. At the foot of Hermon, tempted by a question of his Master, Peter burst forth with a hearty and enthusiastic utterance of his conviction of the divine nature which had been steadily impressing itself upon him. “And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven.” In the high-priest’s house at Jerusalem, when Jesus was standing a culprit on the night of His arrest, waiting for the scourging and the cross, He overheard this same Peter say twice, “I do not know Him,” when some servants questioned him about the prisoner whose fate was the question of the hour. “And the Lord turned and looked on Peter. And Peter went out and wept bitterly.” See what two influences came out of this friendship. See what joy and sorrow issued from the bosom of this love. See how the joy at hearing the confession of such a profound, far-reaching truth as His own divinity must have been full of fear which was almost certainty that the disciple would fail in some of the inevitable applications of the truth which he must be so imperfectly appreciating even while he enthusiastically proclaimed it. See how the suffering which the treason brought must still have had in it a consolation, as Jesus detected in the very passion of the denial the crushed remonstrance of the love which, even under the denial, was living still. Or take a yet harder case. Jesus had another disciple whom He saw slipping more and more away from Him, who He saw would some day betray Him with the worst ingratitude. And yet I think that every man whose sad and anxious office it has ever been to try to lift a soul which in spite of all his struggles has been always sinking deeper and deeper into the depths, will bear me witness that in the patience and wisdom and faithfulness which his Master lavished upon Judas Iscariot for years there must have been a pathetic pleasure, peculiar and subtle because of the growing hopelessness of results which compelled each effort to find its satisfaction in its own essential nature. It must have had something of the delight in mere service with which one watches at the bedside of a sick friend, of whose recovery all hope is gone. And both in Peter and in Judas the second of the truths of which I spoke appears, — that it was not for the joy or for the sorrow that their society would bring that Jesus sought them. Peter and Judas alike He sought because they were the sons of God; the pain or pleasure they would give Him came afterwards and as an accident.

In all of Christ’s associations the same inevitable mingling of the sad and glad appears, There was a little family at Bethany in which He often made His home, and the last time He left the hospitable door He carried out with Him two memories, — the memory of how the eyes of Mary had looked up into His face, eager with the desire to understand all His sacred truth, and the memory of how the same eyes had streamed with tears beside her brother’s tomb. The same voices of the populace at Jerusalem which cried “Hosanna!” cried “Crucify him!” before the week was done. The happiness of promising heaven to a dying thief was filled with pity that only by a torturing death had the poor wretch been brought into the sight and hope of life. One day He saw a poor widow in the Temple give a true charity; but the same sensitiveness of soul which made Him find pleasure in her simple act laid Him open to the distress which only such a soul could feel at the ostentatious hypocrisy of the Pharisees. And all through His life the deep, enthusiastic happiness at giving men the chance of their divine inheritance was mingled with the distress of knowing that

men who would not take what He held out to them must be worse off than if He had not come to them. “He that heareth My word hath everlasting life,” and “On whomsoever this stone shall fall it shall grind him to powder,” — the opposite fates of men, with the emotions they awakened, — the two were always on His heart together and crowded each other on His lips,

So it must always be. To be a true minister to men is always to accept new happiness and new distress, both of them forever deepening and entering into closer and more inseparable union with each other the more profound and spiritual the ministry becomes. The man who gives himself to other men can never be a wholly sad man; but no more can he be a man of unclouded gladness. To him. shall come with every deeper consecration a before untasted joy, but in the same cup shall be mixed a sorrow that it was beyond his power to feel before. They who long to sit with Jesus on His throne may sit there if the Father sees them pure and worthy, but they must be baptized with the baptism that He is baptized with.

All truly consecrated men learn little by little that what they are consecrated to is not joy or sorrow, but a divine idea and a profound obedience, which can find their full outward expression not in joy, and not in sorrow, but in the

mysterious and inseparable mingling of the two.

There yet remains one other class of pleasures and sufferings which belong to all devoted and ideal natures, and in which Jesus had a share, It consists of the moral joys and pains, of those which come from the acute perception of right and wrong, of moral fitness or unfitness in the things about us. You cannot put a man very high unless you give him a good share of that quality. Merely to see that things are right or wrong, and not to feel a pleasure in their rightness and a pain in their wrongness, does not indicate a finely moulded character. The moral perceptions, even the moral obediences, do not make a full moral life. The moral emotions must be there too. That such a power as this was in Jesus nobody can doubt who knows Him. And yet we are a good deal surprised, I think, when

we survey His history and see how few are the moments in which this power prominently appears. The reason is that the life of Jesus, and all His thoughts and feelings, had personal shapes and directions. We do not know how largely this is true until we read the Gospels with this thought in our minds. The great moral enthusiasts kindle when they see a good deed done, rejoice in the progress of humanity, have a keen happiness when some new instance brings out the fitness for virtue which is in the whole great world, and on the other hand suffer as if a spear pierced them or a club smote them when a bad action makes a discord and wrongs the fundamental purpose of the world. There is very little indeed of that in Jesus. We cannot think of Him as a pure moral enthusiast. With Him almost everything is personal. He is glad when a man is good because the man’s own life is illuminated, and still more because the man glorifies His Father which is in heaven. A wickedness wounds Him because it is a degradation to the man who does it and an insult to God. Behold Him as He goes into the Temple, eee eh * Ah Ss which the greedy people had turned -into a market-house. It is “My Father’s house” for which he is so jealous. It is no abstraction of — reverence for which He burns. It is exactly — as if a child came home and found his mother’s chamber turned into a huckster’s shop. It is as literal, as personal, as that. The profound sense of unfitness, of discord, is there, but it is held in solution in this more vehement feeling of personal wrong. It is this personalness of all His moral enthusiasms, as it seems to me, that keeps us from ever feeling or fearmg m Jesus any of that moral pedantry — or what, with a word that has no dignified equivalent, we call that priggishness — which haunts the words of the moral enthusiasts who kindle at the harmonies and discords of abstractions, whether they talk as utilitarians or as transcendentalists.

Nevertheless, though this is true, the sense of the absolute must underlie and must appear through the personal enthusiasms of Jesus Otherwise the moral quality would evaporate, — and His personal emotions would come to be only mere fondnesses and prejudices. And there are instances enough in which we can feel, beating and shining through His personal affections, the delight and sorrow with which His soul recognized the essential qualities of holiness and sin. I have already spoken of the indignation which possessed Him in the desecrated Temple. As an illustration of the opposite emotion, there occurs that beautiful outburst in which, almost with surprise, certainly with a sudden overflow of gladness, as He saw the perfection of the method of God’s treatment of the world and revelation of Himself through innocence, Jesus breaks out and cries, “I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes.” What a happy heart is there! It is all personal, and yet the personalness holds clearly in its heart a sense of the beauty of a moral idea, — the idea that the profoundest belongs to the purest, the loftiest truth to the innocent and guileless heart. One day a centurion came to Jesus and wanted Him to work a miracle; and as they talked about it, the simplicity of the man’s trust came out. He illustrated His belief in the power of Jesus by describing his own relation to the forces which were under him. “I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh.” Instantly, as it would seem, so large and true a conception of the world all held together in one sublime system of authority and obedience, running up to the highest, running down to the least of its activities, filled the soul of Jesus with delight. “I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel,” He said. One other day, in a remote country village, He met ten lepers. As the poor wretches stood afar off and cried to Him, He bade them go and show themselves to the priests. And as they went, lo, their leprosy was gone and they were clean. Then one of them turned back, all radiant with gratitude, and fell down at his healer’s feet. National prejudice, — for the man was a Samaritan, — old bitterness, the selfishness which comes with sudden happiness, all these were broken through, and there he lay, all overwhelmed with thankfulness and love. Meanwhile the other nine went cheerily upon their way, meanly satisfied with the mere fact of health. There comes a sorrow and a joy into the face and words of Jesus which are primarily and formally personal, but are not wholly so. In at the heart of it, it is the joy which every noble heart feels at the very sight of gratefulness, and the pain that each true soul experiences at the very presence of ingratitude. That such things are, — their very being and essential qualities, — these are what wake responses of gladness or of sadness in the soul. You have to reach in and find that feeling underneath the personal emotions of Jesus. But it is always there. When He pities Jerusalem, His pity has an eternal dignity about it, because the woe which He commiserates is but part of the universal tragedy of sin. When the poor woman stops Him by the roadside, and with the wit of wretchedness claims even for a dog some crumb of the precious mercy, His praise of her is more than recognition of her quick rejoinder; it is a pleasure in the sight of that clear hold on the right of the weaker over the stronger which is part of the moral structure of the universe. And at the last, when the supreme joy of His life comes, and with an appeal to His Father’s perfect knowledge He exclaims, “I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work that Thou

gavest Me to do,” there is heard inside of that appeal a pure joy in the establishment of righteousness and the setting up of the kingdom of salvation which is the basis of-the personal gratulation that the words express. I must not multiply illustrations. I do not know one instance of Christ’s joy in moral harmony that is not held in the bosom of some personal affection. But, on the

other hand, I do not know one instance of per-.

sonal affection which does not get its value from some moral emotion at the centre of it. That is the kind of moral enthusiasm which the influence of Jesus has spread throughout the world. It is not calm, cool approbation of goodness, it is delight in a good man, with which the Christian kindles. But it is always certainly his goodness in him — not his mere person, but the moral nature which his person vividly exhibits — that excites the Christian’s admiration. And so it is neither an enthusiasm for goodness nor an enthusiasm of humanity that the influence of Jesus

“s is creating in the world, but a communion of saints, — a race of men each delighting in the other for his holiness, and each delighting in holiness for the brightness that it gives the others’ lives.

I do not think that it would be right to close this study of the pleasure and the pain which Jesus experienced and into which His disciples are constantly led, without saying two or three words upon a point which may often suggest a difficulty. I have been speaking of the certain satisfaction of His soul in moral fitness, in the harmony of righteousness, But, some one asks, how is it with those other harmonies in which we are always finding delight, the fitnesses which the esthetic nature recognizes and loves? Was there anything of those in Jesus? Had He anything of what we call the sense of artistic beauty? Did He get any of that joy of taste of which our modern life makes so much? It is not an easy question to answer ina word. We may point to the special earnest purpose which filled all of the life of Jesus. We may say that

He who was walking on to Calvary had no time in the intenseness of His moral life for art and its luxuriousness. We may say that He was a Jew, and it was not in the nature of His race to gather from beautiful things that happiness which they imparted to the quick-eyed Greek, We may say that it was a mere question of the accidental circumstances and furniture of the life of Christ, that the physical sensibility and the moral impressibleness which we have been studying in Him make undoubtedly a large part, while undoubtedly they do not make the whole of that only halfaccountable element in us which we call the esthetic nature, and so that the capacity of the pleasure which that nature values only waited in Him for some circumstances to develop it. We may say that though Jesus made nothing of artistic beauty, yet His religion has made much of it, and out of Christianity the highest artistic life has come. We may say all these things, and no doubt all of them have truth. But still the great impression of the life of Jesus, as it seems to me, must always be of the subordinate importance of those things in which only the zesthetic nature finds its pleasure. There is no condemnation of them in that wise, deep life. But the fact always must remain that the wisest, deepest life that was ever lived left them on one side, was satisfied without them. And His religion, while it has developed and delighted in their culture, has always kept two strong habits with reference to art which showed that in it was still the spirit of its Master. It has always been restless under the sway of any art that did not breathe with spiritual and moral purpose. Never has Christian art reached the pure zstheticism of the classics. And in its more earnest moods, in its reformations, in its puritanisms, it has always stood ready to sacrifice the choicest works of artistic beauty for the restoration or preservation of the simple majesty of righteousness, the purity of truth, or the glory of God.

I have intimated already, once or twice to-day, what significance there is, not merely in the separate presences of joy and trouble in the life of Jesus, but also in the proportions which they hold to one another, and the way in which they are perpetually mingled. Let me-recur to that a moment as I close. In that respect, as in many others, the last day of Jesus, the day of His crucifixion, presents no unreal picture of what His whole life was. That day, in spite of the tragedy which was ripening fast all through the morning, and the cross upon which the sun went down, was not all dark. Strange glimpses of a light which must have brought deep delight to the soul of Jesus shone out through all its course. Follow Him in your thought from the time when He met His disciples in Jerusalem the night before. First came the sitting down at supper

with them, a feast of joy, the only familiar board at which we ever see Jesus through His life before His crucifixion. No sooner is He there, and the quiet happiness begun, than the disciples begin to quarrel about some foolish question of precedence, and Jesus is distressed. Then comes the beautiful action in which, as it were, He refreshes the joy of devotion which had filled the years of labor that were all over now,

He bends and washes the disciples’ feet. No sooner is that done than Judas has to be convicted and dismissed. Then comes the bright moment when St. Peter bursts out with his promise of loyalty, followed the next instant by the Savior’s sad prophecy of how near His disciple’s weakness lay to his promised strength. Next follows the encouraging description of the Spirit of comfort and strength which was to come when Jesus had departed. Then, looking in the blank, unsuspicious faces of the men about Him, the Lord’s voice sinks again as He foretells how they will be persecuted. In an instant all that is forgotten, and He is wrapt away from all the present in acelestial memory and a divine anticipation. “Now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with the glory which I had with Thee before the foundation of the world.” With that ecstasy still filling Him, He goes out to the Garden and its agony. He is betrayed and deserted. Yet still one last poor flash of Peter’s loyalty lightens the darkness for an instant. The denial, the trial, the scourging, the crucifixion, follow fast. Yet even in the midst of their horror there is room for some momentary gleams of joy. The wavering of Pilate; the cries of a few sympathetic voices among the hooting mobs as He passed through the street; the group of friends at the foot of the cross; and then that great joy which must have fallen into His spirit when from the other cross there came a cry of faith and hope; at last the utter satisfaction which fills His soul as He exclaims, “It is finished,’ — all of these come in to show that the very agony of agonies was charged with the divine capacity of joy. As we gather the total impression of that wondrous day, how complete it is! How joy and sorrow interfuse and blend with one another!. And the result is a new compound of life which is different from either. How evident it is that by some principle more deep than just, that joy is pleasant and pain is hard to bear, they are distributed. It is as if Jesus walked under a cloud, and yet felt always that in the very substance of cloud there was suffused and softened light. The cloud had light in its darkness and darkness in its light; and so the explanation of it all was clear. A sunlight through the cloud He felt, and behind the sunlight there must be a sun. Behind the bitter circumstances lay a law, the blessed law of obedience, which was fellowship with God; and behind the law a truth which I was God Himself.

Under that same cloud of circumstances we must walk; but if there is behind it, for us, too, that law and that truth which really made the life of Jesus, — the law of obedience and the truth of sonship, — then for us, too, light shall come through the cloud, and, mingling with its darkness, make that new condition in which it is best for a man’s soul to live, that sweet and strong condition in which both joy and sorrow may have place, but which is greater than either of them, — the condition which He called peace.