Now what is the fact behind this fact? When a man can truly say of his wrong-doing: "It is no longer I that do it," what are we bound to affirm besides? When we remember that the fact of his helplessness was the same before he realized it as it was afterwards, what are we to say? This that up to the very limits of his helplessness, he is no more to blame for not doing his proper work in God's world, than is the strong man whose system has been invaded and rendered helpless by the typhoid bacillus. Further, his very delusions are themselves a part of his disease, and he cannot escape until his malady has been met and mastered by a delivering power stronger than either itself or him, and he is being led up to health and vigor.

To the conclusion that the place where the law of God must exist, to make its transgressor guilty before him, is in the knowledge of the transgressor himself, we must now add, therefore, this other word, that up to the very limits of each man's helplessness to avoid his transgressions, the divine righteousness must hold him personally guiltless. The victim of typhoid cannot fairly be held accountable for the full work of a healthy man. Sin is, in one of its phases, a disease for the existence of which no man, since Adam, can be held responsible. This is New Testament teaching. And, according to that same teaching, it was the darkness of our ignorance that brought the Light of the World to our relief, the

awfulness of our disease that brought the great Physician to our side, and our helplessness in our bitter bondage that brought the Mighty Deliverer to our rescue.

Over against this obligation of God to man, self-imposed and self-recognized, lies our own obligation to him. Each man knows himself to be individually responsible to God and feels that he has been a sinner against him on his own account. This consciousness of personal guilt arises out of the fact that God has been known to us as the God of Salvation from both our sins and sinfulness to a greater extent than we have availed ourselves of his sanctifying grace. But the bitterest cry that breaks from human lips and lifts itself to Heaven, is wrung from human hearts, not by this guilt, but in view of that helplessness through sin's disease or bondage, which makes the life of righteousness impossible without Heaven's help. Our joy is that He who made and maintains the need for infinite help has bestowed that aid from the start, and with growingly glorious results.

Here, then, we have reached this one clear fact, that the plan of redemption, in which the Incarnation was wrapped up from the beginning, found its primeval necessity in the righteousness of the Infinite Love.

III

JESUS AS A SIGN

A sign is some visible thing which represents

ChristianTwo of them we Baptism and the

an invisible reality greater than itself. ity has three of these signs. call sacraments. They are Lord's Supper. In baptism the outward and visible act of applying water to an individual who has been presented for the purpose of undergoing the rite, represents an invisible act indefinitely greater than itself. So also the visible act of one who partakes of the Lord's supper represents an indefinitely greater invisible act.

Water is invaluable as a food and also as an instrument of cleansing. Associate it with a cleansing agent in a Turkish bath institute and it means physical cleansing for all who come and submit to certain conditions. But associate water with one who is authorized to use it in baptism, and let him apply it to the persons of those who are presented for the rite, and the act of the baptizer represents that invisible act of the Holy Spirit, by which He purifies the hearts of those who believe in God as the God of their personal salvation through Jesus Christ.

Bread is invaluable as a sustainer of physical

life, and unfermented wine is the very life of the grape the very life of the grape plant itself, indeed, since it produces the seed, or plants in embryo, of all future vineyards. Unfermented grape juice and bread taken together, therefore, are a sign of, or represent, physical life and its sustenance. And when you set portions of them apart for use in connection with the spiritual religion of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the rite which we call his Supper, they then represent him as at once the Spiritual life and the spiritual nourishment of all those who continously receive him by obedient faith, just as obediently they partake of the bread and wine themselves in the Supper.

But before either of these symbols could be chosen on earth, one had to be chosen in heaven. The thing it was to represent was the divine love for our sinful race. It had to be something that could actually set forth the infinite thing that was to be represented. It had to be something also that even the worst man could understand and appreciate. The use of water in baptism could be understood and appreciated as symbolizing moral and spiritual cleansing. Partaking of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper could be understood and appreciated as showing forth the reception of Christ as the inbringer and sustainer of spiritual life in those who believe in him. what could stand as a symbol of that love of the triune Jehovah, which stoops and suffers and

But

dies, that it may win bad men to holiness and peace and enduring riches? Could men have guessed?

The divine solution of the problem, when it first met human eyes, was a babe. But this babe would have been no solution at all, if it had died in childhood. For then it would have represented innocence, apart from conscious intelligence and personal choice, and God in himself cannot be truly represented thus. Each babe is God-like in its possibilities, but a babe must live on for years if these possibilities are ever to become the actual facts of character, which men can see and admire and love. The son of Mary, lying there in the manger, receives homage, because the spirit of prophecy has already seen him as the glorious man he afterwards became. It is not the babe, but the man the babe so soon became, that is approached with bended knee. Could it have been true that he was to die in infancy, the spirit of prophecy would never have been awakened concerning him, and he would have gone to a grave that would in a few short years have been nameless and forgotten. The worship of a babe, as a babe, is no true part of Christianity.

Man is at once a common being on this planet, and the most exalted in his attributes of all its inhabitants. So high is he in comparison with every other earthly being, that he is arbiter of the destinies of them all. One man is of more worth than every creature besides. So man is the