In order to reach some apprehension of its greatness, it will be requisite to contrast the previous condition of perfect exaltation, glory and life which the Savior enjoyed, with that of subjection, shame, and death to which He bowed Himself when He undertook the work of man's redemption.

In the first place, it may be observed that He was possessed from eternity of absolute supremacy and universal dominion. Before the mountains were brought forth or ever He made the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting He is God. "Being in the form of God, He thought it not robbery to be equal with God." "The brightness of His Father's glory and the express image of His person, He hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name" than all the created intelligences in the universe. As He is divine, His nature is the ground of moral distinctions, and His bosom the primal source of law. Angelic hierarchies, thronedoms, principalities and powers, minister in His presence. Worlds and systems innumerable, that "wheel unshaken through the void immense," revolve around His throne; and as they perform their appointed courses express, in the grand harmony of their movements, allegiance to His will. Wherever a holy creature exists amid all the shining hosts of worlds His law is acknowledged and His rule confessed to be supreme.

But, behold the wondrous nature of His sacrifice! Thus invested with universal empire, the author and dispenser of universal rule, He voluntarily lays out of His hands the rod of dominion, and subjects Himself to the authority of that law which was issued and administered by Himself. Instead of the aspect of a lawgiver and a sovereign, He assumes that of a subject

and a servant, He made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Himself the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Born of a woman and made under the law, the sceptre which His own hands had wielded descended upon Himself; the lightnings which had flashed from His throne blazed around His own soul; and the thunder of His own awful mandate against transgressors sends Him a reputed culprit to imprisonment, scourging and death.

Another feature in the extraordinary sacrifice made by the Son of God was His relinquishment of glory, and His assumption of inexpressible shame. His glory was eternally divine. Whatever of homage, adoration and praise were rendered to Deity were paid to Him. He inhabiteth the praises of eternity. The sublime worship of heavenly hosts was incessantly poured out as a tribute at His feet. The exalted faculties of sinless intelligences were employed in His service, and the choicest and most magnificent offerings which their powers could furnish, or their love could suggest, were lavished in His presence. The rapturous chants of angelic choirs, and the choral songs of the morning stars, rehearsed His infinite perfections, the glory of His deeds and the praises of His name. Countless worlds of light reflected the radiance of His face, and suns and stars shone with a lustre which they borrowed from His throne.

This glory the Son of God consented to veil when He humiliated Himself and became incarnate that He might die for men. His intrinsic or essential glory, that is, the glory which attends His own contemplation

of His being and character as God, can suffer no change; but his extrinsic or declarative glory, that is, the effulgent manifestation of His perfections, the reflection of His beauty and the celebration of His praises by the universe of creatures, this was mysteriously eclipsed and suspended by His incarnation, by the wonderful connection of the divine nature with the human in a common relation to the personality of the great Mediator. It may be difficult, although the fact be a revealed one, to apprehend how the declarative glory of the Son of God should be held in abeyance considered as divine, for it would seem to have involved an arrest for a time of the praises rendered to Him as God; but there is a glory which the Scriptures clearly teach us was temporarily sacrificed through the incarnation and death of Christ. This was the Mediatorial glory.

As eternally designated to the execution of the scheme of redemption—the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, He possessed a glory which was peculiar to Him in the capacity of Mediator. This He laid aside when He assumed our nature and underwent our sufferings; and He resumed it only upon the completion of His mediatorial work on earth, and His triumphal ascension into heaven. The worship paid Him by celestial armies, the honors rendered Him by the universe of holy creatures, and the radiant exhibition of His glories the incarnate Redeemer sacrificed for shame, reproach, and contempt. He was born in a low estate and cradled in the lap of poverty; was calumniated as one in league with devils in the performance of the most extraordinary and beneficent miracles; was vilified as a glutton and a wine-bibber; was misrepresented as a rebel and an insurgent against

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lawful authority; was arrested as a common malefactor; was excommunicated from His own visible church by the officers who derived from Him their right to rule; was beaten at the common whippingpost of culprits; was struck in the face and spitted on by the rabble soldiery of a foreign government; and, finally, the song of drunkards and the by-word of scoffers, was under guard led out, attended by an insulting mob, to execution, and amidst taunts and jests was nailed to the accursed tree in company with thieves -a spectacle in death to devils and to men.

It ought to be remembered, further, in estimating the greatness of this sacrifice, that the Lord of life consented to become obedient to death, and to experience it in its most cruel and ignominious form. "All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men." "By Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers: all things were created by Him and for Him; and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist." Containing in Himself the fountain of being, He giveth to all life and breath and all things. His wonderful providence, as by a perpetual miracle, vitalizes all the processes of nature and conserves in existence organisms which would otherwise sink into their original nothingness, or into masses of inert and dissolving matter. All creatures derive from His inspiration the beginnings of live, and from His hand the bounty of continued existence.

Incarnated in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, His touch communicated healing to the sick, and His word

startled the dead from their graves. And yet He consented Himself to die. The author and prince of life, invested with supreme dominion over the realm of Death, He passed under the yoke of the monarch whose palace is the tomb, bows His head in token of allegiance to his authority, and descends at his command into the prison of the grave. The Giver of life, He succumbs to the extinguisher of it, and the very principle of being appears to submit to the stroke of death.

There is something, moreover, extremely affecting in the consideration that the sinless Savior consented to the sacrifice of His reputation for integrity. The only perfect specimen of humanity that the world, since the fall, had known, He merited singular honors from His fellow men. If the respect, the admiration, and the love of mankind could have been challenged by uprightness the most unblemished, beneficence the most tender, philanthropy the most untiring, charity the most unselfish, and virtue the most unsullied, they were due to Jesus of Nazareth.

In place of them He meets misrepresentation, slander and abuse. Conscious of perfect rectitude, of immaculate holiness, He sacrificed His right to vindicate Himself; and when He stood before His accusers falsified and maligned, He answered nothing, but consented to be treated as an offender against God and a culprit before men. He suffered Himself to be convicted by a criminal process, and as a condemned criminal went out to execution to expiate His reputed crimes by a judicial death. There is, if I mistake not, one most touching instance in which He appeared to offer a protest against the injury to which His personal character was subjected. It occurred during His agony