entire: "Ye are the light of the world;" "Ye are the salt of the earth;" "What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light;""If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light;""If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?" (How many dark lanterns-such as misguided men of genius-does this one sentence inclose!) And are not all inconsistent, half-formed, or conventional systems of morality, exploded by the grand generality—the scope transcending far the duration of this mortal life for its aim and accomplishment of the words, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect?"

But wholeness belonged to more than Christ's words; it belonged to himself and to his words, because they faithfully and fully represented himself, even as the acorn carries in it the figure of the oak. He was entire; and his possession of all virtues was signified by the gentle calm which reigned over, and inclosed them within it. Just as the whole man comes out in his smile, the "fullness of the Godhead" lay, like a still, settled smile, on Christ's meek face. His eye concentrated all the rays of the Divine Omniscience into its mild and tearful orb. His heart was a miniature ocean of love. His arm seemed the symbol of Omnipotence. His voice was the faint and thrilling echo of the sound of many waters. We are apt to think and speak as if the attributes of Divinity were somehow crowded and crushed into Mary's son. But those who saw him and believed, felt that Godhead lay in him softly and fully, as the image of the sun lies in a drop of dew. "In him dwelt the fullness of Godhead bodily," as a willing tenant, not as a reluctant captive.

But, as a man, as well as the incarnation of Godhead, he was perfect. Beside the stately, ancient, and awful forms of the patriarchs of the old world, and the bards and first kings of Israel, he seems young and slender. What were his years to those of Adam and Methuselah? He wrote not, like Solomon, on trees-from the cedar on Lebanon to the hyssop which springeth out of the wall. He had no Sinai for pedestal, as

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Moses had. He had not the mighty speech of Isaiah. But he possessed what all these wanted-he possessed perfection. He was only a child, but he was a celestial child; he was only a lamb, but it was a lamb without blemish and without spot. In him, as God-man, all contrasts and contradictions were blended and reconciled. You hear him now, in tones soft as youthful love, preaching concord to his disciples; and again, in the voice of a terrible thunder, and with the gestures of an avenger, denouncing wrath upon the hypocrite and the formalist, the Pharisee and the Scribe. Hear yonder infant weeping in the manger of Bethlehem. That little trembling hand is the hand of him who made the world; that feeble, wailing cry is the voice of him who spake, and it was done-who commanded and it stood fast. See that carpenter laboring in the shed at Nazareth! The penalty of Adam is standing on his brow in the sweat-drops of his toil. That carpenter is all the while directing the march of innumerable suns, and supplying the wants of endless worlds. Behold yonder weeper at the grave of Lazarus! His tears are far too numerous to be counted; it is a shower of holy tears, and the bystanders are saying-" Behold, how he loved him!" That weeper is the Eternal God, who shall wipe away all tears from off all faces. See, again, that sufferer in the Garden of Gethsemane! He is alone; there is no one with him in his deep agony; and you hear the large drops of his anguish, "like the first of a thunder-shower," falling slowly and heavily to the ground. And, louder than these drops, there comes a voice, saying-"Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." The utterer of that sad cry, the swelterer of those dark drops, is he whom the harps of heaven are even now praising, and who is basking in the sunshine of Jehovah's smile. "Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness."

The reticence of Jesus is one of the most remarkable of his characteristics. What he might have told us, in comparison of what he has !-of man, of God, of the future on earth, of the eternal state! "He knew what was in man." "The Son only

knoweth the Father." "Thou, Lord, knowest all things." But he remained silent. Nor was his silence forced and reluctant.

It was wise and willing. It seemed natural to him, as is their twinkling silence to the stars. This surrounded him with a peculiar grandeur. The greatest objects in the universe are the stillest. The ocean has a voice, but the sun is silent. The seraphim sing, the Shekinah is dumb. The forests murmur, but the constellations speak not. Aaron spoke, Moses' face but shone. Sweetly might the high-priest discourse, but the Urim and Thummim, the blazing stones upon his breast, flashed forth a meaning deeper and diviner far. Jesus, like a sheep before her shearers, was dumb in death; but still more marvelous was the self-denied and God-like silence of his life.

The secret of this silence lay partly in the practicalness of his purpose. He had three great things to do in the space of three years, and he could spare no time for doing or talking about aught else. He had to preach a pure morality, to live a pure life, and to die a death of substitution so vast, as to stop the motions of the universe till it was over. This was the full baptism wherewith he was to be baptized. He was straitened till it was accomplished. He bent his undivided energies to finish this threefold work; and he did finish it. He reduced morality to a clear essence, forming a perfect mirror to the conscience of man. He melted down all codes of the past into two consummate precepts. To these he added the double sanction of love and terror. And thus condensed, and thus sanctioned, he applied them fearlessly to all classes by whom he was surrounded. He did something far more, difficult. He led a life-and such a life! of poverty and power, of meanness and grandeur, of contempt and glory, of contact with sinners and of perfect personal purity-a life the most erratic and the most heavenly—a life from which demons shrank in terror, round which men crowded in eager curiosity, and over which angels stooped in wonder and love-a life which gathered about the meek current of its benevolence the fiery chariots and fiery horses of all miraculous gifts and all divine energies. And having thus lived, he came purged,

as by fire, to a death, which seemed to have borrowed materials of terror, from earth, heaven, and hell, to bow down along with its own burden upon his solitary head.

But, to humble him to submission, the fearful load of Calvary was not required. He was humble all his life long, and never more so than when working his miracles. How he shrunk, after they were wrought, from the echo of their fame! He did not rebuke the woman of Samaria for proclaiming her conversion, but he often rebuked his disciples for spreading the report of his miracles. These were great, but his purpose was greater far. They were an equipage worthy of a god, but only an equipage. If we would understand his profound lowliness, let us see him, who had been clothed with the inaccessible light as a garment, girding himself with a towel, and washing his disciples' feet; or let us look at him, who erst came from "Teman and from Paran," in all the pomp of Godhead, riding on an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass; or let us watch the woman washing his feet with tears, and wiping them with the hairs of her head; or let us sit down by the side of the well at Samaria, and see him who fainted not, neither was weary, with "his six days' work—a world," wearied upon this solitary way, and hear him, who was the Word of God, speaking to a poor and dissolute female as never man spake." Surely one great charm of this charmed life, one chief power of this all-powerful and all-conforming story, arises from the lowliness of the base of that ladder, the "top of which did reach unto heaven."

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But this lowliness was mingled with gentleness. It was a flower which grew along the ground—not a fire running along it. We have no doubt that this expressed itself in the very features and expression of his countenance. We have seen but one pictured representation which answered to our ideal of the face and figure of Jesus. It was the work of an Italian master, whose name we have forgotten, and represented Christ talking to the woman of Samaria. It was a picture which might have converted a soul. There sat the wearied Savior, by the wellside-his eye full of a far look of love and sorrow, as if he saw

the whole degraded species in the one sinner before him, and his hand half open, as if it held in it "the living water"—the woman listening with downcast looks, and tears trickling down her cheeks her pitcher resting on the mouth of the well, and behind her, seen in the distance, the sunny sky and glowing mountains of Palestine. But, in the noble figure and the ethereal grandeur of his countenance, you saw that the gentleness was not that of woman, nor even that of man; it was the gentleness of him whose "dwelling is with the humble and the contrite in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and the heart of the contrite ones." It was this which led him to gentle associates -to the society of the holy women, and of those children who saw the simplicity of infancy blended with the perspicacity of Godhead in the same face, and felt at once awe-struck and attracted. The babes and sucklings saw and felt what was hid from the wise and prudent. But the chief scene for the exercise of this exceeding gentleness was the company of publicans, sinners, and harlots. The sight of personified purity mingling with the vilest of beings, with condescension, blame, hope, and pity expressed in his countenance, instead of disgust and horror, was touching beyond the reach of tears. Like the moon looking full in upon a group of evil-doers, at once rebuking, softening, and spiritualizing the scene, so at Simon's table shone on the sinners around, the shaded orb of the Redeemer's face, and it seemed as if heaven were dimly dawning upon the imminent victims of hell.

And yet, with this mildness, there was blended a certain ineffable dignity. The dignity of a child approaches the sublime. It is higher than the dignity of a king-higher, because less conscious. It resembles rather the dignity of the tall rock, or of the pine surmounting its summit. This dignity, compounded of purity and unconsciousness, was united in Christ to that which attends knowledge and power. It was this which made the people exclaim, that he taught with authority, and not as the scribes that wrung from the officers sent to apprehend him, the testimony that never man spake like this man,