THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST.
By M. S. Howard
WE have often, and with great profit, meditated on the essential deity of the Lord Jesus. He is the Son of God. He is one with the Father in his nature and being. He is truly and properly God, and no man can rob him of the glory which he had with the Father before the world began. But this is contemplating Christ at a long range. It is high. It is difficult to attain unto it. It is one of those great things that even an angel's reed cannot measure; that an angel's plummet cannot sound. But when we think of Christ as a man, we can hold that. He is like ourselves. He had every one of our natural infirmities. When we are weary, we know that he sat tired and thirsty on Jacob's ancient well. When, with midnight watching, we feel the need of long absent slumber, we remember how he slept, though the storm swept across the little Galilean Sea, and threatened to submerge him and those who were with him. There is not a period of life, from dawning infancy to mature years, which may not claim his sympathy, on the ground that he has passed through every stage; felt its joys and its sorrows; known its hopes; and, shall we say, suffered its disappointments? Especially in hours of temptation, when all the powers of evil rally against the soul, it knows that he was tempted in all points with his people, and helps them to conquer the foe with a strength begotten of his own prolonged and bitter experience. And when death draws near, with its shadows and its separations, the believer receives courage from the thought that the Son of God tasted death; was laid away in the grave; for three desolate days slept in unbroken silence, while dear ones wept at their unutterable loss. How all this brings the Redeemer into contact with the race which he came to save! Men see one like themselves in many respects, and they are drawn to him irresistibly. They feel the pressure of his hand, the beating of his heart, the warm breathing of his soul in response to what is within them. They go about their daily business with the feeling that, though he is a great way above them in purity and holiness, there is a sense in which he is one with them and they are one with196him. The lonely heart feels his presence. The burdened spirit feels the inflowing of his strength. The crushed and anxious know where to go for pity and help. It was no accident or chance that Christ was born in the flesh; that he was a babe in Bethlehem; a child in Nazareth; a young man of warm and generous sympathies threading the streets of Judæan cities, and doing good quietly and pityingly along highways and in retired hamlets, and wherever the sick and the poor needed his divine help. The more we study the august facts of the incarnation, the more we shall be impressed and awed by it. The Lord of glory inhabiting our miserable clay! The Son of God bending to our condition in all directions apart from sin! The King of angels stooping to our humiliation! The cradle becomes a throne; the manger a presence chamber of royalty; the little obscure town of Bethlehem the very capital city of the kingdom of God!—Sermon by Rev. M. S. Howard, Wilbraham.