^ John Vassar once spoke to a lady about her soul, and the lady told her husband of what he had said. " I should have told him," said her husband, " to mind his own business." " If you had been there," said the lady, " you would have thought it was bis business." ^
(1) One part of that redemption which was the business of Christ was to offer a perfect example. When He sums up His own life, it is at one time, " I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do " ; " my meat is to do the will of him that sent me " : at another it is, " I am among you as he that serveth " — as the Servant of men ; " the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." And we see why the two go together. The true child shares the true parent's thoughts and purposes, and feels as he feels. And so the child of God, because he knows that He is the Father of His human creatures, and that He is love, and means nothing but love for them, must himself begin to share that love, that care, begin to feel the zeal to help, the wish to serve.
K God had written divers books of example in the lives of the saints. One man was noted for one virtue, and another for another. At last, God determined that He would gather all His works into one volume, and give a condensation of all virtues in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now He determined to unite all the parts into one, to string all the pearls on one necklace, and to make them all apparent around the neck of one single person. The sculptor finds here a leg from some eminent master, and there a hand from another mighty sculptor. Here he finds an eye, and there a head full of majesty. He saith, within himself, " I will compound these glories, I will put them all together; then it shall be the model man. I will make the
* H. Thorne, Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 66.
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statue par excellence, which shall stand first in beauty, and shall be noted ever afterwards as the model of manhood." So said God, " There is Job — he hath patience ; there is Moses — he hath meekness; there are those mighty ones who all have eminent virtues. I will take these, I will put them into one ; and the man Christ Jesus shall be the perfect model of future imitation." Now, I say that all Christ's life He was endeavouring to do His Father's business in this matter.^
If It seems as if nothing could be more impossible than to follow our Lord's example. He was God, and we are but weak and sinful men. How can we follow the Divine example in our small, petty life ? How can we follow the Divine example when there is within us so much that is selfish, so much that is hard, so much that is false, and so much that is ungenerous ? How can we follow His example ? And yet He Himself has told us that even to give a cup of cold water is a thing that He will notice, if it is done in His spirit. In His spirit ; and that spirit ought to animate all the actions of every-day life. No doubt it is here, here particularly, that it seems as if our power to obey His precepts must break down. To follow His example — how can it be done ? But the Lord Himself, when He calls us to follow His example, knows our weakness and knows what is the nature of the task that is put upon us ; He enters into all the folly and all the blindness and all the pains and all the temptations tnat mark our characters and lower our lives ; He enters into it all. Without sin Himself, He nevertheless shared all the troubles of human life, and as if to encourage us these strange and awful words have been written by His direction, that He "learned obedience by the things which he suffered." He learned obedience because He passed through all that was needed to make obedience perfect. He learned not to obey ; but He learned what to obey really meant. His humanity had to pass through what our humanity passes through. He obeyed — He had no need to learn that — but He learned what was the struggle, what was the trouble, that perpetually impeded obedience. He learned to feel it, and still He retains that humanity which felt it, and He sym- pathizes with every difficulty that besets our endeavours to please Him. He sympathizes, for He knows it all; He sympathizes because He has passed through it all. And if we are to abide in Him, we, too, must learn obedience, not only in the sense in which He learned it; we must not only learn what it is to obey, but we must learn to obey. And the Lord knows us through and through ; He sees whether we are