^ Scripture is a succession of saintly biographies all upon one type, the penitential. By a sudden transition there springs up one solitary instance of a completely opposite type, which vanishes, and never reappears. But the solitary and insulated unpenitential type makes also a solitary assumption of worth, and the assumption is part of the portrait.^
^ If you want to find those who have the keenest sense of sin, you will not find them among the reprobates or among the newly repentant, but among the experienced and maturing saints. It is at the beginning of the Christian life, when the great heights of holiness are still to climb, that the sense of sin and of unworthiness is most imperfectly developed. It is growth in grace that deepens the consciousness of the blackness of personal sin and that makes confession of sin the painful wail of the soul. And so it is among the holy ones that you hear the most heart-sick expressions of sin. Here is John, the mystic of the twelve, fitted by his refinement of spirit to lean on the Master's breast, and catch the soft whispers of the deeper things; and yet, from this man, there come the words, " If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Here is Paul, of masculine mind and of childlike heart, abounding in labours, persistent in sacrifice ; and yet in old age, when the veil was almost transparent, he writes to his beloved Timothy, " Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief '^ Here is John Bunyan, whose intimacy with the ways of the Almighty passed far beyond the human ken ; brave, lowly, saintly, and yet his writings abound in agonizing confession of personal unworthiness and sin. And here is one of the saints of our own time, the holy Andrew Bonar, whose long life was like an unbroken beam of the Eternal light ; and yet to the very week of his death his diary abounds in expres- sions of unworthiness and the pained confession of personal sin. These are the common characteristics of the lowly saints.^
(2) The sinlessness of Jesus deepens the conviction of our own sinfulness. We no longer judge ourselves by law, or convict our-
* J. B. Mozley, in Conteynporary lieview, vii. 495.
* J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, March 26, 1903, p. 300.
4o6 THE SINLESSNESS OF CHRIST
selves at the bar of conscience ; His life is our law, and He is our conscience, and from Him comes our fullest and most convincing condemnation. But we feel sin as men could not feel it before Christ came. Fear has deepened into pathos, and penitence into the tenderest contrition, because although He was the sinless One, yet He was the suffering One — " For our sins and for our salvation." Sinless, Christ has filled men's hearts with a profounder sense of sin than even the saintliest men of old ever knew or felt. To the best of men life has become one long season of Lent — a season of penitence because the vision of His life and the vision of His Cross are ever with us. " Which of you convicteth me of sin ? " has become not only His defence but our condemnation.
T[ For myself, it is only since His Divine image rose before my soul that I have properly learned what is the true state of man. Previously, I always measured myself with the little, and so appeared in my own eyes to be great. Now I measure myself with Him, and have become very little indeed.^
^ Sin began in man with the dawn of the ideal. It was with the infancy of the race as with the individual infant ; which, born a mere bundle of sensations and appetites, arrives gradually at moralhood, where it can sin, and does. A perception of sin, we say, is an element of moral progress. There are no shadows where there is no light.^
Drop, drop, slow tears,
And bathe those beauteous feet, Which brought from heaven
The news and Prince of peace: Cease not, wet eyes.
His mercies to entreat ; To cry for vengeance
Sin doth never cease: In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears; Nor let his eye
See sin, but through my tears.^
2. Christ is our Example.- -A difficulty arises here in connec- tion with the sinlessness of our Lord which has troubled some people. " How," they say, " can He be our example if He could
* A. Tholuck, Hours of Christian Devotion, 31.
* J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 40. • P. Fletcher.
ST. JOHN VIII. 46 407
not sin ? We are sinners. He is sinless. Is it of any avail to say to us, Be like Jesus Christ ? We cannot be like Him, just because He is without sin and we are not." Now, it is quite true that on the face of it to imitate Christ as we are is an impossi- bility. And, in fact. He never did preach Himself simply as an example apart from other claims that He made. He did not merely live a human life of perfect goodness and then say, " Be like me." We must take what He said about following Him in connection with all the rest of His claim and His work. He did realize the ideal human life, but He also offered a propitiatory sacrifice for sin, and promised to give us of His Spirit whereby we can be made partakers of His holy human Nature. His first appeal to us is to believe on Him, that is, to entrust our lives to Him as God and Man. It is " Come unto me " first, and then " Learn of me." It is only the man who has first handed over his life into the keeping of Christ, who has accepted His atoning work, who seeks His Spirit, who can really, with any likelihood of success, imitate the example of Jesus. It is only to the believer, pardoned by the sacrifice of Christ, filled with the transforming power of the life of Christ, that Christ is an example of conduct.