^ P. Thuieau-Dangin, St. Bernardine of Sieiw, 152.
2 COR. viii. 9 261
2. The poverty of our Lord was a genuine renunciation. " I love," says A. C. Benson in The Altar Fire, " to think of Words- worth an obscure, poor, perverse, and absurd man, living on milk and eggs, utterly unaccountable and puerile to the sensible man of affairs ; of Charlotte Bronte in the bare kitchen of the little house in the grey wind-swept village on the edge of the moor. We surround such scenes with a heavenly halo. We think of them as romantic, but there was little that was beautiful about them at the time. The most beautiful of such scenes is the tale of Bethlehem. We poor human souls, knowing what that event has meant for the race, make the bare, ugly place seemly and lovely, surrounding the Babe with a tapestry of heavenly forms and holy lights, and rapturous sounds, taking the terror and meanness of the scene away, and thereby losing the Divine seal of the great mystery, the fact that hope can spring in unstained and sublime radiance from the vilest, lowest, meanest conditions that can well be conceived."
Poverty is a very terrible thing; so terrible that nothing seems to deal so hardly with all our fairer and gentler humanities. Where the face is pinched with habitual want, the heart is seldom the home of scrupulous veracity or chivalrous honour. When the struggle for life grows deadliest even the sternest of the virtues begin to fail. There sit two men on a raft afloat on the mighty deep : it is all that remains of a once goodly ship, they all that survive of a once jovial and kindly crew. In the solitude of the ancient ocean, faced by grim starvation, what do they? Clasp each other in a last fraternal embrace, and die together in a love victorious over famine ? No, not they ; rather they sit and watch each other with hungry eyes, and each thinks what chances he may have in the struggle that is to determine which of the two shall give his life for the other. Nay, poverty is not kindly, famine does not come with grace in her hand and magnanimity in her heart ; and natures that find it easy to be good with riches find it hard to be good with enforced poverty. And Christ though rich became poor.
(1) He stooped to creaturely dependence. — Though inherently and divinely equal to the Father, He consented to occupy the position of a creature's inferiority : " My Father is greater than I." Though Almighty Maker of the Universe, He consented to
262 THE LIBERALITY OF CHRIST
receive His ability from God : " The Son can do nothing of him- self." Whatever He knew, He learned as a lesson from above. Whatever He did, He did by Divine direction. Of the infinite treasures of the earth which were His, He would not turn so much as a stone to bread to feed His own hunger. On Himself He imposed those strict bounds which bind every created man ; and these bounds to His life He faithfully respected. The very basis of His earthly existence — His consenting to be born of a woman — involved this amazing abnegation of all underived riglits, and of all antecedent ownership. It involved that He claimed as His own and would use for His purposes nothing but what the Divine bounty has been pleased to confer on human nature in making it what it is. Even that He did not claim as properly His own by any Divine right, but only as His in the same way in which it is ours — as what a man receives from his Maker. Thus He became poor, with a creature's poverty.
(2) He placed Himself within the restrictions of law. — No man is free to do whatever he likes. A man is not his own property, not lord of himself, even in the sense of making what he will of himself, of his own powers, appetites, or energies. Born in a given rank, at a certain date, his little life-story is bounded from birth to death by circumstances over which he has a very moderate control indeed. The imperative of duty, the imperative of providence, and the imperative of society are lying upon him. This thing, and not that, he must eat, drink, do, or forbear from doing. Some impulses he may, some too he may not, indulge. Against this curbing and prescribing law, whether of morals or of social custom, all men fret ; and Jewish men in particular were saddled with a yoke of ancient prescriptions peculiarly vexatious. Each day of the week, every act of social or domestic existence brought a Jew under some minute regulation which interfered with his freedom, and made him feel that in no sense whatever was he rich enough to be his own master. To all this Christ sub- mitted. He became too poor to have a will of His own or to be a law unto Himself, for He was " made under the [Mosaic] law." Beautiful acts of love which with divinely free and uncommanded choice He was spontaneously prone to do, no one bidding Him, these very acts He now submitted to perform, because they were enjoined, with a distinct recognition of law in the doing of them.