2 COR. VIII. 9 263
and an express bowing of His own to Another's will. Painful acts of endurance, which went against nature and were very hard for flesh and blood, these, too, even when the goodness or the need of them could not be discerned for darkness of vision, He tutored His submissive heart to accept, and His obedient will to do. Thus, also. He became very poor, with the poverty of a subject,
(3) He came into our place of poverty even as sinners. — Jesus walked on earth with a forfeited life: His own, indeed, to lay down or to take again (as He well knew), had He but chosen to assert His rightful claim, or to use what He possessed; yet no longer His own, in fact, because He had devoted it to the law, given it away for a ransom, consecrated it for a sacrifice. Here was the acme of self-impoverishment. He held not even Himself to be properly His own. On the contrary, He held Himself to be a ransom for our transgression, a price due, a person doomed ; and so gave Himself to justice, to be handled at the pleasure of that righteous Father who had given Him this commandment. Him- self He would not save, but committed Himself to Him who judgeth righteously. Thus poor beyond all poverty did He be- come, who was the most rich God and Lord of earth and heaven !
^ In Paris M. Coillard had the happiness of baptizing Semoindji Stephen, a Christian boy whom he had brought from the Zambesi, in the presence of a large assemblage of friends and helpers who heard his confession of faith, and to whom it was proof of his ministry. Once when they were visiting the Guinness family at Cliff College, who had treated this boy very kindly, the lad came to his master's room one night after every one had gone to bed. He was sobbing violently, and it was long before he could control himself to speak. At last he said, " Oh, I never understood before what you gave up when you came to bring us the tMito (Gospel). I did not know your home was so different. With us, you know how it is, when we meet strangers we fly from each other, and each man seeks his weapon. When we go from village to village we meet only enemies who hate us. Here, you go from one home to another : all are friends, all is love and con- fidence and welcome. I know now what it must have cost you to leave it all for us." ^
3. The poverty of Jesus was purely voluntary. He stooped to it. He embraced it. He was rich enough in the purposes of * 0. W. Mackintosh, Coillard of the Zambesi, 413.
264 THE LIBERALITY OF CHRIST
His love to become poor. No one took from off His brow the crown of Heaven, He laid it aside ; no one stripped Him of His royal robes, He unrobed Himself; no one paralysed the arm of His power, of Himself He chose our weakness ; no one shrouded Him in mortal flesh, of His own will He assumed the limitations and bonds of our nature. He laid down the life of heaven for the life of earth, as He laid down the life of earth for the life of heaven. " I lay down my life," He said. " No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." The wealth of His poverty must for ever wear the crown of all His riches. Within the moral necessities of His own nature, in view of the requirements of ours, He possessed a free and eager joy, which led Him " out from God," and brought Him " into the world," to become " poor that we might become rich."
^ Man, what can seem to thee bitter or hard to bear, when thou dost rightly consider that He who was in the form of God, and from all eternity in the light of the Holiest, and who was born therefrom, was as a beam and as the substance of God : that He comes into the cell and the slime of thy perverted nature, which is so unclean that all things, however pure in themselves, become impure and imperfect as they approach it ; and that He, for thy sake, willed to become wholly immured therein ? ^
^ Two hundred years ago, a mighty sovereign perceived that his people were rude, ignorant savages — backward in the arts of peace and war. He left, for a season, his realm in the hands of faithful councillors. He threw aside crown and sceptre. He arrayed himself in sordid raiment, and travelled to another land. Here as a shipwright he laboured with his hands, here he dwelt in a rude wooden cottage, here he mixed with common men. After a season, he returned to his own country, and made it great and powerful by the knowledge and skill he had acquired in the time of his disguise. This was what the patriotism of the Czar Peter of Muscovy induced him to do for the aggrandizement of his country. But a mightier than human kings has worn the disguise of humanity, the aspect of a slave, for us and our salva- tion!*