We can go through no darker rooms Than He went through before ;
and where He has stretched Himself on the cold ground and bivouacked, we need not be ashamed or afraid to lie down. The Captain of our salvation has shared all our hardships, and plodded with bleeding feet over every inch of the ground over which He would lead us.
(2) He must learn comioassion in the midst of suffering. — Before He suffers, He has the pity of a God ; after He suffers. He has learnt the compassion of a man. And though in the light the general seems to have gone up the hill, and left the army to struggle in the plain, He has gone, like Moses to the mount, to lift all-powerful hands of intercession, and bearing in His heart tender compassion, a fellow-feeling of our pains. No Christ is worth anything to us, suffering and bleeding and agonizing here, unless it be a Christ of whom we know that His heart is full of sympathy because He Himself has felt the same, and that He has learnt to haste to the help of the miserable, because He himself is not ignorant of misfortune.
^ A German theologian finds the unparalleled power of Jesus in the unlimited range of His sympathies. He stands apart from and above all men in greatness. He is absolutely unique. He is, as Bushnell said, unclassifiable. But is not His uniqueness this, that He is not provincial, local, and narrow, but universal ; that He knew what is in man as no other has known, and that He had power and sympathetic union with men and women of any nation and any religion ? He whose uniqueness made Him the Son of God was He whose universality made Him the Son of man.^
^ Every believer realizes by experience that Christ is the only perfect sympathizer. " I'm not perfectly understood," says every- body in fact. But if you are a believer you are perfectly under- stood. Christ is the only one who never expects you to be other than yourself, and He puts in abeyance towards you all but what is like you. He takes your view of things, and mentions no other. He takes the old woman's view of things by the wash- tub, and has a great interest in wash powder ; Sir Isaac Newton's
* George Harris, Inequality and Progress, 147.
HEBREWS II. TO 315
view of things, and wings among the stars with him ; the artist's view, and feeds among the lilies; the lawyer's, and shares the justice of things. But He never plays the lawyer or the philosopher or the artist to the old woman. He is above that littleness.^
^ It was the need of a Divine assurance that there is a heart of sympathy at the root of things which Christ came to satisfy. He not only declared the Divine sympathy, He entered the human struggle. It was not enough that God should declare the Divine sympathy in a word : He chose also to declare it in a Life. There can be no doubt of a sympathy which issues in self-sacri- fice ; and we see the Heart of God in the Cross of Jesus Christ. He who ordained the hard law of the Cross, Himself sub- mitted to it, to prove by His self-sacrifice that it came from a will of love: and He transformed it by bidding us not only to take it, but to take it after Him, It is through the fellowship of the Cross that He comes most closely to us. When we see and greet Him there, supreme and calm, He gives us His own supremacy and calmness. We conquer our crosses by bearing them with flim.^
In Christ I feel the heart of God
Throbbing from heaven through earth;
Life stirs again within the clod, Kenewed in beauteous birth;
The soul springs up, a flower of prayer,
Breathing His breath out on the air.
In Christ I touch the hand of God, From His pure height reached down,
By blessed ways before untrod, To lift us to our crown ;
Victory that only perfect is
Through loving sacrifice, like His.
Holding His hand, my steadied feet
May walk the air, the seas ; On life and death His smile falls sweet.
Lights up all mysteries : Stranger nor exile can I be In new worlds where He leadeth me.
^ Letters of James Smetham, 297.
' Cosmo Gordon Lang, The Miracles of Jesits.
3i6 PERFFXT THROUGH SUFFERINGS
Not my Christ only; He is ours;
Humanity's close bond; Key to its vast, unopened powers,
Dream of our dreams beyond. What yet we shall be none can tell: Now are we His, and all is well.* * Lucy Larcom.
The Sabbath Rest.
i»7
Literature.
Arnold (T,), Sermons, i. 112.
Brooke (S. A.), Short Sermons, 91.
Cairns (J.), Christ the Morning Star, 325.
Carroll (B. H.), Sermons, 444.
Edwards (T. C), The Epistle to the Hebrews, 58,
Hunt (A. N.), Sermons for the Christian Year, iii. 147.
Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., i. 321.
Lee (F. G.), Miscellaneous Sermons, 277.
Maclaren (A.), Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 281.
Meyer (F. B.), The Way into the Holiest, 68.
Murray (A.), The Holiest of All, 151.
Oosterzee (J. J. van), The Year of Salvation, ii. 233.