Our Lady Saint Mary Part 8

S. Luke II. 22.

O come let us wors.h.i.+p the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,--we the Christian nations, for He is our true G.o.d.

And we hope in Holy Mary, that G.o.d will have mercy upon us through her prayers.

Hail to thee, Mary, the fair dove, who hath borne for us G.o.d the Word.

COPTIC

The reading of a story in the Gospels is often like looking through a window down some long arcade; there is in the foreground the group of actors in whom we are presently interested, and beyond them is the whole background of contemporary life to which they belong, of which they are a part. If we have time to think out the meaning of this surrounding life we gain added insight into the meaning of our princ.i.p.al characters.

It is so now as we watch this group of humble peasant folk coming up to the temple to fulfil the demands of the law of Moses. In the precincts of the temple they are merged in a larger group whose interests are clearly identical with their own, and whom we easily see to be the local representatives of a party--the name, no doubt, suggests an organisation which they had not--scattered throughout Judea. Their interest was the redemption of Israel. They were the true heirs of the prophets, and among them the prophecies which concerned the Lord's Christ were the subject of constant study and meditation. Amid the movements and intrigues of political and religious parties, they abode quietly in the temple, as Simeon and Anna, or in their homes, as Zacharias and Elizabeth, _waiting_. Their power was the silent power of sanct.i.ty, the power that flows from lives steeped in meditation and prayer. They const.i.tute that remnant which is the depository of the hopes of Israel and the saving salt which prevents the utter putrefaction of the body of the nation.

We cannot for a moment doubt that Mary and Joseph were of this remnant, and that they were in complete sympathy with those whom they found here in the temple when the Child Jesus was brought in "to do for him after the custom of the law." The actual ceremony of the purification was soon over, the demands of the law satisfied. Neither Jesus nor Mary had any inner need of these observances; their value in their case was that by submission to them they a.s.sociated themselves closely with their brethren, our Lord thus continuing that divine self-emptying which he had begun at the Incarnation. We are impressed with the completeness of this stooping of G.o.d when we see the offering that Mary brings, "A pair of turtle doves," the offering of the very poor. Our Lord has accepted life on its lowest economic terms in order that nothing in His mission shall flow from advent.i.tious aids. He must owe all in the accomplishment of His work to the Father Who gave it Him to do. It will be the essence of the temptation that He must soon undergo that He shall consent to call to His aid earthly and material supports and base His hopes of success on something other than G.o.d.

Accidentally, there is this further demonstration contained in the poverty of the Holy Family, that, namely, the completest spiritual privilege, the fullest spiritual development, is independent of "possessions." It is no doubt true that "great possessions" do not of necessity create a bar in all cases to spiritual accomplishment; but to many of us it is a consolation to know that the completest sanct.i.ty humanity has known has been wrought out in utter poverty of life. We shall have occasion to speak more of this later; we now only note the fact that those whom we meet in the pages of the New Testament as waiting hopefully for the redemption of Israel are waiting in poverty and hard work.

What we find in S. Mary as she pa.s.ses through the ceremony of her purification from a child-bearing which had in no circ.u.mstance of it anything impure, is the spirit of sacrifice which submission to the law implies. She has caught the spirit of her Son, the spirit of selfless offering to the will of G.o.d. It is the central accomplishment of the life of sanct.i.ty. The life of sanct.i.ty must be wrought out from the centre, from our contact with G.o.d. No one becomes holy by works, whatever may be the nature of the works. Works, the external life, are the expression of what we are, they are the externalization of our character. If they be not the expression of a life hid with Christ in G.o.d they can have no spiritual value, whatever may be their social value. The kind of works which "are done to be seen of men" "have their reward," that is, the sort of reward they seek, human approval; they have no value in the realm of the spirit.

But the life that is lived as sacrifice, as a thing perfectly offered to G.o.d, is a life growing up in G.o.d day by day. It is our Lord's life, summed up from this point of view in the "I come to do thy will, O G.o.d." Its most perfect reflection is caught by blessed Mary with her acceptance of G.o.d's will: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord." But it is the life expression of all sanct.i.ty; for the saint is such chiefly by virtue of his sacrificial att.i.tude. It is the completest account of the life of sanct.i.ty that it "leaves all" to follow a divine call. It is the response of the Apostles who, as James and John, leave their father Zebedee and the boats and the nets and the hired servants, to follow Jesus. It is the answer of Matthew who rises from the receipt of custom at the Master's word. It is the answer of all saints in all times.

Sanct.i.ty means the abandonment of all for Christ: it means the embracing of the poverty of Jesus and Mary.

Is sanct.i.ty then, or the possibility of it, shut within the narrow limits of a poor life? Well, even if it were, the limits would not be so very narrow. By far the greater part of the human race at any time has been poor, as poor as the Holy Family. Unfortunately, Christianity is forgetting its vocation of poverty and becoming a matter of well-to-do-ness. But we need not forget that the poor are the majority.

However, the fact is not that economical poverty is automatically productive of spirituality, but that accepted and offered poverty is the road to the heart of G.o.d. It is not denied that the rich man may consecrate and offer his goods to G.o.d and make them instruments of G.o.d's service; but in the process he runs great risk of deceiving himself and of attempting to deceive G.o.d--the risk of quietly subst.i.tuting for the spirit of sacrifice the spirit of commercial bargaining, and attempting to buy the favour of G.o.d, and of ransoming his great possessions by a well-calculated tribute. It is not so much our possessions as the way we hold them that is in question; it is a question whether the inner motive of our life is the will to sacrifice or the will to be rich. "They that desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful l.u.s.ts which drown men in destruction and perdition,"

These dangers S. Paul noted as the besetting dangers of riches are counteracted by the possession of the spirit of sacrifice which holds all things at the disposal of G.o.d, and views life as opportunity for the service of G.o.d. And in so estimating life, we must remember that money is not the only thing that human beings possess. As I pointed out the vast majority of the human race have no money: it by no means follows that they have no capacity or field for the exercise of the spirit of sacrifice. There is, for instance, an abundant opportunity for the exercise of that spirit in the glad acceptance of the narrow lot that may be ours. Probably many, indeed most, poor are only economically poor; they fall under S. Paul's criticism in that "they desire to be rich," and are therefore devoid of the spirit of sacrifice that would transform their actual poverty into a spiritual value. But all the powers and energies of life do in fact const.i.tute life's capital. A poor boy has great possessions in the gifts of nature that G.o.d has granted him. He may use this capital as he will. He may be governed by "the desire to be rich," or by the desire to consecrate himself to the will and service of G.o.d--and the working out of life will be accordingly. He may become very rich economically, or he may devote his life to the service of his fellows as physician, teacher, missionary, or in numberless other paths. Once more, the meaning of life is in its voluntary direction, and whatever may be his economic state, he may, if he will, be "rich toward G.o.d."

If what we are seeking is to follow the Gospel-life, if we are seeking to express toward man the spirit of the Master, we find abundant field for the exercise of this spirit of sacrifice in our daily relations with others. S. Paul's rule of life: "Look not every man to his own things, but every man also to the things of others," is the practical rule of the sacrificed will. It seeks to fulfil the service of the Master by taking the spirit of the Master--His helpfulness, His consideration, His sympathy--with one into the detail of the day's work. It is one of the peculiarities of human nature that it finds it quite possible to work itself up to an occasional accomplishment, especially in a spectacular setting, of spiritual works, which it finds itself quite impotent to do under the commonplace routine of life. The race experience is accurately enough summed up in the cynical proverb: "No man is a hero to his valet." It expresses the fact that in ordinary circ.u.mstances, and under commonplace temptations, we do not succeed in holding life to the accomplishment which is ours when we are, as it were, on dress parade.

In other words, we respond to the opinions we desire to create in others; and the spirit of sanct.i.ty is a response not to public opinion, but to the mind and thought of G.o.d. When we seek the mind of Christ, and seek to reproduce that mind in our own lives, seek to be possessed by it, then we shall gladly render back to G.o.d all life's riches which we have received from Him, and acknowledge in the true spirit of poverty that "all things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee."

The world has got into a very ill way of thinking of G.o.d as _force_.

Force seems in the popular mind to be the synonym of _power_. The only power that we understand is the power that _compels_, that secures the execution of its will by physical or moral constraint. With this conception of power in mind men are continually asking: "Why does not G.o.d do this or that? If he be G.o.d and wills goodness, why does He not execute goodness, use power to accomplish it?"

It ought to be unnecessary to point out that such a conception of power is quite foreign to the Christian conception of G.o.d. Goodness that is compulsory is not goodness. Human legislation, in its enforcement of law, looks not to the production of goodness but to the production of order, a quite different thing. But G.o.d's heart is set upon the sanctification of His children and is satisfied with nothing less than that. "This is the will of G.o.d, even your sanctification." But sanctification cannot be compelled. The divine method is, that "when the fulness of time was come, G.o.d sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, G.o.d sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Through this method we "were reconciled to G.o.d by the death of His Son." The result is not that we are compelled to obey, but that "the love of Christ constraineth us." The account of the apostolic authority is not that it is a commission to rule the universal Church, but "now then we are amba.s.sadors for Christ, as though G.o.d did beseech you by us; we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to G.o.d."

The study of this divine method should put us on the right track in the attempt to estimate the nature of sanct.i.ty and the results we may expect from it. We shall expect nothing of spiritual value from force. We shall be quite prepared to turn away from the governing parties in Jerusalem as from those who have repudiated the divine method and are therefore useless for the divine ends. We shall turn rather to those who gather about the temple and there, in a life of prayer and meditation, wait for the redemption. It is to these, who are the real temple of the Lord, that the Lord "shall come suddenly," that the manifestation of G.o.d will be made. And their hearts will overflow with joy as they behold the fulfilment of the promises of G.o.d.

The power of G.o.d is the power of love; and it is that love, and that love alone, that has won the victories of G.o.d. It is a very slow method, men say. No doubt. But it is the only method that has any success. The method of force seems effective; but its triumphs are illusory. Force cannot make men love, it can only make them hate. The world is being won to G.o.d by the love of G.o.d manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord. And it is as well to remember, when we are tempted to complain of the slowness of the process, that the slowness is ours, not G.o.d's. The process is slow because men will not consent to become the instruments of G.o.d's love for the world, will not transmit the crucified love of G.o.d's Son to their fellows. They continually, in their impatience, revert to force of some sort, for the attainment of spiritual ends. They become the tools of all sorts of secular ambitions which promise support in return for their co-operation. And the result may be read by any one not blinded by prejudice in the futility and incompetence of modern religions of all sorts. It is seen perhaps most of all in the pride of opinion which keeps the Christian world in a fragmentary condition, and which approaches the undoing of the sin of a divided Christendom with the preliminary announcement that no separated body must be required to admit that it has been in the wrong. Human disregard of the divine method of love and humility can hardly go farther; and the only practical result that can be expected to follow is such as followed from the negotiations of Herod and Pontius Pilate--a new Crucifixion of the Ever-sacrificed Christ.

We have risen to the divine method when we have learned to rely for spiritual results upon G.o.d alone. Then is revealed to us the power of sanct.i.ty. We turn over the pages of the lives of the saints, of those who have been great in the Kingdom of G.o.d, and we are struck by the growing influence of these men and women. They are simple men and women whose life's energy is concentrated on some special work; they are confessors or directors; they work among the very poor; they lead lives of retirement in Religious Houses; they are preachers of the Gospel; they are missionaries. The one thing that they appear to have in common is utter consecration to the work in hand. And we see, it may be with some wonder, that as they become more and more absorbed in their special work, they become more and more centres of influence. Without at all willing it they draw people about them, become centres of influences, arouse interest, become widely known. In short, they are, without willing it, centres of energy. Of what energy? Obviously, of the energy of love: the love of G.o.d manifested in them draws men to G.o.d. The man at whose disposal is unlimited force compels men to do his will; but he draws no one to him except the hypocrite and the sycophant who expect to gain something by their servility. The saint draws men, not to himself, but to G.o.d; for obviously it is not his power but G.o.d's power that is being manifested through him.

Unless we are very unfortunate we all know people whose attractiveness is the attractiveness of simple goodness. They are not learned nor influential nor witty nor clever, but we like to be with them. When we are asked why, we can only explain it by the attractiveness of their Christlikeness. What we gain from intercourse with them is spiritual insight and power. Their influence might be described as sacramental: they are means our Blessed Lord uses to impart Himself. They are so filled with the mind of Christ that they easily show Him to the world; and withal, quite unconsciously. For great love is possible only where there is great humility.

And this power of sanct.i.ty which is the outcome of union with G.o.d is a permanent acquisition to the Kingdom of G.o.d. G.o.d's Kingdom is ultimately a Kingdom of saints. The sphere of G.o.d's self-manifestation in human life increases ever as the saints increase; and the power of sanct.i.ty necessarily remains while the saint remains, that is, forever. The saint remains a permanent organ of the Body of Christ, a perdurable instrument of the divine love. To speak humanly, the more saints there are, the more the love of G.o.d can manifest itself; the wider its influence on humanity. And the greater the Saint, that is, the nearer the Saint approaches the perfection of G.o.d, to which he is called--Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect--the more influential he must be; that is the more perfectly he will show the divine likeness and transmit the divine influence. When we think of the power of the saints as intercessors that is what actually we are thinking of,--the perfection of their understanding of the mind of Christ.

But to return to this world and to the gathering in the temple on the day of the Purification. These are they in whom the hope of Israel rests. Israel is not a failure because it has brought forth these. G.o.d's work through the centuries has not come to naught because in these there is the possibility of a new beginning. The consummate flower of Israel's life is the Blessed Mother through whom G.o.d becomes man; and these who meet her in the temple are the representatives of those hidden ones in Israel who will be the field wherein the seed of the Word can be sown and where it will bring forth fruit an hundredfold. Jesus, this Child, is G.o.d made man; and these around Him to-day, Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, are those who will receive His love and will show its power in the universe forever.

And so it will remain always; the good ground wherein the seed may be sown and bring forth unto eternal life is the spiritual nature of man, made ready by humility and love,--"In quietness and confidence shall be your strength." In the quietness that waits for G.o.d to act, the confidence that knows that He will act when the time comes. It is well if our aspiration is to be of the number of those who live lives hid with Christ in G.o.d; who are seeking nothing but that the love of G.o.d may be shed abroad in their hearts; who are "constrained" by nothing but the love of Jesus. It is true that this simplicity of motive and aim will bring it about that our lives will be hidden lives, lives of which the world will take no note. We may be quite sure that none of the rulers of Israel thought much about old Simeon who pa.s.sed his time praying in the temple. And if we want to be known of rulers it is doubtless a mistake to take the road that Simeon followed. But the reward of that way was that he saw "the Lord's Christ," that it was permitted him to take in his arms Incarnate G.o.d, and then, in his rapture, to sing _Nunc Dimittis_. We cannot travel two roads at once. When the Holy Family goes out from the temple it can go, if it will, to the palace of Herod, or it can go back to Bethlehem. It cannot go both ways and we know the way that it took. And we in our self-examination to-night can see two roads stretching out before us. We can go the way of the world, the way that seeks (whether it finds or no) popularity and prominence, or we can join the Holy Family and in company with Jesus and Mary and Joseph go back to the quietness and hiddenness of the House of Bread where the saints dwell. With them, sheltered by the Sacrifice of Jesus and the prayers of Mary and Joseph we can wait for the Redemption in the full manifestation of the life of G.o.d in us, and for the time when the love of G.o.d shall be fully "shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given us."

O Sion, ope thy temple-gates; See, Christ, the Priest and Victim, waits-- Let lifeless shadows flee: No more to heaven shall vainly rise The ancient rites--a sacrifice All pure and perfect, see.

Behold, the Maiden knowing well The hidden G.o.dhead that doth dwell In him her infant Son: And with her Infant, see her bring The doves, the humble offering For Christ, the Holy One.

Here, all who for his coming sighed Behold him, and are satisfied-- Their faith the prize hath won: While Mary, in her breast conceals The holy joys her Lord reveals, And ponders them alone.

Come, let us tune our hearts to sing The glory of our G.o.d and King, The blessed One and Three: Be everlasting praise and love To him who reigns in heaven above, Through all eternity.

PART TWO

CHAPTER X

EGYPT

The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt.

S. Matt. II, 13.

Deliver us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, from all evils past, present, and to come: and at the intercession for us of Blessed Mary who brought forth G.o.d and our Lord, Jesus Christ; and of the holy apostles Peter, and Paul, and Andrew; and of blessed Ambrose Thy confessor, and bishop, together with all Thy saints, favorably give peace in our days, that, a.s.sisted by the help of Thy mercy, we may ever be both delivered from sin, and safe from all turmoil. Fulfil this, by Him, with Whom Thou livest blessed, and reignest G.o.d, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever.

AMBROSIAN.

Those who live in intimate union with G.o.d, the peace of whose lives is untroubled by the constant irruption of sin, are peculiarly sensitive to that mode of the divine action that we call supernatural. I suppose that it is not that G.o.d wishes to reveal Himself to souls only at crises of their experience or under exceptional conditions, but that only souls of an exceptional spiritual sensitivity are capable of this sort of approach. Communications of the divine will through dream or vision of inner voice are the accompaniment of sanct.i.ty; one may almost say that they are the normal means in the case of advanced sanct.i.ty. Most of us are too much immersed in the world, are too much the slaves of material things, to be open to this still, small voice of revelation. Our eyes are dimned by the garish light of the world, and our ears dulled by its clamour, so that our powers of spiritual perception are of the slightest. This is quite intelligible; and we ought not to fall into the mistake of a.s.suming that our undeveloped spirituality is normal, and that what does not happen to us is inconceivable as having happened at all. If we want to know the truth about spiritual phenomena we shall put ourselves to school to those whose spiritual natures have attained the highest development and in whose experience spiritual phenomena are of almost daily happening.

To the man "whose talk is of oxen," whose whole life is absorbed in the study of material things, a purely spiritual manifestation comes as a surprise. His instinctive impulse is to deny its reality as a thing obviously impertinent to his understanding of life. But one whose life is based on spiritual postulates, who is, however feebly, attempting to shape life in accordance with spiritual principles, though he may never have attained anything that can be interpreted as a distinct revelation from G.o.d by vision or voice or otherwise, yet must he by the very basic a.s.sumptions of his life be ready to regard such manifestations of G.o.d as intelligible, and indeed to be expected. So far from regarding divine interventions in life as impossible, we shall regard the Christian life which has no experience of them as abnormal, as not having realised its inheritance. The degree and kind of such intervention in life will vary; but it is the fact of the intervention that is important: the mode in a special case will be determined by the needs of that case. As we think along these lines we reach the conclusion that what we call the supernatural is not the unnatural or the abnormal, but is a higher mode of the natural.

We are not surprised therefore to find that those whose spiritual development was such as to make it possible for G.o.d to choose them to fulfil special offices in relation to the Incarnation; who could be chosen to be, in the one case, the Mother of G.o.d-incarnate, and in the other, to be the guardian of the divine Child and His Blessed Mother, have the divine will in regard to the details of the trust committed to them, imparted to them in vision and in dream. So far from such vision and dream suggesting to us "a mythical element" in the Gospel narratives, they rather confirm our faith in that they harmonize with our instinctive conclusions as to what would be natural under the circ.u.mstances. We are prepared to be told that at this crisis in the Holy Child's life "the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word; for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt."

Thus early in our Lord's life is the element of tragedy introduced. The Incarnation of G.o.d stirs the diabolic powers, the rulers of "this darkness" to excited activity. The companion picture of the Nativity, of the Holy Child lying in Mary's arms, of the wondering shepherds, of the Magi from a far country,--the shadow of all this idyllic beauty is the ma.s.sacre of the Innocents, the wailing of Rachel for her children. It is, as it were, the opening of a new stage in the world-old conflict where the powers of evil appear to have the advantage and can show the bodies of murdered infants as the trophies of their victory.

But are we to think of the death of a child as a disaster? Has any actual victory redounded to the Prince of Power of the Air? One understands of course the grief and sense of loss that attends the death of any child, the breaking of the dreams which had gathered about its future. What the father and the mother dreamed over the cradle and planned for the future does not come to pa.s.s--all that is true. But in a consideration of the broader interests involved, does not the death of a baby have a meaning far deeper than a disappointment of hopes and dreams? It is true, is it not? that the coming of the child brought enrichment into the life of its parents? There was a new love born for this one child which is not the common property of all the children of the family, but is the peculiar possession of this child and its parents. Life--the life of the parents--is better and n.o.bler by virtue of this love. They understand this, because when they stand by the side of the child's coffin they never feel that it had been better that this child had not come into existence. And more than that: as they commit this fragile body to the grave they know that there is no real sense in which they can say that they have lost this child. Rather, the child is a perpetual treasure, for the moment contemplated through tears, but presently to be thought of with unclouded joy. It is so wonderful a thing to think of this pure soul caught back to G.o.d; to think of it growing to spiritual maturity in G.o.d's very presence; to think of it following the Lamb withersoever He goeth. Yes: to think of it also as our child still, with our love in its heart, knowing that it has a father and a mother on earth, and, that, just because of its early death, it can be to them, what otherwise they would have been to it--the guard and helper of their Jives. In G.o.d's presence are the souls of children as perpetual intercessors for those whom they have left on earth; and they may well rejoice before G.o.d in that what appeared the tragedy of their death was in fact a recall from the field of battle before the testing of their life was made. We wept as over an irreparable loss,

While into nothingness crept back a host Of shadows unexplored, of sins unsinned.

The artists have imagined the souls of those who first died for Jesus attending Him on the way to Egypt as a celestial guard. In any case we are certain that the angels who watched about Him so closely all His life were with the Holy Family as they set out upon the way of exile. It would have been a wearisome march but that Jesus was there. His presence lightened all the toils of the desert way. Egypt, their place of refuge, would not have seemed to them what it seems to us, a land of wonder, of marvellous creations of human skill and intelligence, but a place of banishment from all that was dear, from the ties of home and religion.

The religion which lay wrapped in the Holy Child was to break down barriers and hindrances to the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d; but the time was not yet.

For them still the Holy Land, Jerusalem, the Temple, were the place of G.o.d's manifestation, and all else the dwelling place of idols. They must have shuddered in abhorrence at those strange forms of G.o.ds which rose about them on every hand. We cannot ourselves fail to draw the contrast between the statues which filled the Egyptian sanctuaries and before which all Egypt, rich and poor, mighty and humble, prostrated themselves, and this Child sleeping on Mary's breast. The imagination of the Christian community later caught this contrast and embodied it in the legend that when Jesus crossed the border of Egypt, all the idols of the land of Egypt fell down.

We cannot follow the thought of the Blessed Mother through these strange scenes and the experiences of these days. No doubt in the Jewish communities already flouris.h.i.+ng in Egypt there would be welcome and the means of livelihood. But there would be perplexing questions to one whose habit it was to keep all things which concerned her strange Child hidden in her heart, the subject of constant meditation. Why, after the divine action which had been so constant from His conception to His birth, and in the circ.u.mstances which attended His birth, this reversal, this defeat and flight? Why after Bethlehem, Egypt? Why after Gabriel, Herod?

It brings us back again to the primary fact that the Incarnation is essentially a stage in a battle, and that the nature of G.o.d's battles is such that He constantly appears to lose them. He "goes forth as a giant to run His course"; but the eyes of man cannot see the giant--they see only a Babe laid in a manger. We are tricked by our notion of what is powerful.

"They all were looking for a king To slay their foes and lift them high; Thou cam'st, a little baby thing That made a woman cry."

The battle presents itself to us as a demand that we choose, that we take sides. The demand of Christ is that we a.s.sociate ourselves with Him, or that we define our position as on the other side. "The friends.h.i.+p of the world is enmity with G.o.d" is a saying that is true when reversed: The friends.h.i.+p of G.o.d is enmity with the world. An open disclosure of the friends.h.i.+p of G.o.d sets all the powers of the world against us. This may be uncomfortable; but there does not appear to be any way of avoiding the opposition.

Our Lord, in His Incarnation, not only stripped Himself of His glory, took the servant form, and in doing so deliberately deprived Himself of certain means which would have been vastly influential in dealing with men, but He also declined, in a.s.suming human nature, to a.s.sume it under conditions which would have conferred upon Him any advent.i.tious advantage in the prosecution of His work. He would display to men neither divine nor human glory: He would have no aid from power or position, from wealth or learning. He undertook His work in the strength of a pure humanity united with G.o.d. He declined all else. And He found that almost the first event of His life was to be driven into exile.

And they who are a.s.sociated with Him necessarily share His fortunes.