person." And to one of the Apostles, who was longing for the immediate vision of God, and who said to Him, "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us," our Lord replied, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." When Prophets have told us their visions and Apostles their gospel, their work is done. They are weak, erring, sinful men like ourselves. They have seen the Divine glory, and they tell us what they have seen. They have been taught of God, and they tell us what they have learnt. But the revelation is over when they cease to speak. Their personal character and history, their relations to their friends and to their enemies, their occupations, their sorrows and their joys-all these have only a secondary and human interest. It is not so with our Lord Jesus Christ. Far more of God was revealed in what He was, in what He did, and in what He suffered, than in what He taught.

The resources of human language had been almost exhausted, before Christ came, in the attempt to celebrate the majesty, the holiness, and the mercy of God; and although, as a Teacher of religious truth, the Lord Jesus Christ had a unique power, we misapprehend the character of the supremacy which He claims, if we suppose that it is to be illustrated and vindicated by placing His mere words side by side with the words of Prophets who preceded Him. I doubt whether He ever said anything about the Divine compassion more pathetic or more perfectly beautiful than had been said 2 John xiv. 9.

I Heb. i. 3.

by the writer of the hundred-and-third Psalm: "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust." It is not in the words of Christ that we find a fuller and deeper revelation of the Divine compassion than in the words of the Psalmist, but in His deeds.

"There came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And Jesus ["moved with compassion:" Mark i. 41] put forth His hand and touched him "-touched the man, from whom his very kindred had shrunk;—" touched him," it was the first time that the leper had felt the warmth and pressure of a human hand since his loathsome disease came upon him;-" touched him, and said, I will, be thou clean."

And when the heart of Christ was filled with sorrow by the news of John the Baptist's death, and He went into "a desert place apart," He did not, in the weariness of His grief and the solemn anticipation of His own end, turn away, vexed and annoyed, from the people that followed Him into His solitude; but when He saw the great multitude, He "was moved with compassion, and he healed their sick." "

Every form of human sorrow affected Him. "He came nigh to the gate of the city [of Nain], and, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son

I Matt. viii. 2, 3; Mark i. 40, 41; Luke iv. 12, 13. It is re markable that every one of the Synoptical Gospels notices the fact that our Lord "touched" the man. 2 Matt. xiv. 14.

of his mother, and she was a widow." She was a stranger, and made no appeal to His pity. But "when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not. And He came and touched the bier; and they that bare him stood still. And He said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak."

Nor is this all.

The story is completed by the simple words, which suggest a scene of ineffable tenderness: "And He delivered him to his mother."

narrative of the death Our Lord had finally

Still more affecting is the and resurrection of Lazarus. left Galilee, and had come to the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, to remain there till He was betrayed, condemned, and crucified. The dark succession of sorrows through which He was to pass was near, and He knew it; but when He saw Mary "weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, He groaned in spirit, and was troubled." They asked Him to come with them to the grave, and “ 'Jesus wept." He was about to raise His friend, but the actual grief of those whom He loved, almost broke His heart, and He wept; wept too, perhaps, as has been suggested, "in pure sympathy with the sorrows of humanity, for the myriad myriads of desolate mourners who could not, with Mary, fly to Him, and say, 'Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my motherbrother-sister had not died!'"2 When we read these 1 Luke vii. 11-15.

• HENRY ROGERS: Defence of the Eclipse of Faith, p. 143.

narratives, and remember His own declaration, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," even the words of the Psalmist seem to lose all their tenderness

and power.

The point on which I am insisting is so important, and is so often forgotten in this controversy, that, obvious as it is, I must venture to illustrate it still more fully.

It is acknowledged even by those who not only reject the doctrine of the Atonement but deny our Lord's Divinity, that He revealed the infinite mercy of God as it had never been revealed before. It is certain that since His coming, and as the result of His coming, the Divine mercy has attracted a stronger and a deeper trust, and that sinful men have had more perfect rest in God.

But how was the nobler revelation made? Is it possible to quote from the discourses of our Lord any more thrilling representations of the mercy of God than can be quoted from the Old Testament? Did He say more than Nehemiah said: "Thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness"? Or more than Jonah said, who shrunk from threatening Nineveh with the Divine judgments, because he feared that the threatenings might, after all, never be fulfilled: "Therefore I fled unto Tarshish; for I knew that Thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest Thee of the evil"? Did our Lord say more than Isaiah said: "Though your sins be as I Neh. ix. 17. 2 Jonah iv. 2.

scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool :" "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, and He will abundantly pardon"? The passages of Scripture which come to our lips when we wish to acknowledge in nobler and richer words than our own the longsuffering of God and His readiness to pardon sin, are rarely taken from the discourses of Christ; they are the words of Psalmists, Prophets, and Apostles.

If it is objected that there is nothing in the Old Testament, and nothing else in the New, comparable to the three great parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Piece of Money, and the Prodigal Son, the very objection sustains the position for which I am contending. These parables were spoken by our Lord in selfdefence. They explained and vindicated what the Pharisees charged Him with as a crime: "This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them;" and to me even these wonderful parables are a less affecting illustration of the energy and tenderness of the Divine mercy than the freedom with which the Son of God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, the Holy One and the Just, sat at table with irreligious and sinful men, spoke to them as a friend, and encouraged them to forsake sin and win eternal life and glory. It was by His assumption of our nature, by the gentleness and kindness with which He treated those who were guilty of the worst sins, by His merciful words to repenting