home in Bethlehem, where Mary brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes. Angels enter the scene and heaven seems wonderfully near to the spot where this world's Redeemer is born, the second Adam, the one perfect Man. We follow his story until we see him parted from his disciples and carried up into heaven.

We now open the Fourth Gospel and look for the background of the picture of Jesus. At first we can see nothing in the excess of wonderful light from another world. No scene greets us such as painters can glorify. No manger, no angels, no star pointing the way, no wise men from the East. Void of all form is the wide area behind the world's Redeemer. We are looking into infinite space and timeless time. The earth has vanished, for it is not as yet called into existence. Every star is blotted out of the firmament, for the heavens are not as yet. Man exists only in the thought of God. No angel nor archangel nor smallest vestige of created matter can anywhere be discovered. And yet there is one there that inhabits eternity and is not solitary. Ages on ages he has been. For him there is blessed society. He is an everlasting Father because he has an everlasting Son. And there is Holy Spirit there. “In the beginning," so we read, "was the Word"-the Son in whom the Father was forever going out of himself and beholding himself mirrored. By this Word, the Son, he in his own good time and pleasure created and upholds worlds. Through the Son man appears in history. But man falls into disobedience, from which he must be rescued through the same Son, the everlasting Word of the Father. So, in the fulness of time, "The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we [men] beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth." He is described by John in new terms, as the Light and the Life of men. We follow the story to its end and we hear Jesus praying for his disciples of all ages, that they may be

with him where he is, that they may behold his glory, the glory which he had with the Father before the world was. The first three gospels leave us with the thought of missionary service-"Go ye into all the world." The last gospel takes us up into heaven, past all the sorrow and toil of time, even into the eternity from which the Word of God at the first came forth for our salvation.

And yet no one of the evangelists gives us a better picture of a perfect man, one like unto us in all things, than this fourth evangelist, who is so transcendental. In his gospel we behold Jesus sitting at the well of Jacob, weary, hungry and thirsty. He is seen to weep at the grave of Lazarus out of pure sympathy. He feels deeply for the disciples, orphaned after his death. He prays as men must pray and gets strength from his Father. On the cross he remembers his mother.

Let us seize upon the majestic truth of the Incarnation, of the eternal Word made flesh and dwelling among us; of the reality of the existence of Christ before all worlds and all time. Let us grasp all that is involved in the saying that he dwelt among us, or, as in the original, "tabernacled," that is, "tented" or "camped," among us. It was only an episode in his eternal life as Son, when for three and thirty years he deliberately laid aside the divine mode of existence and took up the human mode of existence, limiting himself in all things to the measure of our natures and so accomplishing our redemption from sin and bringing to us the free gift of eternal life. The act was one of infinite humiliation. That humiliation began when he was born in the manger and made under the law. The apostle Paul, who obtained his gospel not through the other apostles, but straight from Christ himself, tells us that the Son of God, being in the form of God, did not think it a thing to be grasped that he should be equal with God, but emptied himself of glory and power, became man, was

a slave, was obedient even to the point of dying the death of the cross; for which God hath highly exalted him and given him a name above every name.

We are here, just by the simple reproduction of the gospel narratives, brought face to face with the amazing mystery of godliness. "God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory."

But it is just this insoluble mystery that has taken hold on the world, has bound together the generations of believers, which holds them together to-day and will do so to the end. The presence of God is in it all. The very impossibility of ever fully comprehending how God could become true man has the divine power within it and offers itself to the faith of the ages. The little figure which the rationalists would leave us, only of one perfectly comprehensible to the common mind, this Jesus, the amiable philanthropist who is not the eternal Son of God, has no power over any one. Man at his highest cannot make a Saviour out of his own brain and heart. He cannot reduce the holy gospels to a commonsense level and say that Jesus was this and that, but not the supernatural and redeeming Son of God, who with the Father and the Spirit is to be worshiped; he cannot fashion a little, easily understood Christ and have anything the world can love or lay hold of. God only can give us a Saviour. And he does it as God. When we draw nigh to God we are ready to receive this Saviour who dwelt among us, who came to his own and his own received him not. This faith in the Saviour to be worshiped is the only faith of the true Church of God. By it delicate maidens, in the primitive ages, went calmly forth into the arena at Rome and heard the fierce roar of the multitudes of human voices and were torn to pieces by the wild beasts. By it martyrs have gone cheerfully to the flames. By it men have not counted their lives dear unto

themselves, but have penetrated the wilds of Africa, or faced cannibals in the islands of the sea. Time would fail us to rehearse the story of the power of the faith that rests on the Divine and Eternal Son of God, who, for us men and for our sins, dwelt among us, bore our sins in his own body on the tree, rose from the tomb and ascended to the Father, from whence he shall come again the second time to them that look for him, apart from sin unto salvation.

The trouble we are sure to feel in trying to comprehend the humilation of Christ was not felt by himself. He had no trouble in speaking of himself in this wise: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above;" "I came forth and am come from God." "And no man hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven;" "Before Abraham was, I am." Often he speaks of himself as having come into the world, just as we should speak of having come into this country from Europe. Always he feels that he is among us on a mission. Sometimes it is the Father's part and sometimes his own free will that effects his coming. Listen to these sayings and let them sink down into your hearts :-"My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work." "He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which sent him." "I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." But he also says: "I am the living bread which came down out of heaven." "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." Thus the two pictures blend together and show us the one Son of Man and Son of God.

"In him was life; and the life was the light of men." These two words constantly appear in the writings of John. First life is mentioned, and then light as its result. In other words, it is through life as it is in Jesus Christ that light comes to us and dwells in us. In his light we see light. The eternal life, manifested, becomes light. The life

brought into our souls by regeneration becomes light upon our path and turns us in time into lights in the world, holding forth the Word of life. Get true spiritual life into a man and he begins to be light himself. He yields light to others. Once he was darkness. His world was a dark world. His influence was depressing and darkening. Now he is a child of light and is called to walk in the light. The very countenance has a light it once had not. We must read the ninth verse so that it shall say to us that the true light, coming into this world of darkness from the other world of God's immediate presence, lightens every man. Some faint glow from it appears everywhere, even in heathen darkness. Whatsoever light men have in their consciences is from the Light of the World.

"The Word became flesh!" Have you ever thought that God speaks first? You think you speak to him first in the day when you kneel in your prayer, but it is not so. He spoke yesterday and he wakened you. You recall the hour, long ago, when, out of much anguish and many tears, you sought after Him whom you could not seem to find, and when you spoke to Him sincerely it seemed to you that you had first spoken to Him and called his attention to your little self. But no! Others had spoken to him for you before, or you would never have called on his name. The procession of those who have prayed lengthens to the history of the race, and still no one has spoken before God spoke. He speaks first to the world. Back in his own proper eternity he began by speaking the Word, and that Word was a living person who, getting himself heard in sundry times and divers manners, at length, in the fulness of times became a man, Jesus, the Christ.

And that divine man is God's message-his word to you, spoken in everlasting love and power. When you hear him you will live. The Word will give you 1.fe indeed. Christ is God's word to you. Study with prayer his words—they