SERMON IX.

The Sympathy of Christ.

HEBREWS iv. 15.

"For we have not an High Priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."

THIS passage speaks of our Blessed Lord's sym

pathy with man. We might render it, ' We have not an High Priest which cannot sympathize with our infirmities.' Not that we must limit His power of sympathy merely to the sorrows and weaknesses of humanity. He can feel for all that is simply human and natural, save so far as sin has corrupted it from its first integrity. To a hasty observer the questions so eagerly debated in early Christian times as to the exact character of our Lord's incarnation-as to whether, for instance, in Him the Eternal Word was united with a human person or with human nature-may seem over subtle and too curious, mere disquisitions of words; he would say that,

in entertaining them, the Church had too greatly forgotten the Apostle's warning, "Avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions." But a closer consideration will shew that in those questions issues the most practical were involved; that, in contending for an exact, dogmatic faith concerning them, the Church was contending for truths replete with strengthening and consoling power. This truth of Christ's sympathy, for instance, is vastly dependent upon an accurate belief concerning the nature of His incarnation. Suppose that, as certain heretics asserted, the Everlasting Son had united Himself in Mary's womb to Mary's child-that in Christ the Eternal Word had descended, so to say, upon an individual and separately existing soul—then He laid hold indeed upon that one person; He would sympathize fully, we might say, with all such circumstances as in His union with that person He Himself experienced; but we could not say that He had laid hold of the race, that He could feel for the race. But take the truth on which the Church insisted, viz. that the Eternal Word took to Himself, not any individual unit of our race, but our common humanity, that which we all share; and then it follows that His sympathy is no longer narrow and limited; He is one, not

with any single class or sort of men, but with the whole human family; He can enter not into one range of experience alone, but into all; His sympathy is with what is common to man; He can feel with and for all lots, all interests; He has what one may call an universal mind. It is this which gives the remarkable character they possess to His words in the Gospel. It is the mark, we know, of a writer of great genius that he expresses thoughts which men of the most varied ranks and periods recognise as the whisperings of their own hearts. Many men may be appreciated by this or that class of thinkers; but he is a great author whose productions are everywhere read-in the cottage and in the hall; whose passages are familiar in the mouth as household words;" a familiarity, a popularity they have attained because they seem to have a power of interpreting our common nature, because they express the feelings and reflect the inner history not of one order, or sex, or time, but of humanity. It is this gift-shared, in a greater or less degree, by men of genius-which is pre-eminently and in its perfection exhibited in our Blessed Lord. His words in the Bible never grow out of date. They are as applicable to the exigencies of the day, as wise in guiding to the solution of the social

problems of our time, as precious for the direction of the life of the Christian merchant quietly pursuing his avocations under the peaceful rule of our sovereign, as they were applicable to the struggling Church persecuted by heathen emperors; as they were precious to the Christian martyr, who dared not confess his faith but at the risk of life. In all tongues, under all climes, the words of Christ are "a lamp to the feet, and a light to the path;" and this because they are the utterances of One who shares our common humanity, whose sacred heart beats with the great heart of the race, who knows not what is in this or that man or set of men, but "what is in man." And therefore it is, again, that we are sure that, let the world change as she may, His words can never be cast aside or grow out of date.

And for this same reason also, that Christ is a partaker of our common humanity, all pure human feelings may claim sympathy from Him. His own peculiar personal experience may have been such as to win for Him the title of the "Man of Sorrows;" yet may we believe that He rejoices in our joy, as well as grieves with our grief. "Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep," is the law of sympathy for us; and ours cannot be wider in its

range than His whom it humbly seeks to imitate. Persons who can go trustfully to their Saviour in their sorrows hardly dare to do so in their innocent pleasures and enjoyments; they have a sort of latent, half-conscious feeling that enjoyment and mirth are at variance with religion; a saddened atmosphere is that which they think the meetest for the Christian pilgrim to journey under. But it is not this which we seem to learn from the Gospels. They seem to teach us that Christ has a sympathy with human joy as well as with human sadness; and though on the whole it may be "better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting," yet Christian duty does not entirely shut out our sympathies from the latter. Was not Christ found at the marriage feast? Had He no sympathy with the innocent mirth of little children, when He took them up in His arms, and smiled on them, and blessed them? I do not doubt that one motive to the performance of His miracles, one reason why He sent not one away disappointed of the multitudes who came to Him for cure, but healed them all, was the gladness He Himself had in giving gladness to so many; in short, His sympathy with the joy of those whose sufferings He relieved, of the friends to whom He gave them back in health.