ever seen such promise in His life as at
this hour: seedtime seemed to them to be past, and the harvest at hand.
Their Master seemed to be fairly launched on the tide that was to carry
Him to the highest pinnacle of human glory. And so He was, but not, as
they thought, by simply yielding Himself to be set as King and to
receive adoration from Jew and Gentile. He saw with different eyes, and
that it was a different exaltation which would win for Him lasting
sovereignty: "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." He knew
the law which governed the development of human life. He knew that a
total and absolute surrender of self to the uses and needs of others was
the one path to permanent life, and that in His case this absolute
surrender involved death.

A comparison of the good done by the life of Christ with that done by
His death shows how truly He judged when He declared that it was by His
death He should effectually gather all men to Him. His death, like the
dissolution of the seed, seemed to terminate His work, but really was
its germination. So long as He lived, it was but His single strength
that was used; He abode alone. There was great virtue in His life--great
power for the healing, the instruction, the elevation, of mankind. In
His brief public career He suggested much to the influential men of His
time, set all men who knew Him a-thinking, aided many to reform their
lives, and removed a large amount of distress and disease. He
communicated to the world a mass of new truth, so that those who have
lived after Him have stood at quite a different level of knowledge from
that of those who lived before Him. And yet how little of the proper
results of Christ's influence, how little understanding of Christianity,
do you find even in His nearest friends until He died. By the visible
appearance and the external benefits and the false expectations His
greatness created, the minds of men were detained from penetrating to
the spirit and mind of Christ. It was expedient for them that He should
go away, for until He went they depended on His visible power, and His
spirit could not be wholly received by them. They were looking at the
husk of the seed, and its life could not reach them. They were looking
for help from Him instead of themselves becoming like Him.

And therefore He chose at an early age to cease from all that was
marvellous and beneficent in His life among men. He might, as these
Greeks suggested, have v