isited other lands and have continued His
healing and teaching there. He might have done more in His own time than
He did, and His time might have been indefinitely prolonged; but He
chose to cease from all this and voluntarily gave Himself to die,
judging that thereby He could do much more good than by His life. He was
straitened till this was accomplished; He felt as a man imprisoned and
whose powers are held in check. It was winter and not spring-time with
Him. There was a change to pass upon Him which should disengage the
vital forces that were in Him and cause their full power to be felt--a
change which should thaw the springs of life in Him and let them flow
forth to all. To use His own figure, He was as a seed unsown so long as
He lived, valuable only in His own proper person; but by dying His life
obtained the value of seed sown, propagating its kind in everlasting
increase.

II. The second point suggested is, that the proper value of Christ's
life consists in this--that it propagates similar lives. As seed
produces grain of its own kind, so Christ produces men like Christ. He
ceasing to do good in this world as a living man, a multitude of others
by this very cessation are raised in His likeness. By His death we
receive both inclination and ability to become with Him sons of God.
"The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge that if one
died for all, then all died; and that He died for all, that they which
live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him that died
for them." By His death He has effected an entrance for this law of
self-surrender into human life, has exhibited it in a perfect form, and
has won others to live as He lived. So that, using the figure He used,
we may say that the company of Christians now on earth are Christ in a
new form, His body indeed. "That which thou sowest, thou sowest not that
body which shall be, but bare grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath
pleased Him, and to every seed his own body." Christ having been sown,
lives now in His people. They are the body in which He dwells. And this
will be seen. For standing and looking at a head of barley waving on its
stalk, no amount of telling would persuade you that that had sprung from
a seed of wheat; and looking at any life which is characterised by
selfish ambition and eagerness for advancement and little regard for the
wants of other men, no persuasion can make it credible that that life
springs from