other elements in our complex
being? The spiritual man is not the man who has starved his physical or
intellectual being; but the man whose whole nature, harmoniously
developed in the whole range of its varied gifts and powers and
faculties, is altogether brought under the mastery of that which is
highest in him, that spirit in which he is akin to God, the wearer of the
Divine Image. The saintliest, loftiest characters of men and women have
been the fruits of this discipline.

We see the final demonstration of the purpose of pain in Him Who "learnt
obedience by the things which He suffered." This one word which tells of
physical suffering, tells also, as we have already seen, of the victory
gained over it by His human Spirit. It was by the reaction of that
Spirit under sharpest bodily pain, that the moral perfection of the Son
of man ceased to be potential, and became actual. So it is with us, so
at least it may be in ever-increasing measure, when pain is accepted and
met in the way in which Christ accepted and met His pain, not in the
spirit of useless and wild rebellion against the laws of the universe,
nor in that of a blind, fatalistic, and unintelligent fatalism, which
calls itself resignation. We may, hence, learn to look beyond and behind
pain to that great law of perfection through suffering which takes
effect, as it were, spontaneously in lower forms of life; but which, in
the realm of the moral and the spiritual, demands the co-operation of the
human mind and will.

2. We may see also, in the fifth word, the revelation of the attitude of
the Son of God towards His own body. That attitude, and hence the only
genuinely and characteristically Christian attitude, may be best
described as the mean between the pampering of the body, and its savage
neglect in the interests of a _false_ asceticism.

As at first He put aside "the slumberous potion bland" and willed "to
feel all, that He might pity all," so, now His task is over, He craves,
and accepts, alleviation of His bodily pain. It is a wonderful
illustration of the true, the Christian way of regarding the body. The
human body is essentially a good and holy thing. Those sins which we
call "bodily," like all sins, have their origin in the rebellious will.
They are only distinguished from other sins, because in them the will
uses the body, and in other sins other God-given endowments of our
nature, in opposition to the eternal goodness which is the Wil