manity that has ever walked
the earth, to whom all others, even the most complete, are fragments,
the fairest foul, the most gracious harsh. In Him and in Him only has
been 'given the world assurance of a man.'

The other condition which is here introduced is 'born under the law,' by
which it may be noted that the Apostle does not mean the Jewish law,
inasmuch as he does not use the definite article with the word. No doubt
our Lord was born as a Jew and subject to the Jewish law, but the
thought here and in the subsequent clause is extended to the general
notion of law. The very heart of our Lord's human identification is that
He too had duties imperative upon Him, and the language of one of the
Messianic psalms was the voice of His filial will during all His earthly
life; 'Lo! I come, in the volume of the Book it is written of Me, I
delight to do Thy will and Thy law is within My heart.' The very secret
of His human life was discovered by the heathen centurion, at whose
faith He marvelled, who said, 'I _also_ am a man under authority'; so
was Jesus. The Son had ever been obedient in the sweet communion of
Heaven, but the obedience of Jesus was not less perfect, continual and
unstained. It was the man Jesus who summed up His earthly life in 'I do
always the things that please Him'; it was the man Jesus who, under the
olives in Gethsemane, made the great surrender and yielded up His own
will to the will of the Father who sent Him.

He was under law in that the will of God dominated His life, but He was
not so under it as we are on whom its precepts often press as an
unwelcome obligation, and who know the weight of guilt and condemnation.
If there is any one characteristic of Jesus more conspicuous than
another it is the absence in Him of any consciousness of deficiency in
His obedience to law, and yet that absence does not in the smallest
degree infringe on His claim to be 'meek and lowly in heart.' 'Which of
you convinceth Me of sin?' would have been from any other man a defiance
that would have provoked a crushing answer if it had not been taken as a
proof of hopeless ignorance of self, but when Christ asks the question,
the world is silent. The silence has been all but unbroken for nineteen
hundred years, and of all the busy and often unfriendly eyes that have
been occupied with Him and the hostile pens that have been eager to say
something new about Him, none have discovered a flaw, or dared to 'hint
a fault.' That