must be about My Father's business?" That in Him
which is most conspicuous and which He wishes to be most conspicuous is
perfect sonship; filial trust and duty carried to its perfect height. It
is this perfect filial unanimity with the Father which makes His life
valuable, significant, different from all other lives. It is this which
makes Him the perfect representative of the Father; which enables Him to
be God's perfect messenger to men, doing always and only the will of God
in men's sight. He is in the world not for the sake of fulfilling any
private schemes of His own, but having it as His sole motive and aim to
do the Father's will.

This perfect filial feeling had no doubt its root in the eternal
relation of the Son to the Father. It was the continuance, upon earth
and under new conditions, of the life He already had enjoyed with the
Father. Having assumed human nature, He could reveal Himself only so far
as that nature allowed Him. His revelation, for example, was not
universal, but local, confined to one place; His human nature being
necessarily confined to one place. He did not assert superiority to all
human law; He paid taxes; He recognised lawful authority; He did not
convince men of His Divinity by superiority to all human infirmities; He
ate, slept, died as ordinary men. But through all this He maintained a
perfect harmony with the Divine will. It was this which differentiated
Him from ordinary men, that He maintained throughout His life an
attitude of undoubting trust in the Father and devotion to Him. It was
through the human will of the Lord that the Divine will of the Eternal
Son uniformly worked and used the whole of His human nature.

It is in this perfect Sonship of Christ we first learn what a son should
be. It is by His perfect loyalty to the Father's will, by His uniform
adoption of it as the best, the only, thing He can do, that we begin to
understand our connection with God, and to recognise that in His will
alone is our blessedness. Naturally we resent the rule of any will but
our own; we have not by nature such love for God as would put His will
first. To our reason it becomes manifest that there is nothing higher or
happier for us than to sink ourselves in God; we see that there is
nothing more elevating, nothing more essential to a hopeful life than
that we make God's purposes in the world our own, and do that very thing
which He sees to be worth doing and which He desires to do. Yet we fi