to their need. They lived upon Him. It
was His life which maintained life in them. By communion with Him they
were formed in His likeness.

The presentation of Christ to men now divides them into two classes, as
at the first. There are always those who accept and those who reject
Him. His contemporaries showed, for the most part, a complete ignorance
of what might be expected of God, a native inability to understand
spiritual greatness, and to relish it when presented to them. And yet
Christ's claims were made with such an air of authority and truth, and
His whole character and bearing were so consistent, that they were half
persuaded He was all He said. It is chiefly because we have not a
perfect sympathy with goodness, and do not know its value, that we do
not at once and universally acknowledge Christ. There is in men an
instinct that tells them what blessings Christ will secure to them, and
they decline connection with Him because they are conscious that their
ways are not His ways, nor their hopes His hopes. The very presentation
to men of the possibility of becoming perfectly pure reveals what at
heart they are. By the judgment each man passes on Christ he passes
judgment on himself.

Let us stir ourselves to a clearer decision by remembering that He is
presented to us as to His contemporaries. Time was when any one going
into the synagogue of Nazareth would have seen Him, and might have
spoken with Him. But the particular thirty years during which this
manifestation of God on earth lasted makes no material difference to the
thing itself. The Incarnation was to be some time, and it is as real
having occurred then as if it were occurring now. It occurred in its fit
time; but its bearing on us is not dependent on the time of its
occurrence. If it had been accomplished in our day, what should we have
thought of it? Would it have been nothing to us to see God, to hear Him,
perhaps to have had His eye turned upon us with personal observation,
with pity, with remonstrance? Would it have been nothing to us to see
Him taking the sinners place, scourged, mocked, crucified? Is it
conceivable that in presence of such a manifestation of God we should
have been indifferent? Would not our whole nature have burned with shame
that we and our fellow-men should have brought our God to this? And are
we to suffer the mere fact of Christ's being incarnate in a past age and
not in our own, to alter our attitude towards Him, and blind