onceptions, which we have piled together between God
and ourselves, Christ clears away; and thus He opens the path to God.

And He opens it in another way too, on which I cannot dwell. It is only
the God manifest in Jesus Christ that draws men's hearts to Him. The
attractive power of the divine nature is ail in Him who has said, 'I, if
I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' The God whom men know, or
think they know, outside of the revelation of divinity in Jesus Christ,
is a God before whom they sometimes tremble, who is far more often their
terror than their love, who is their 'ghastliest doubt' still more
frequently than He is their 'dearest faith.' But the God that is in
Christ woos and wins men to Him, and from His great sweetness there
streams out, as it were, a magnetic influence that draws hearts to Him.
The God that is in Christ is the only God that humanity ever loved.
Other gods they may have worshipped with cowering terror and with
far-off lip reverence, but this God has a heart, and wins hearts because
He has. So Christ opens the way to Him.

And still further, in a yet higher fashion, that Saviour is the
Path-breaker to the Divine Presence, in that He not only makes God known
to us, and not only makes Him so known to us as to draw us to Him, but
in that likewise He, by the fact of His Cross and passion, has borne and
borne away the impediments of our own sin and transgression which rise
for ever between us and Him, unless He shall sweep them out of the way.
He has made 'the rough places plain and the crooked things straight';
levelled the mountains and raised the valleys, and cast up across all
the wilderness of the world a highway along which 'the wayfaring man
though a fool' may travel. Narrow understandings may know, and selfish
hearts may love, and low-pitched confessions may reach the ear of the
God who comes near to us in Christ, that we in Christ may come near to
Him. The Breaker is gone up before us; 'having therefore, brethren,
boldness to enter into the holiest of all ... by a new and living way,
which He hath consecrated for us ... let us draw near with true hearts'

III. Then still further, another modification of this figure is found in
the frequent representations of Scripture, by which our Lord is the
Breaker, going up before us in the sense that He is the Captain of our
life's march.

We have, in the words of my text, the image of the gladly-gathered
people flocking after the Leader.