surely may ask what He will," and it shall be done,” yet the very chance of His will conflicting with the Father's will is anticipated, and the superiority of the Father's will provided for. "Not my will but thine be done." In the desert, on the mountain, by the table, wherever He prayed, there was the picture of the perfect prayer. Towards the condition of the praying Christ all our prayers strive, and are to be measured by the nearness with which they approach that union of perfect sympathy with God and perfect submission to God with which He laid hold of the divine willingness to help.

The result of our whole study of Prayer to-day seems to be this, that it involves far more than we ordinarily think, a certain necessary relation between the soul and God. The condition of prayer is personal; it looks to character. How this rebukes our ordinary slipshod notions of what it is to pray! God's mercy-seat is no mere stall set by the vulgar roadside, where every careless passer-by may put an easy hand out to snatch any glittering blessing that catches his eye. It stands in the holiest of holies. We can come to it only through veils and by altars of purification. To enter into it, we must enter into God.

O my dear friends, there is not one of us that can live without praying. We all know that. But praying is not "saying our prayers," not shuffling through a few petitions morning and evening, nor clamoring with imperious voices before God's presence, setting up our own will, however earnestly and vehemently, against His. "Lord teach us to pray," we ask: and the first answer is, "If ye abide in me and my

words abide in you," then ye shall pray successfully. We must be Christians first. We must enter into the new life, and, once there, Prayer will grow wonderfully easy; as easy to pray on earth, "Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me," as it will be to praise in heaven, "Thou art worthy, O Lord, for thou hast redeemed us."

XVIII.

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.

"I am Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End the First and the Last."- REV. xxii. 13.

WITH all the other deficiencies in our ordinary Christianity, every earnest Christian thinker is continually thrown back to feel that its fundamental defect is an imperfect knowledge of its great head and centre, Christ. Christ is Christianity. He does not merely teach, He is the religion which we hold. To know it, we must know Him. He is not merely the revealer, but the truth. Hence comes the high ambition to know more of the Saviour in order that our share of the salvation may be more complete. Who is He? What is there in Him that fits Him for His work? When did His work begin? By what continual power does it go on? The New Testament comes in answer to these questions to tell us all that we may know of Christ. This verse from the Revelation of St. John may help us to much knowledge of Him, and I invite you as Christians, this afternoon, to a short study of the truths which it contains.

For the verse comprises Christ's declaration of Himself. He asserts His own eternity. He is the beginning of all things and the end of all things, eternity of the past, an eternity of the future. His power for man resides in these, His two eternities,

an

each of which, His life as Alpha and His life as Omega, has its peculiar benefits for us.

And remember, at the very outset, what such a declaration must include. Christ says, "I am Eternal." Now, that must mean not merely that He has existed and shall exist forever, but also that in the forevers of the past and the future He is eternally Christ; that the special nature in which He relates Himself to us as Saviour never had a beginning and shall never have an end. Now, what is that special nature?-Christ! The word includes to our thought such a Divinity as involves the human element. Christ is the Divinely human, the humanly Divine. It is the Deity endowed with a peculiar human sympathy, showing by a genuine brotherhood the experience of man. That is to say, there are two words: God and Man. One describes pure deity, the other pure humanity. Christ is a word not identical with either, but including both. It is the Deity in which the Humanity has part; it is the Humanity in which the Deity resides. It is that special mediatorial nature which has its own double wearing of both, the ability to stand between and reconcile the separated manhood and divinity.

Keep this in mind, and then see what it will mean when we are told that this Christ nature, this divine human, has existed forever. Are we not in the habit of talking as if the redemption which called for an anointed Redeemer were a late thought in the universal history. Untold ages after the dateless time when God began to be, His almighty word was spoken, and a new world with a new race to live on

it shaped itself out from the void. In that new world a new experiment of moral life brought a catastrophe unknown before, to meet whose terrible demands the great Creator came Himself and took the nature of this last creature living in His last creation. God was made man, and Christ the God-man was made manifest before the worlds. Here we make man, you see, a late thing in the history of the universe; and how is it possible, then, that Christ, who is God with the element of human sympathy, should be eternal? And just here, as it seems to me, there comes in one of the key-passages of the Bible, which we are always far too apt to overlook. It is that verse in Genesis: "In the image of God created He man." God made man like Himself. Ages before the incarnation made God so wonderfully in the image of man, the creation had made man in the image of God.

Now, if we can comprehend that truth at all, it must be evident that before man was made the mantype existed in God. In some part of His perfect nature there was the image of what the new creation was to be. Already, before man trod the garden in the high glory of his new Godlikeness, the pattern of the thing he was to be existed in the nature of Him who was to make him. Before the clay was fashioned and the breath was given, this humanity existed in the Divinity; already there was a union of the Divine and human; and thus already there was the eternal Christ.

Stop here one minute, and see how this exalts the human nature that we wear. In the midst of the eter