And this is the first thing to put Christianity in a class cly itself. Our case was so grievous, the crisis so urgent, that God himself came and "dwelt among us,' and worked and suffered among and with us. I remember that years.ago there was a fall of earth and old walls in Rome and that some people were buried under the ruins. Of course men set to work to try and dig them out. And word had been sent up to the palace to tell the king. At once the king, Victor Emmanuel, went down and took a pick and began digging himself. That is the idea of the Gospel. That is what John had come to see in Jesus Christ. God had not sent, but had come. He had taken a pick, not left the work of rescue to others. "Herein was the lava of God manifested in our case. Here is the appeal and uniqueness of Christianity. God himself, we believe, shouldered the burden, took the pick, and dug man out of the smother of sin and death that had overwhelmed him.
It is the most amazing thing in the world, yet, if you believe it, it is the thing that makes the heart bound with joy. It means, that somehow God himself has taken over the tremendous task of clearing sin out of the human soul and out of the world. God has not left it to us and our efforts and theories and moral endeavour. We can use all of these that we can: but man's experience is that he has always failed to cleanse his sou] and here is the "good news" of the Yospel, God took up the pick. He came, suffered and rose again in his Son. That is the meaning of the Christian doctrine of grace. No one could have compelled the Eternal to do that. No. He did it because he loved us; '"Herein was the love of God manifested in our case, that-God hath sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through that John got convinced of that It may be asked, how it was
in threa short years. It is indeed a wonder. But the answer is that neither he nor any of the disciples could help it. Jesus made such an overwhelming impression on their souls that they couldn't help it. Nothing was clearer to them than that while He was like men in some things, He was unlike them in still greater things. He struck them as the sun compared with the light of stars. He did the work and exercised the functions of God. He forgave sins; He legislated -for eternity: He flooded their souls with such divinity, such truth, such love, that there was
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.