holier men
become the more intense and poignant becomes the sense of personal
shortcoming. "We have done those things which we ought not to have done;
we have left undone those things which we ought to have done:" among all
the sons of men there is none, who truly knows himself, who dare be
silent when the great confession is made--none save the Son of Man; for
He, it has well been said, was _not_ the one thing which we all are; He
was _not_ a sinner.

This consciousness of separateness runs through all that the evangelists
have told us concerning Christ. When _e.g._ He is preaching He never
associates Himself, as other preachers do, with His hearers; He never
assumes, as other preachers must, that His words are applicable to
Himself equally with them. We exhort; He commands. We say, like the
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Let us go on unto perfection"; He
says, "Ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." We
speak as sinful men to sinful men, standing by their side; He speaks as
from a height, as one who has already attained and is already made
perfect. Or, the contrast may be pointed in another way. We all know
what it is to be haunted by misgivings as to the wisdom of some course
which, under certain trying circumstances, we have taken. We had some
difficult task to perform--to withstand (let us say) a fellow-Christian
to his face, as Paul withstood Peter at Antioch; and we did the
unpleasant duty as best we knew how, honestly striving not only to speak
the truth but to speak it in love. And yet when all was over we could
not get rid of the fear that we had not been as firm or as kindly as we
should have been, that, if only something had been which was not, our
brother might have been won. There is a verse in Paul's second letter to
the Church at Corinth which illustrates exactly this familiar kind of
internal conflict. Referring to the former letter which he had sent to
the Corinthians, and in which he had sharply rebuked them for their
wrong-doing, he says, "Though I made you sorry with my epistle, I do not
regret it, though I did regret"--a simple, human touch we can all
understand. Yes; but when did Jesus hesitate and, as it were, go back
upon Himself after this fashion? He passed judgment upon men and their
ways with the utmost freedom and confidence; some, such as the
Pharisees, He condemned with a severity which almost startles us;
towards others, such as she "that was a sinner," He was