imparting love, has for its main instrument to appeal to our
hearts, not the cradle but the Cross. We are being told by many people
to-day that the centre of Christianity lies in the thought of an
Incarnation. Yes. But our Lord Himself has told us what that was for.

'The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to
give His life a ransom for many.' It is only when we look to that Lord
in His death, and see there the very lowest point to which He stooped,
and the supreme manifestation of His grace, that we shall be drawn to
yield our hearts and lives to Him in thankfulness, in trust, and in
imitation: and shall set Him before us as the pattern for our conduct,
as well as the Object of our trust.

Brethren, my text was spoken originally as presenting the motive and the
example for a little piece of pecuniary liability. Do you take the
cradle and the Cross as the law of your lives? For depend upon it, the
same necessity which obliged Jesus to come down to our level, if He
would lift us to His; to live our life and die our death, if He would
make us partakers of His immortal life, and deliver us from death; makes
it absolutely necessary that if we are to live for anything nobler than
our own poor, transitory self-aggrandisement, we too must learn to stoop
to forgive, to impart ourselves, and must die by self-surrender and
sacrifice, if we are ever to communicate any life, or good of life, to
others. He has loved us, and given Himself for us. He has set us therein
an example which He commends to us by His own word when He tells us that
'if a corn of wheat' is to bring forth 'much fruit' it must die, else it
'abideth alone.' Unless we die, we never truly live; unless we die to
ourselves for others, and like Jesus, we live alone in the solitude of a
self-enclosed self-regard. So living, we are dead whilst we live.

WILLING AND NOT DOING

'Now therefore perform the doing of it; that as
there was a readiness to will so there may be a
performance also.'--2 COR. viii. 11.

The Revised Version reads: 'But now complete the doing also; that as
there was the readiness to will, so there may be the completion also out
of your ability.' A collection of money for the almost pauper church at
Jerusalem bulked very largely in the Apostle's mind at the date of the
writing of the two letters to the Corinthian church. We learn that that
church had been the first to agree to the pr