Look
into any commonplace, everyday life, no matter whose, and you will find
it exemplified. Many a selfish bad man has one tender spot in his
nature, his affection for his child, and for the sake of that child he
will deny himself as he has never dreamed of doing for anything else;
so far as that one influence is concerned he actually reverses the
principle which governs the rest of his life. I have read of an
African negress who on one occasion was beaten nearly to death by the
brute to whom she was slave and paramour. Her murderer, for such he
was, was arrested and placed on trial for his misdemeanour, in
accordance with the rough justice of the white man in his dealings with
the native. In the night the poor dying woman crawled painfully to the
tree against which the ruffian lay bound, cut his cords, and set him
free. It was her last act in this life; in the morning she was found
lying dead on the spot whence the prisoner had fled. This particular
story may or may not be true, but the same kind of thing has been true
a million times in human history. What was the spirit in this
benighted woman of the African wilds but the Christ spirit, the
self-giving spirit seen with such unique sublimity in the life of Jesus?

Look abroad all through the world, look back upon the slow, upward
progress of humanity to its home in God, and you will read the story of
the incarnation of the eternal Son. Never has there been an hour so
dark but that some gleams of this eternal light have pierced the murky
pall of human ignorance and sin; never have bitter hate and fiendish
cruelty gone altogether unrelieved by the human tenderness and
self-devotion that testify of God. Indeed without the limitation, the
struggle, and the pain, how would this Christ spirit ever have known
itself? Granted that self-surrender had never been called for by the
conditions of life, granted that our resources had always known
themselves infinite, and that which is worthiest and sublimest in the
nature of God and man alike could never have been revealed. This is
why the eternal Son has become incarnate; this is what we are here to
do, and upon the faithful doing of it depends our experience of the joy
that the world can neither give nor take away. The life and death of
Jesus are the central expression and ideal embodiment of this age-long
process, a process the consummation of which will be the glorious
return and triumphant ingathering of a redeem