nish
his work. To Him he looked in prayer before every important act, and
taught his disciples that model prayer which, for simplicity, brevity,
comprehensiveness, and suitableness, can never be surpassed. He often
retired to a mountain or solitary place for prayer, and spent days and
nights in this blessed privilege. But so constant and uniform was his
habit of communion with the great Jehovah, that he kept it up amid the
multitude, and converted the crowded city into a religious retreat. His
self-consciousness was at every moment conditioned, animated, and
impregnated by the consciousness of God. Even when he exclaimed, in
indescribable anguish of body and soul, and in vicarious sympathy with
the misery of the whole race: 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me!' the bond of union was not broken, or even loosened, but simply
obscured for a moment, as the sun by a passing cloud, and the enjoyment,
not the possession of it, was withdrawn from his feelings; for
immediately afterward he commended his soul into the hands of his
Father, and triumphantly exclaimed: 'It is finished!' So strong and
complete was this moral union of Christ with God at every moment of his
life, that he fully realized for the first time the idea of religion,
whose object is to bring about such a union, and that he is the personal
representative and living embodiment of Christianity as the true and
absolute religion.

With all this, the piety of Christ was no inactive contemplation, or
retiring mysticism and selfish enjoyment; but thoroughly practical, ever
active in works of charity, and tending to regenerate and transform the
world into the kingdom of God. 'He went about doing good.' His life is
an unbroken series of good works and virtues in active exercise, all
proceeding from the same union with God, animated by the same love, and
tending to the same end, the glory of God and the happiness of man.

COMPLETENESS AND UNIVERSALITY OF HIS CHARACTER.

The next feature we would notice, is the completeness or pleromatic
fulness of the moral and religious character of Christ. While all other
men represent at best but broken fragments of the idea of goodness and
holiness, he exhausts the list of virtues and graces which may be named.
His soul is a moral paradise full of charming flowers, shining in every
variety of color, under the blue dome of the skies, drinking in the
refreshing dews of heaven and the warming beams of the sun, sending its
sw