recruits the black side of the war for which He seeks to enlist them,
but He tells it all to them to begin with, and then waits--and He only
knows how longingly He waits--for their repeating, with full knowledge
and humble determination, the vow that sprang so lightly to their lips
when they did not understand what they were saying. Of course our Lord's
words had literal truth, and their original intention was to bring
clearly before this man the hard fact that following Jesus meant
homelessness. It is as if He had said, 'You are ready to follow Me
wherever I go--are you? You will have to go far, and to be always going.
Creatures have their burrows and their roosting-places, but I, the Lord
of creatures, the Son of Man, whose kingdom prophets proclaimed, am
houseless in My own realm, and My followers must share My wandering
life. Are you ready for that?' Jesus was homeless. He was born in a
hired stable, cradled in a manger, owed shelter to faithful friends, was
buried in a borrowed grave; He had 'not where to lay His head,' living
or dying. And His servants, in literal truth, had to tramp after Him,
through the length and breadth of the land. And if this man was meaning
to follow Him whithersoever He went, he had not before him a little
pleasure-journey across the lake, to come back again in a day or two,
but he was enlisting for a term of service, that extended over a life.

But then, beyond that, there is a deeper lesson here. 'The Son of Man'
on our Lord's lips not only expressed His dignity as Messiah, but His
relation to the whole race of men; and declared that He was what we
nowadays call ideal manhood. And that is the point, as I take it, of the
contrast between the restful lives of the lower creatures, who all have
a place fitted to them, where they curl themselves up, and go to sleep,
and are comfortable, and the higher life of men, which is homeless in
the deepest sense. 'The Son of Man,' He in whom the whole essence of
humanity is, as it were, concentrated; and who, in His own person,
presents the very type and perfection of manhood, cannot but be
homeless.

Ah, yes I man's prerogative is unrest, and he should recognise it as a
blessing. It is the condition of all noble life; it is the condition of
all growth. 'The foxes have holes,' and the fox's hole fits it, and
therefore the hole of the fox to-day is what it was in the beginning,
and ever shall be. Man has no such abode, therefore he grows. Man is
bless