glimpse of His divinity and of the glories to come, He never failed also to remind them of His approaching persecution and ignominious death. Unless one forgets self, unless he hates and dies to self, he can never accomplish anything great for God or humanity or his own soul. A greater benefactor than Jesus the world has never known, and He, in the accomplishment of His mission, simply annihilated self. He was fond of comparing Himself to the seed — sometimes to the largest, the grain of wheat, and again, to the smallest, the mustard-seed. Christ was at once the greatest and the least, God and man. We see Him at His lowliest in the manger, at the pillar, thorncrowned or crucified, but He was still the greatest, for He was born of a Virgin, feared and adored by kings, hailed by angel choirs; He made the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak, and the dead to rise again. He was the greatest of all when, at His death, Nature was convulsed and conquered, and when, rising from the tomb, He led captivity captive. But the author of Christianity, as it exists to-day, is Christ not at His greatest but at His lowliest, for His method was to sink His divinity into His humanity, and to lower His humanity into the very earth, that dying there He might bring forth much fruit. It was necessary that He, the new Adam, should sleep the sleep of death on the cross, that out of His side might emerge the new Eve — the Church — the Mother of all the living. We read that Rachel of old gave birth to two sons, the first of whom was born without the pains of childbirth, but the second with such excruciating tortures
