peasant folk and farmers, pent up in the charnel house of humanity, and Who was willing to count His equality with God not a prize jealously to be retained, Who emptied Himself and took on Him the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross? The contrast between our life, with all its privileges, to-*day and the most squalid African village is invisible over against the contrast between what Christ laid down and what Christ took up for the love He bore us and His world.
And we need greatly this fearlessness in our confession of Him,—that, without concealing Whom we follow and Whose servants we are, we should go out now, openly to avow our discipleship and the vow we have taken of loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ! Think how many betrayals of Him there have been, and how much of putting afresh to shame the Son of God and crucifying Him anew by men and women who had said they were going to follow Him faithfully, just as Simon said he was resolved to do on that very night in which before the cock crew he denied his Lord. Shall we not go out into the coming days with something in us that casts out this fear?
We look with longing and admiration upon such deliverance from fear when we find it in other lives. I was in Edinburgh during the South African war, just after the battle of Mae-
