compassion there is something which rises up to tinge it, and to infuse thoughts of self into it. They have the truest sympathy who are most perfectly dead to themselves. Therefore, of all the members of Christ's mystical body, they must mutually sympathise most perfectly who are most free from the taints of evil.

2. And from this our thoughts ascend to Him who is all-perfect; who being from everlasting Very God, was, for our sakes, made very Man, that He might unite us wholly to Himself. Above and beyond all sympathy is that of our High Priest. It stands alone in its incommunicable perfection. "Such an High Priest became us,' that is, was required by our spiritual necessities, "who is holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners." Because we are sinners, we need One who is without sin to sympathise with us. How can it be reverently or safely thought that any sympathy can be perfect but His? Does not such a thought imply that we do not clearly distinguish what we are speaking of? He cannot, indeed, partake of the awful knowledge, derived from experience, which they possess who have ever consented to sin, who have ever been defiled, by it. But that knowledge does not perfect sympathy: it only mars the perfection of the

1 Heb. vii. 26.

person. Even the holiest must be delivered from this knowledge of sin before their sympathy is raised towards His unapproachable tenderness. In one sense it is true, that to have been darkened and defiled is the way to learn a bitter knowledge of sin. But it is only so because it inflicts on us the miseries which follow after sin, and scourges us through repentance to purity of heart, whereby we learn its hatefulness. None hate sin but those who are holy, and that in the measure of their holiness; and therefore in the Person of our blessed Lord there must exist the two great conditions of perfect sympathy: first, He has suffered all the sorrows and miseries which are consequent upon sin and distinct from it; next, He has, because of His perfect holiness, a perfect hatred of evil. And these properties of His human nature unite themselves to the pity, omniscience, and love, which are the perfections of His divine. To have sinned ourselves is not necessary to perfect our sympathy with sinners. God forbid the evil thought! Rather, it is the property of spotless sanctity to flow forth with the fullest stream of compassion. Who would mourn over a sister's fall so intensely as she who is all pure and full of sensitive fear of so much as a sullying thought? To have fallen and to have repented could add nothing to her

intense love and sorrow, to her absolute humiliation for another's transgression. Community in sin is not the source of sympathy, but participation in holiness. The knowledge of the misery of sin which our Lord learned by suffering temptation is no doubt far beyond any thing we can learn by consenting to it; for it is consent that so far destroys our true perception of it. Temptations are far more afflicting to holy minds than falls are to the less pure. And all through the life of the truest saint, even while the love of God is shed abroad in his heart, and the stillness of eternal peace reigns in it, there is, in proportion to the growth of sanctity, a growth also in his sorrow for sins long ago repented. His past falls come to be more intensely seen and abhorred. It is as he recedes from his former self, and passes out of the sphere of his past temptations, that he feels all their horror and deadliness. And this explains what we see in the lives of the holiest menthat as they have visibly advanced in holiness, they have multiplied their acts of humiliation and their discipline of repentance; and that instead of being thereby drawn from compassion to those who are still in their sins, they are of all men the most tender, pitiful, forbearing, and compassionate. None live for the conversion of souls so devotedly; none have so ready a sorrow for the

sins of others; none deal with them so lovingly, bind up their wounds so softly, console them, even against their own will, so persuasively. And why? Not because of their past sin, but because of their present holiness; not for what they have been, but for what they are; not because they have been sinners, but because they are saints. What they have learned of sin by past consent and defilement is a hindrance, not a help, to their true sympathy. They attain to this high grace of the mystical body of Christ just as they pass out of themselves into Him.

Now from all this we may see in what it is that our Lord, by the experience of humiliation in our flesh, has learned-wonderful word!-to sympathise with us.

Not in any motion of evil in the affections or thoughts of the heart; not in any inclination of the will; not, if we dare so much as utter it, in any taint or soil upon the soul. Upon all such as are destroying themselves in wilful commerce with evil, He looks down with a divine pity; but they have withdrawn themselves from the range of His sympathy. This can only be with those who are in sorrow under sin; that is, with penitents. It is in the suffering of those that would be cleansed and made holy that He partakes. Let us now see how we may draw comfort from this thought.

They who have sinned may go to Him in a perfect confidence that He is able to "be touched with the feeling of our infirmities." We have something in Him to which we may appeal.

1. We may plead with Him on His own experience of the weakness of our humanity. None knows it better than He, not only as our Maker, who "knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are but dust," but as Man, who made full trial of our nature "in the days of His flesh." He knows its fearful susceptibility of temptation—how in its most perfect state, as in His own person, it may be approached and solicited by the suggestions and allurements of the evil one. And if in Him it could be tempted to sin, how much more in us! May we not believe that it was out of the depth of His mysterious obedience that He spoke, when He said: "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak?" He did not mean sinful flesh only, but humanity itself, the weakness of which was seen in Eden, and was proved by Himself in the wilderness, when "He suffered being tempted." When we confess our sins before Him, we may lay open all. Things we hardly dare to speak to any man, to any imperfect being, we do not shrink from confessing before Him-things which men would not believe, inward struggles, distinctions in intention, extenuating causes, errors of