confidence in God and eager desire to purify ourselves by His strength and a great love for all of His children for His sake. Then we shall not have lived in vain. Then death will be to us but the beginning of a perfect life. THE FEEDING OF THE MULTITUDE. "When Jesus then lifted up His eyes, and saw a great company come unto Him, He saith unto Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?"-ST. JOHN vi. 5. As we read the story of Jesus in the gospels I think we must often find ourselves trying to imagine what was really the incarnate consciousness, as we may call it, of Christ-what was the feeling which He had in regard to man, as with a superior nature, yet a nature identical with humanity, He went about among men and saw their ordinary life; as, with the intense human sympathy in Him, He sympathised with all that life, knew every one of its temptations, knew the power of evil in the world, and had felt its attack upon His own nature in the temptation and all the experiences which the temptation represented. It must have been a strangely mingled feeling of both the ideal and the real, of what men were designed to be and what they were, with which Jesus went about among His brethren. Knowing men's temptations, He must have wondered how certain men ever trampled them under foot. On the other hand, seeing the divinity in human nature, He must have wondered at the way in which it was possible for men to be content to live in their sins. It must have seemed SO strange to see men, now great, now little, now good, now bad. He must have seen men in a certain sort of strange haze of unreality, as when one sees men moving in the moonlight. I doubt not that there are some people to whom life seems very much like that. Full of the consciousness of God, they wonder at themselves and their brethren for the lower life they live. Then, conscious of the temptations that surround mankind, they are ready to wonder at the higher life. Men do not all wonder at the same things. Men appreciate their growth by the different orders of things which are able to excite their wonder. The man who lives one sort of life wonders at the man who lives another sort of life. Wonder advances from age to age. The things that men wondered at fifty or one hundred or two hundred years ago do not cause wonder to-day. And, if men should come back from the dim past into our life, they would find abundant sources of wonder at things which we do not think of as wonderful. If we could cast our eyes into the next century, we should go wandering about, seeing things that would appear to us miraculous. The child wonders at things which, by-and-by when he is a man, he finds to be perfectly familiar. From age to age in the life of every man he leaves behind him new surprises. That which surprised him before he finds no longer strange, while new wonders are continually waiting for him beyond. Again, the things that the man wonders at are perfectly clear to the child. Sometimes we outgrow the things which have been familiar to us, and come to places in life in which they seem strange. So every being is measured by his surprises. The strong, independent man walks amidst his brethren feeling all the weakness of their life. The man who appreciates that God is his helper in everything he does looks around and wonders at the multi tude of things which are annoyances and vexations to his brethren, making them live low and degraded lives, things that, by the help of God, seem to him not worthy to touch the soul of the man who is really consecrated to God. Apply all this to the life of Jesus. Can we not see that there must have been something of gradation in His life? That the things which came to Him as wonders in His early life He outgrew as He passed on and became more conscious of the divinity that was in Him? And can we not understand that the things which seem to other men surprises, were not to Him surprises at all? God was so completely one of the postulates of the universe that He did not wonder at the things which caused the admiration of His brethren. There The miracle of Jesus which I want you to think about is an illustration of this. He had passed with His disciples to the other side of Tiberias and come into that region where so many strange things had happened to the Jews. Some of the multitude had passed over with Him. Jesus was not one who cared for the souls of men simply, and cared not how their bodies were faring. When He looked into the faces of the men He knew that they were hungry. have been teachers who wanted to give mankind a lofty inspiration, but seemed not to care whether men were hungry and thirsty or not. On the other hand, there have been teachers who simply dedicated themselves to the lower walks of humanity. If they could see men well fed and well housed they did not ask themselves whether there was no higher food with which they ought to supply the souls of those whose bodies had now been satiated. The richness and completeness of the life of Jesus seems to me to be shown in this almost as much as in anything, that He cared for the wants of men from the topmost to the bottommost of men's lives. So, as Jesus looked into the faces of the people who had followed Him across the Sea of Tiberias He saw their hunger there. He saw that there was something which their bodies needed. Then there came this conversation with His disciples. We are especially told that there was no |