Moral Glory of Jesus Christ 67 spair, that which made his life intolerable, was, “I have be trayed the innocent blood..’’ There is the testimony of His friends. His disciples affirm that during their intercourse with Him His life was unsullied. Had there been a single blemish they would have detected it, and, honest historians as they were, they would have re corded it, just as they did their own shortcomings and blun ders. The purest and most austere man that lived in that day, John the Baptist, shrank from baptizing the Holy One, and in conscious unworthiness he said, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” Nor is His own testimony to be overlooked. Jesus never once confesses sin. He never once asks for pardon. Yet is it not He who so sharply re bukes the self-righteousness of the Pharisees? Does He not, in His teaching, seem to ignore all human piety that is not based upon a broken heart? But yet He never lets fall a hint, He never breathes a prayer which implies the slightest trace of blameworthiness. He paints the doom of incorrigible and unrepentent sinners in the most dreadful colors found in the entire Bible, but He Himself feels no apprehension, He expresses no dread of the penal future; His peace of mind, His fellowship with Almighty God. is never disturbed nor interrupted. If He urge sorrow upon others and tears of penitence, it is for their sins; if He groan in agony, it is not for sins of His own, it is for others’. He challenges His bitterest enemies to convict Him of Sin (John 8:46). Nor is this all. “The soul,” it has been said, “like the body has its pores,” and the pores are always open. “Instinctively, unconsciously, and whether a man will or not, the insignificance or the great ness of the inner life always reveals itself.” From its very center and essence the moral nature is ever throwing out about itself circles of influence, encompasses itself with an atmosphere of self-disclosure. In Jesus Christ this self-reve lation was not involuntary, nor accidental, nor forced: it was in the highest degree deliberate. There is about Him an air of
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