We are thus brought to the fact upon which of recent years so much emphasis has been justly laid, namely, that nowhere throughout the Gospels does Christ betray any consciousness of sin.  “Which of you,” He said, “convicteth Me of sin?” And no man was able, nor is any man now able, to answer Him a word.  But the all-important fact is not so much that they could not convict Him of sin; He could not convict Himself. Yet it could not be that He was self-deceived.  “He knew what was in man;” He read the hearts of others till, like the Samaritan woman, they felt as though He knew all things that ever they had done.  Was it possible, then, that He did not know Himself?  Not only so, but the law by which He judged Himself was not theirs, but His.  And what that was, how high, how searching, how different from the low, conventional standards which satisfied them, we who have read His words and His judgments know full well.  Nevertheless, He knew nothing against Himself; as no man could condemn Him neither could He condemn Himself.  Looking up to heaven, He could say, “I do always the things that are pleasing to Him."[18] This is not the language of sinful men; it is not the language of even the best and holiest of men.  Christ is as separate from “saints” as He is from “sinners.”  The greatest of Hebrew prophets cries, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”  The greatest of Christian apostles laments, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Even the holy John confesses, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”  It is one of the commonplaces of Christian experience that the holier men become the more intense and poignant becomes the sense of personal shortcoming.  “We have done those things which we ought not to have done; we have left undone those things which we ought to have done:”  among all the sons of men there is none, who truly knows himself, who dare be silent when the great confession is made—­none save the Son of Man; for He, it has well been said, was not the one thing which we all are; He was not a sinner.

This consciousness of separateness runs through all that the evangelists have told us concerning Christ.  When e.g. He is preaching He never associates Himself, as other preachers do, with His hearers; He never assumes, as other preachers must, that His words are applicable to Himself equally with them.  We exhort; He commands.  We say, like the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “Let us go on unto perfection”; He says, “Ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  We speak as sinful men to sinful men, standing by their side; He speaks as from a height, as one who has already attained and is already made perfect.  Or, the contrast may be pointed in another way.  We all know what it is to be haunted by misgivings as to the wisdom of some course which, under certain