No lesson is to-day more needed because we are more and more being influenced to treat life as a private matter.  I have spoken of this before and need not elaborate it now; but I do want to insist, at whatever risk of repetition, that a Christian must, if his religion mean anything at all, look on the interests of the Body, not as a separate group of interests to which he is privileged or obligated to contribute such help as seems to him from time to time appropriate, but as in fact his own primary interests because his true significance in the world is gained through his membership in the Body.  His life is hid with Christ in God and his conversation is in heaven.  The life that he now lives in the flesh he lives by the faith of the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him.  To assert separate interests is to break the essential relation of his life.  He is nothing apart from the Body but a dry and withered branch fit for the burning.  No doubt our egotism rebels against this view of life, but it is certain that it is the view of the Christian Religion.  If we would realise the ideals of the Religion we must act as those who are in constant relations with the other members of the Body and whose life gets its significance through those relations.

There is no more outstanding lesson of our Lord’s life than this.  It is true from whichever angle you look at it.  If you think of our Lord as a divine Person it is at once evident how much of His meaning is included in His relations to the other Persons of the Blessed Trinity.  He claims no independent will; it is the will of the Father that He has come to do.  He claims no original work:  it is the work that the Father has given Him to do that He is straightened until He accomplish.  He has no individual possession, but all things that the Father has are His.  Considered as God, our Lord is One Person in the one divine nature, no Unitarian interpretation of Him is possible.  On the other hand, if you look at Him as Incarnate, as having identified Himself with humanity, He is in that respect made one with His brethren.  He has made their interests His, and as their new Head is opening for them the gate of the future.  He is inviting them into union with Himself, that in the status of His “brethren” and “friends” they may be also the true children of the heavenly Father.  There is no hint anywhere that these things may be accomplished apart from Him, in individual isolation:  indeed, if they could be so accomplished the Incarnation would be meaningless.  He is the Way and no one cometh to the Father but by Him.  He is the Truth, and no one knows the Father but he to whom the Son reveals Him.  He is the Life, and no one spiritually lives except through His self-impartation.  “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.  He that eateth me, even he shall live by me.”  In this outlook from the Cross which we recognise in our Blessed Lord when, forgetting His own sufferings in His appreciation of the needs of