that would not have hindered Him from being attractive.  Many men you have known and loved have had few charms of physiognomy.  Wilberforce was not attractive in face.  Socrates was repulsive.  Suwarrow, the great Russian hero, looked almost an imbecile.  And some whom you have known, and honored, and loved, have not had very great attractiveness of personal appearance.  The shape of the mouth, and the nose, and the eyebrow, did not hinder the soul from shining through the cuticle of the face in all-powerful irradiation.

But to a lovely exterior Christ joined all loveliness of disposition.  Run through the galleries of heaven, and find out that He is a non-such.  The sunshine of His love mingling with the shadows of His sorrows, crossed by the crystalline stream of His tears and the crimson flowing forth of His blood, make a picture worthy of being called the masterpiece of the eternities.  Hung on the wall of heaven, the celestial population would be enchanted but for the fact that they have the grand and magnificent original, and they want no picture.  But Christ having gone away from earth, we are dependent upon four indistinct pictures.  Matthew took one, Mark another, Luke another, and John another.  I care not which picture you take, it is lovely.  Lovely?  He was altogether lovely.

He had a way of taking up a dropsical limb without hurting it, and of removing the cataract from the eye without the knife, and of starting the circulation through the shrunken arteries without the shock of the electric battery, and of putting intelligence into the dull stare of lunacy, and of restringing the auditory nerve of the deaf ear, and of striking articulation into the stiff tongue, and of making the stark-naked madman dress himself and exchange tombstone for ottoman, and of unlocking from the skeleton grip of death the daughter of Jairus to embosom her in her glad father’s arms.  Oh, He was lovely—­sitting, standing, kneeling, lying down—­always lovely.

Lovely in His sacrifice.  Why, He gave up everything for us.  Home, celestial companionship, music of seraphic harps, balmy breath of eternal summer, all joy, all light, all music, and heard the gates slam shut behind Him as He came out to fight for our freedom, and with bare feet plunged on the sharp javelins of human and satanic hate, until His blood spurted into the faces of those who slew Him.  You want the soft, low, minor key of sweetest music to describe the pathos; but it needs an orchestra, under swinging of an archangel’s baton, reaching from throne to manger, to drum and trumpet the doxologies of His praise.  He took everybody’s trouble—­the leper’s sickness, the widow’s dead boy, the harlot’s shame, the Galilean fisherman’s poor luck, the invalidism of Simon’s mother-in-law, the sting of Malchus’ amputated ear.