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 trying circumstances, we have taken. We had some