has to struggle until he comes to the full result of his life? So it is
with self-consecration, with service. You easily do it in some small
ways in the lower life. Life becomes intensified and earnest with a
serious purpose, and it seems as if it gathered itself together into
selfishness. Only then it opens by and by into the largest and noblest
works of men, in which they most manifest the richness of their human
nature and appropriate the strength of God. Those are great and
unselfish acts. We know it at once if we turn to Him who represents the
fulness of the nature of our humanity.

When I turn to Jesus and think of Him as the manifestation of His own
Christianity--and if men would only look at the life of Jesus to see
what Christianity is, and not at the life of the poor representatives of
Jesus whom they see around them, there would be so much more clearness,
they would be rid of so many difficulties and doubts. When I look at the
life of Jesus I see that the purpose of consecration, of emancipation,
is service of His fellow-men. I cannot think for a moment of Jesus as
doing that which so many religious people think they are doing when they
serve Christ, when they give their lives to Him. I cannot think of Him
as simply saving His own soul, living His own life, and completing His
own nature in the sight of God. It is a life of service from beginning
to end. He gives himself to man because He is absolutely the Child of
God, and He sets up service, and nothing but service, to be the ultimate
purpose, the one great desire, on which the souls of His followers
should be set, as His own soul is set, upon it continually.

What is it that Christ has left to be His symbol in the world, that we
put upon our churches, what we wear upon our hearts, that stands forth
so perpetually us the symbol of Christ's life? Is it a throne from which
a ruler utters his decrees? Is it a mountain top upon which some rapt