not so overwhelmingly pitiful, must men look to God,--without a stitch to
their backs except what He has given, without a copper in their pockets
except what has been borrowed from His bank, yet strutting up and down the
street of life, heads held high in air, as though they owned the universe,
and--if it did not sound blasphemous I could add the rest of the fact--and
were doing Him a favour by running His world so skilfully! And it grieves
one to the heart to note that this seems to be about as true within Church
circles as without. The difference between is ever growing smaller to the
disappearing point.

It was into such an atmosphere, never intenser than in Palestine and
Jerusalem nineteen centuries ago, that the man Christ Jesus came. And He
had the moral daring to begin living a dependent life, the true human
life, looking up gratefully to the Father's hand for everything. Was it
any wonder His presence caused such a disturbance in the moral atmosphere
of the world! He insisted, with the strange insistence of gentleness, on
living such a life, through all the extremes that the hating world-spirit
could contrive against Him. Out of such a life comes His "Follow Me." And
in this He is simply calling us back to the original human life as planned
by God.

Now, of course, in that first step, that great "emptying out" step, there
can be no following. There He is the Lone Man, unapproachable in the moral
splendour of His solitude. But from the time when He came in amongst us as
Jesus, our Brother, the typical Son of man, He was marking out afresh the
original road for our feet. This was the foundation trait in His
character. He lived the dependent life.