GOODWILL, THE GATEKEEPER


'Goodwill.'--Luke 2. 14.

'So in process of time Christian got up to the gate. Now there was
written over the gate, _Knock_, _and it shall be opened unto you_. He
knocked, therefore, more than once or twice, saying, May I now enter
here? when at last there came a grave person to the gate, named Goodwill,
who asked him who was there?' The gravity of the gatekeeper was the
first thing that struck the pilgrim. And it was the same thing that so
struck some of the men who saw most of our Lord that they handed down to
their children the true tradition that He was often seen in tears, but
that no one had ever seen or heard Him laugh. The prophecy in the
prophet concerning our Lord was fulfilled to the letter. He was indeed a
man of sorrows, and He early and all His life long had a close
acquaintance with grief. Our Lord had come into this world on a very sad
errand. We are so stupefied and besotted with sin, that we have no
conception how sad an errand our Lord had been sent on, and how sad a
task He soon discovered it to be. To be a man without sin, a man hating
sin, and hating nothing else but sin, and yet to have to spend all His
days in a world lying in sin, and in the end to have all that world of
sin laid upon Him till He was Himself made sin,--how sad a task was that!
Great, no doubt, as was the joy that was set before our Lord, and sure as
He was of one day entering on that joy, yet the daily sight of so much
sin in all men around Him, and the cross and the shame that lay right
before Him, made Him, in spite of the future joy, all the Man of Sorrow
Isaiah had said He would be, and made light-mindedness and laughter