even sacreder, the purest and most complete union that humanity is
capable of--that, too, He consecrates; for even it, sacred as it is,
is capable of a higher consecration, and, sweet as it is, receives a
new sweetness when we think of 'the Bride, the Lamb's wife,' and
remember the parables in which He speaks of the Marriage Supper of
the Great King, and sets forth Himself as the Husband of humanity.
And passing from that Holy of Holies out into this outer court, He
lays His hand, too, on that more common and familiar, and yet
precious and sacred, thing--the bond of friendship. The Prince makes
a friend of the beggar.

Even if we do not think more loftily of Jesus Christ than do those
who regard Him simply as the perfection of humanity, is it not
beautiful and wonderful that He should look with such eyes of beaming
love on that handful of poor, ignorant fishermen, who knew Him so
dimly, and say: 'I pass by all the wise and the mighty, all the lofty
and noble, and My heart clings to you poor, insignificant people?' He
stoops to make them His friends, and there are none so low but that
they may be His.

This friendship lasts to-day. A peculiarity of Christianity is the
strong personal tie of real love and intimacy which will bind men, to
the end of time, to this Man that died nineteen hundred years ago. We
look back into the wastes of antiquity: mighty names rise there that
we reverence; there are great teachers from whom we have learned, and
to whom, after a fashion, we are grateful. But what a gulf there is
between us and the best and noblest of them! But here is a dead Man,
who to-day is the Object of passionate attachment and a love deeper
than life to millions of people, and will be till the end of time.
There is nothing in the whole history of the world in the least like