WASHING THE DISCIPLES' FEET.

JOHN 13: 1-17.

"Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come," etc.

THE blood-red banner of Christianity is emblazoned on both sides. The cross and the crown adorn each, and clustered about them are words and legends which carry an assurance all their own. On one side you find mottoes like these "Fight the good fight;" "Be strong; "Be strong;" "Quit you like men;" "The victory is yours;" while on the other side there are words of apparent contradiction: "Be faithful;" "He that findeth his life shall lose it;" "Conquer through tribulation;" "Sacrifice yourself;" "Esteem lightly your life." In explaining this apparent contradiction we are accustomed to say that the one side of the banner exalts what we love to call the active virtues, courage, fortitude, heroism; while the other side exalts the passive virtues, humility, sacrifice, self-forgetfulness. The gift of Christianity to the world has been these last virtues. As a distinguished scholar truthfully declares: "He [Jesus] reversed the world's ethical scale, dug valleys where mountains stood, reared mountains where the valleys were. What we call the passive virtues were before his time held in lowest esteem or, rather, in no esteem at all. They had not even respectable names. The Latin humilis denotes groveling on the ground. . . . Christianity had to pick up its best words from the rubbish and dustheaps of language and pass them through a baptism of regeneration."

While thus it is true that Christianity had to find words for the virtues it brought to men, it is also true that in the esteem of the world the old virtues of strength and heroism overshadowed the new of sacrifice and humility, and that the world has been in these centuries slowly but certainly finding out that the real battles, and the real victories too, of life are the sequences of the possession of these passive virtues for they are passive only in the sense that they are not conspicuous, that they do their work silently and without observation, that the sphere of their activity is beyond the ken of the eye, and is revealed alone to the vision of the spirit. It would, indeed, be hazardous to exile silent things from strong things, or unobserved things from powerful things. Put your ear down to the earth to-morrow and you can hear no sound; and still there is a power, strong and wonderful, which is pushing blades of grass up towards the face of the sun and which is pumping the sap to the very tips of the highest branches of the trees. Nature is revealing before our eyes a strength sublime these days, but it is a strength the force and the friction of which alike are noiseless. We would not under-estimate the value of those forth-putting qualities to a man's soul which contribute to his power and to his success. We are only saying that these are not the indices of his largest capacities. It requires a heroic soul amid the roaring of musketry and the anguished cry of both friends and foes to march into the face of cannon. But it requires of that same man a deeper heroism to stand under the fire of the enemy, courageous yet motionless, until the word of the commander bids him march or fire. The man in the latter case is driven in upon himself; in the former case he can avail himself of the impulses and the enthusiasms of comradeship. So also it requires a courageous man to champion a great cause, to stand boldly forth and do valiant service in behalf of humanity. It takes courage, it

takes confidence, it takes conscience to do even this; but it requires a man of more majestic stature to stand by the principle he has espoused after it has been abandoned by the popular policy-making sentiments of men, and, if need be, alone to defend or to die for the cause. I think we can all see that, while this class of virtues which calls for the assertion of one's self is noble, this other class of virtues which calls for the abandon of one's self is nobler still; and it is this last which Christ gave to men - a gift men have been slow to appreciate and slower still to appropriate. The exaltation of one of these passive virtues, namely, humility, is the great lesson which we have before us; and we will notice with relation to it that : :

I. It is the quality of an unfettered spirit.

You will recall the circumstances. The life of our Lord was nearing its close. For the first time with his disciples he was celebrating the paschal feast that feast whose deepest meaning was sacrifice, which was so real a thing to Jesus himself; and the disciples, so far from catching the spirit of the occasion, were indulging in a petty, spiteful dispute, concerning self-aggrandizement - which should have the highest place; and in their selfish disputation they were forgetting the dictates of custom and of hospitality, or possibly were wrangling over the question who should be the servant and attend to the foot-washing, when the Lord himself rose and, girding himself with a towel, hastened to embrace the service for which the disciples were too distinguished. The mark of a fettered spirit is itself limitation. Circumscribing its own sacrifices, it measures its own circumference. It is impossible that one shall win glory simply by the application of the principle of adornment. Christ's affirmation is that glory and abdication are very near companions one of the other. Christ had made these men; all that they were, they owed directly to him. But for him they would have passed

their simple, uneventful lives fishing and tax-collecting and have fallen into the obscurity which has become the portion of almost everybody who lived in their time. They may not have understood, but Christ did, what exaltation was this which he brought to them; and had Christ been actuated by those motives which stir the hearts of most of us he would have reminded them once and again of their indebtedness to him to serve him and to wait upon him. It was because Christ's was an unfettered spirit that glory and humiliation were wedded in his life.

This was no isolated incident. Was it not the same Christ who, placing a little child in the midst, gave them, in this picture of life, an illustration of humility? Was it not this Christ from whose lips, like honeyed words, dropped those parables of the Good Samaritan, the lost coin, the prodigal son, each illustrating the sacrificial power of love? Was it not this same Christ whose precept always was, "He that findeth his life shall lose it"? Oh, Christ was ever presenting the wonderful paradox in life, in word, in deed, in act, and was ever urging and illustrating the truth that the unfettered spirit alone can distinguish between honor and humility, adornment and abdication, and comprehend how the humility and the abdication are the passes leading to the mountain heights of reward, of glory, and of true nobility.

Now men and women are continually fettering the spirit of humility. They put blinders upon its eyes that it may not see the lame and the halt and the blind by the roadway of life, for fear it would prompt them to turn aside from their little dignities and minister to others. They attach it to the shafts of some worldly chariot and compel it to draw this to the admiration of the world; and thus because they are continually fettering this spirit of humility they fail of very much which might otherwise be accomplished. Think for a moment how eager the

world is to make separations between itself. We are continually praying in one form or another, most of us, that Pharisaical prayer, "God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are." We talk about the proletarian classes as if between them and ourselves there was some essential difference. They are our brethren as really and as truly as if they walked in the same society and had precisely the same privileges. We talk about the working classes on the one hand, and the capitalistic class upon the other. The difference is only a surface difference. Go down into the heart of things where Jesus went, and you will always find beating in the heart of the laboring man, as beating in the heart of his employer, an immortal soul for which Christ equally died.

It is impossible for us to illustrate before the world the grace as it is in Christ Jesus, save we are in some way able to break these fetters which society and fashion and business and custom are continually placing about us, and go to these little ones just as Christ went to them, considering it the greatest honor of our lives if we can only illustrate in deeds, which we are willing to do for them, the spirit of the Christ who said, "The disciple is not above his master;" "the servant must be as his Lord." Enough for us if only we can strike the fetters from our spirits as really and as truly as Christ did from his, and realizing the high calling wherewith we are called, show to the world everywhere and every day the stooping power of love.

Have you ever put the humility of the Lord Jesus Christ over against his sovereignty? Have you ever realized how wonderfully, over in the second chapter of Philippians, the two are joined together? To see how true it was that Christ found his greatest glory in his condescension, note these simple words: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of