♦Character♦ ♦Motive♦ ♦Selflessness♦ ♦Calm♦ “My Father worketh, and I work.” “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish HIS work.” Such words as these, so often upon His lips, reveal to us the secret of the life of Jesus. The Father-thought filled His heart to the exclusion of all memory or thought of His own great Name and Power. Jesus had, so to speak, no Self; His centre was God; with Whose will and purpose He found Himself in perfect accord. He was the first human being who was unconscious of the need of at-one-ment; He was, from the beginning, at one with His own nature, because at one with the Centre of the universe. There was no conflict in His life. “Christ’s life outwardly,” writes Professor Drummond, “was one of the most troubled lives ever lived. Tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The great calm was always there. At any moment you might have gone to Him, and found rest.... There was nothing the world could do to Him that could ruffle the surface of His spirit. Such living as mere living is altogether unique. It is only when we see what it was in Him that we know what the word rest means. It is the mind at leisure from itself; it is the perfect poise of the will; the absolute adjustment of the inward man to the stress of all outward things; the preparedness against every emergency; the stability of assured convictions; the eternal calm of an invulnerable faith; the repose of a heart set deep in God.” * * * * * St. John, writing long years after Jesus’ bodily presence had been withdrawn, uses two words of Him, which better than any other serve to tell His character. He was “_full of grace and truth_.” Human qualities both, though rare; never indeed found in fulness and in balanced perfection even in the noblest human character; nevertheless, humanity is brought very near to the Unseen when we read that these qualities represent to the most seeing of all the Seers, “the glory of the only begotten of the Father.” ♦Grace♦ “Grace,” essence of all gentle, sympathetic, forth-going, self-effacing, womanly virtues. ♦Truth♦ “Truth,” essence of all strong, courageous, strenuous, manly virtues. It has been as difficult to grasp the union of truth and grace in Jesus, as it has been to receive the divine and the human. The Mediæval Church, feeling after the “grace,” and failing to recognize it in Him, elevated the virgin mother to symbolize the character. The great artists--with truer insight--struggled to express the union on canvas, but the task was beyond even their art; the “Christs” have been, without exception, far short of the ideal. Grace may be womanly, it is never effeminate.