Now, there, taking the words even in their most superficial sense, we come upon the strange peculiarity which marks off the life of Jesus Christ from every other life that was ever lived. There are no loose ends left, no unfinished tasks drop from His nerveless hands, to be taken up and carried on by others. His life is a rounded whole, with everything accomplished that had been endeavoured, and everything done that had been commanded. 'His hands have laid the foundation; His hands shall also finish.' He alone of the sons of men, in the deepest sense, completed His task, and left nothing for successors. The rest of us are taken away when we have reared a course or two of the structure, the dream of building which brightened our youth. The pen drops from paralysed hands in the middle of a sentence, and a fragment of a book is left. The painter's brush falls with his palette at the foot of his easel, and but the outline of what he conceived is on the canvas. All of us leave tasks half done, and have to go away before the work is completed. The half-polished columns that lie at Baalbec are but a symbol of the imperfection of every human life. But this Man said, 'It is finished,' and 'gave up the ghost.' Now, if we ponder on what lies in that consciousness of completion, I think we find, mainly, three things. Christ rendered a complete obedience. All through His life we see Him, hearing with the inward ear the solemn voice of the Father, and responding to it with that 'I must' which runs through all His days, from the earliest dawning of consciousness, when He startled His mother with 'I must be about My Father's business,' until the very last moments. In that obedience to the all-present necessity which He cheerfully embraced and perfectly discharged, there was no flaw. He alone of men looks back upon a life in which His clear consciousness detected neither transgression nor imperfection. In the midst of His career He could front His enemies with 'Which of you convinceth Me of sin?' and no man then, and no man in all the generations that have elapsed since--though some have been blind enough to try it, and malicious enough to utter their attempts,--has been able to answer the challenge. In the midst of His career He said, 'I do always the things that please Him'; and nobody then or since has been able to lay his finger upon an act of His in which, either by excess or defect, or contrariety, the will of God has not been fully represented. At the beginning of His career He said, in answer to the Baptist's remonstrance, 'It becometh us to fulfil all righteousness,' and at the end of His career He looked back, and knowing that He had thus done what became Him--namely, fulfilled it all--He said, 'It is finished!'