"Ye know that they that are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you; but whosoever shall be great among you let him be your minister, and whosoever will be the chiefest let him be servant of all; for even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and give his life a ransom for many." One of the very last acts of his life, and one of the most affecting comments on these words, was his washing his disciples' feet as a menial servant--a last significant act, which might almost be called a sacrament, since by it he, in view of his dying hour, put this last impressive seal on his teaching of humanity and brotherly love. The contest which should be the greatest, in spite of all his efforts, all his teachings, all his rebukes, had only smouldered, not been extinguished, and was ready at any moment to flame out again, and all the way up to Jerusalem when he came to die they walked behind him quarreling over this old point. As a dying mother calling her children around her confirms her life-teaching by some last act of love never to be forgotten, so this Master and Friend before the last supper knelt in humility at the feet of each disciple and washed and wiped them, and then interpreted the act as a sign of the spirit in which leadership in his church should be sought: "If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's feet." In after years the disciples could not but remember that Jesus knelt at the feet of Judas and washed them as meekly as those of all the rest; and then they saw what he meant when he said, "Love your enemies." From first to last the teaching of Christ was one long teaching of the doctrine and discipline of perfect love. When the multitudes followed him, and he went into a mountain to give his summary of the new dispensation, we hear of no high, mystical doctrines. We hear doctrines against censoriousness, against the habit of judging others. We hear men cautioned to look on their own faults, not on those of others. We hear love like the perfect love of God set up as the great doctrine of the new kingdom--love which no injury, no unworthiness, no selfishness can chill, or alter, or turn aside; which, like God's providence, shines on the evil and unthankful, and sends rain on the just and the unjust--this mystery of love, deeper than the mystery of the Trinity, was what, from first to last, the Master sought to make his little church comprehend.