Christ's passive virtue is not confined to the closing scenes of his ministry. As human life is beset at every step by trials, vexations, and hindrances, which should serve the educational purpose of developing its resources and proving its strength, so was Christ's. During the whole state of his humiliation he was 'a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,' and had to endure 'the contradiction of sinners.' He was poor, and suffered hunger and fatigue. He was tempted by the devil. His path was obstructed with apparently insurmountable difficulties from the outset. His words and miracles called forth the bitter hatred of the world, which resulted at last in the bloody counsel of death. The Pharisees and Sadducees forgot their jealousies and quarrels in opposing him. They rejected and perverted his testimony; they laid snares for him by insidious questions; they called him a glutton and a winebibber for eating and drinking like other men, a friend of publicans and sinners for his condescending love and mercy, a sabbath breaker for doing good on the sabbath day; they charged him with madness and blasphemy for asserting his unity with the Father, and derived his miracles from Beelzebub, the prince of devils. The common people, though astonished at his wisdom and mighty works, pointed sneeringly at his origin; his own country and native town refused him the honor of a prophet. Even his brothers, we are told, did not believe in him, and in their impatient zeal for a temporal kingdom, they found fault with his unostentatious proceeding. His apostles and disciples, with all their profound reverence for his character and faith in his divine origin and mission as the Messiah, of God, yet by their ignorance, their carnal Jewish notions, and their almost habitual misunderstanding of his spiritual discourses, must have constituted a severe trial of patience to a teacher of far less superiority to his pupils. To all this must be added the constant sufferings from sympathy with human misery as it met him in ten thousand forms at every step. What a trial for him, the purest, gentlest, most tender hearted, to breath more than thirty years the foul atmosphere of this fallen world, to see the constant outbursts of sinful passions, to hear the great wail of humanity borne to his ear upon the four winds of heaven, to be brought into personal contact with the blind, the lame, the deaf, the paralytic, the lunatic, the possessed, the dead, and to be assaulted, as it were, by the concentrated force of sickness, sorrow, grief, and agony!