The Christian society through its whole structure was marked with the seal of that great act on which it grew, the assumption of human nature by a divine Person. Its whole government, its whole worship, and the whole moral and spiritual being of its people radiate from that Person as King, as Priest, and as Prophet. Take first the character of the individual Christian. It is in all its gradations, in that marvellous range of the same being which stretches from the highest saint matured in acting and suffering to the most imperfect penitent received into the bosom of the one mother, a copy, more or less resembling, of our Lord Himself. He, the divine Image, is the original from which every Christian lineament is traced, and every one of His race repeats Him in some degree. Every virtue is such as a transcript of some portion of His character; and the whole life of the individual resolves itself into an imitation of Him. Thus He is the Prophet not only declaring the whole divine will to men, but leading them in it by His own example. The divine Painter is but representing in every one of His children a copy in some sort of that life, which He set forth in full in the thirty-three years: a thought which we have seen Origen expressing in the chrism which descended from the head of Aaron to the utmost skirt of his raiment. But likewise in His Priesthood a parallel derivation ensues. First He multiplies Himself in His Apostles: they again in the Bishops whom they create; while each of these communicates himself in his priests. A triple transfusion suffices to form the whole hierarchical order. Nothing can be conceived more simple, yet nothing more efficient supposing that He is what He proclaimed Himself to be. The victim which He appoints to be offered by this priesthood is Himself, and His Body so offered is the food, the life, and the bond of the whole spiritual Body thus created. That Person with which He took the manhood is the centre of all this worship, of which the manhood so taken is the instrument. Thus it is that His second office of Priest, bound up so entirely with Himself, is yet communicated through His divine manhood to the whole Body which He forms. And this order remains through all ages, as intimately connected with his Person now, as eighteen centuries ago, and as it will be when all the centuries to come are evolved.