A precious Sacrament He has also left us by which to remember Him. In this He proposes to have us commune with Him in His glory, and to seal unto us all the fruits of His merciful achievements. To this, then, let us come with glad and joyous attestation of our faith in Him, as the acme and crown of our Christmas Festival, and as our highest earthly converse with Him who was born at Bethlehem, crucified on Calvary, and is alive for ever to fill the world with His glory.

The Gracious Errand.

Sunday after Christmas.

For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.-LUKE 19: 10.

HE Christian world is still aglow with the glad celebration of our Saviour's birth. In the text we have His own naming of himself, and of the purpose

of His coming.

You will notice that He does not say, I am come, although He means himself. His language is, "The Son of Man is come." This is the formula in which He often designated himself, and not without important significance.

It is not intended as a denial of His divine Sonship. He all the while assumed and marvellously demonstrated that He was truly the Son of God. Peter confessed Him as "the Christ, the Son of the Living God," and He answered to it with commendation and blessing, as the very truth on which His Church was to be built. But the great wonder in His case was, not that the Son of God should concern himself in human affairs, but that He should have taken on Him man's nature, to become a real member of our

race. This, however, was a necessity in order to be to us an effectual Saviour; and hence His carefulness to impress and emphasize the wondrous fact, that, though the very Son of God, He was, and ever will be, as truly and unchangeable “the Son of Man."

This way of emphasizing his human Sonship implied that He had none of the limitations, narrownesses, or imperfections that mark other men. He was not the Son of a section, or of a particular age, country, or class; but the Son of man, as if the whole human race had come to its highest bloom in Him. He was a Jew by birth, but with nothing of Jewish peculiarities or prejudices to separate Him from the rest of mankind. He was cosmopolitan in all the elements and make up of His character. Everything truest and best in every man, and everything tenderest and purest in every woman, was summed up in Him, making of Him, as a man, the very flower of all humanity.

The same also emphasized His nearness to us. As the Son of Man, He is the relative and brother of every member of our race-bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. He is therefore capable of being "touched with the feeling of our infirmity;" and, being "tempted in all points like as we are,” He is the better able to "succor them that are tempted." And one of the greatest of consolations that Christians have, is, that God hath sent us a Saviour who has a brother's heart, as well as an almighty arm.

As a man He can sympathize with us in all our weaknesses and trials; and as the Son of man, and not of a sect or party, His sympathies are as wide ranging as the race itself, embracing Samaritans as well as Jews, Roman soldiers as well as honored scribes, the Magdalenes as well as the sisters of Bethany, the fishermen of Galilee as well as the priests of Jerusalem, the Zaccheuses and Levis as well as the Peters and Johns, children and menials and lepers and sinners and malefactors as well as the greatest and worthiest of mankind. He is "the Son of man," therefore, wherever beats a human pulse, or a heart that sighs for deliverance, there He is with a true brother's love and tenderness.

All this is certainly included in His description of himself as the Son of Man."

Notice now His account of the purpose for which He came into the world,-"The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."

Men act from different impulses and aims in life: some to better their condition, to augment their fortunes, to gratify their lusts and fancies; some for glory, to win applause, to make themselves a name; and some to help the poor and helpless, to maintain right, to deliver the suffering and oppressed, and to promote the enlightenment and general good of their fellow-men. that which moved the Son of God to take our humanity upon Him, and to become the Son of Man, was, "to seek and to save that which was lost."

But

Some years ago, a man was at work amid a lot of strange bones that had been dug up out of the earth. No one knew to what sort of a creature they belonged, and few cared to know. But the man was familiar with comparative anatomy, and was thus enabled to bring those strange old fragments together in place, and to fill out what was wanting by what was necessarily implied. And when he had done his work, there stood forth a wondrous form of being, as it lived and moved a hundred ages in the past. And so, when the Son of Man came, the world had become a general wreck. Humanity, as depicted in Ezekiel's vision, had become a valley of dry bones. And to gather up and reconstruct these damaged remains to something of their primeval type, to breathe life into them, and to restore man to his original God-likeness and glory, was the purpose for which the blessed Saviour came. "For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."

The man of science, at work with his old bones, could do no more than recover a dead form of the past, which would always remain dead. He could not put life into it. But the office of the Son of Man is to give life, to quicken dead souls, to shape them into saints, and to endow them with a blessed immortality.

And by very simple means does He accomplish this. Having purchased redemption by His cross, by His word, providence and Spirit, He now seeks out the sinful, the sorrowing and the lost,