trated. Others have represented Him ideally and with sublimity, but they have not been able to touch such subjects as the Supper at Cana without either making it too ideal or too vulgar. One man alone has mingled, and without a trace of effort, and with a profound conception at the root of his work, the heavenly with the earthly, the divine with the human, the common with the wonderful, the poetical with the prose of daily life, in his representation of the human existence of Christ. That man was Tintoret. In his 'Last Supper,' for example, it is a common room in which the Apostles and the Master meet. Servants hurry to and fro; the evening has fallen dark, and the lamps are lit; those who eat the meal are really fishermen and unlearned men; here and there there are incidents which prove that the artist wished to make us feel that it was just such a meal as was eaten that night by everyone else in Jerusalem. We are in the midst of common human life. But, the upper air of the chamber is filled with a drift of cherubim, and the haze of the lamp-light takes that azure tint with which the artist afterwards filled the recesses of the Paradise,' and the whole soft radiance of the light falls on and envelopes the upright figure of Christ, worn and beautiful, and bending down to offer to one of his disciples the broken bread. It is common human life filled with the Divine. It is the conception of Christ's personality which modern theology ought to possess, because it ought to be the ideal of our own life.

Nor at the right time is sublimity and awfulness wanted in Tintoret's conception of Christ's humanity.

We pass in his work from the lonely majesty of the temptation in the wilderness to the unapproachable agony and solemnity of the burdened head, bowed with the sorrow of the whole world, of the Christ of the Crucifixion, and from thence to the high sovereignty, yet homelike tenderness, of the Christ of the Paradise,' and we know as we realise the painter's idea that we look on one in whom the human nature of the whole race has realised that divine glory of self-surrender for mankind and conquest of evil which demands of our hearts the deepest love restrained by the deepest awe.

But when we pass to pictures of Tintoret which represent the senators and merchants of Venice presented to Christ, we do not find the Saviour as the unapproachable Divinity, but as the friend and lover of man. He comes down through the air with expanded arms and joyous welcome, not to judge or to rebuke, but to live among his servants, his face full of delightful human feeling, rejoicing that He can in entire sympathy take a share in their daily work, and bless their common life.

This mingled conception of divine majesty and human friendliness, of heavenly power and earthly homefulness, is the conception of Christ's humanity which we want to arrive at now, and we are drawing towards it day by day. One step was made towards it by the work of one whose honoured age is still with us when he instilled into the whole of modern theology the thought of Christ as the federal Head of mankind, as being Himself the container of mankind, as the incarnation of the humanity which has for ever been in God. That idea secured

for the man Christ Jesus, and secured for ever, our worship and our awe. It separated Him from the race as king; it bound Him up with the race as brother; it made mankind live and move and breathe in God.

But more was wanted, and is wanted. We want a Christ entirely one with all that is joyous, pure, healthy, sensitive, aspiring, and even what seems to us commonplace in daily life; we desire Him, while He is still our King, to be also not too bright and good for human nature's daily food,' for business and for home; we wish Him to share in our anxieties about our children; to come and hallow our early love, and bless with a further nobleness all its passion; to move us to quietude and hope within the temple of the past where our old age wanders and meditates; to be with us when our heart swells with the beauty of the world, and to give his sympathy to us in that peculiar passion; to whisper of aspiration in our depression, of calm in our excitement, to be, in fine, a universal friendly presence in the whole of our common life.

I believe that out of that will spring no diminution of reverence to Him, no unhappy familiarity, but rather that deepening of awe, that solemnity of love which arise towards One whom we have lived with daily, and never known to fail in the power-sweetest of all, in a world where so much seems mean and commonplace — of lifting the prosaic into the poetic by the spirit of love, of giving us the sense of greatness in things which seem the smallest, of making life delightful with the feeling that we are being educated through its slightest details into children of the Divine Holiness.

If in the rest of this sermon and for some Sundays to come we can reverently enter into the finer shades of the human character of Christ, we shall gain—I trust without losing the awe which belongs to Him as Divine —a deeper sense of his union with our nature mingled with a love to Him at once more delicate and homelike.

I speak, then, of the beauty of Christ's character as my main subject; and for the rest of this morning's work only of one element in it—of his sensibility; a word I prefer to sensitiveness, for it includes sensitiveness. Sensitiveness is the power of receiving impressions, whether from nature or man, vividly, intensely, and yet delicately. Sensibility is this passive quality of sensitiveness with activity of soul in addition exercised upon the impressions received. The more perfect the manhood, the more perfect is this sensibility. The possession of it in a high degree is the chief source of beauty of character as distinguished from greatness of character; and yet without it no character can reach the highest greatness. The total absence of it is the essence, the inmost essence, of vulgarity. The presence of it in its several degrees endows its possessor, according to the proportion of it, with what Chaucer meant by 'gentilness.' Now, when we talk of the perfect manhood of Christ, and never consider this side of his nature, we must be making a grave omission-an omission which removes from our view half of the more subtile beauty of his character.

It does not seem wrong to say that there was in Him the sensibility to natural beauty. It has always been

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my pleasure to think that He also, like us, wished and sought that nature should send its own deep quiet to restore his heart.' It cannot be without reason that, when He was wearied and outdone, He called to his disciples to go away into a desert place to rest awhile; that when Jerusalem was loud in his ears, He oftimes resorted to the glades of Gethsemane; that when He desired to pray, He went alone into the hills; that when He felt the transfiguration glory coming upon Him, He ascended the lofty side of Hermon; that when He taught, it was by preference by, the waves of Galilee, or walking through the corn-fields on the Sabbath, or on the summit of some grassy hill. We know that He had watched the tall lilies' arrayed more gloriously than Solomon; that He had marked the reed shaken in the wind, and the tender green of the first shoot of the fig-tree. We find his common teaching employed about the vineyard, and the wandering sheep, and the whitening corn, and the living well, the summer rain, and the wintry flood and storm. These and many more would not have been so often connected with his action and so ready on his lips had not He loved them well, and received their impressions vividly.

There are those to whom this thought may have no value, but to others the character of a perfect man wants this to make it beautiful, and beauty is of necessity an element of perfectness. It is true that the beauty which comes of this sensibility to Nature is not so profoundly tender and varied as that which comes of sensibility to human feeling, but it is calmer, perhaps more sublime: there is a glory of purity in it and of passion un