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GRACE AND GLORY

embraces a number of various ends, all of which we legitimately pursue, and in all of which we serve the will of God. Our Lord's life was a human life which derived its meaning from beginning to end from his vocation as a Savior; in seeking and saving its significance exhausted itself. To that even the most sacred and private concerns of his soul with God, his prayer, his trust, all his intercourse with the Father, were wholly subservient. The personal was swallowed up in the one great devotion to the work of God. Into this the full stream of his strength flowed, from this its hidden sources were nourished: He made it his meat and his drink to do the will of his Father in heaven. He lived for this will and He lived on it. Thus only can we explain to ourselves the sensitiveness of our Lord, where his right to prosecute this task was called into question, for then He felt Himself assailed in the center and sanctuary of his being. Hence on this very occasion, when after his entrance of the house of Zacchaeus the people murmured, saying, "He is gone in to lodge with a man that is a sinner," our Lord did not content Himself with pointing out the propriety and beneficence of the act, but vindicated his conduct by an appeal to the supreme law of life under which He stood and from which He could not free Himself without ceasing to be what He was. With what sublime simplicity He takes for granted, that his entering into a house could be for no other purpose than to introduce salvation there! Of course, there is in this something unique, incapable of reproduction in precisely that sense by even the