which this seeking and saving brings Him down should be measured by the distance there is between the highest in God and the lowest in man. To lodge with publicans and sinners might be condescension for a high-placed personage—what language will express its meaning in the case of the infinite God? The "Son of Man," who unites in Himself all that Deity and humanity together can lend of glory to the Messianic state, He it is who came to seek and to save the lost. It was such a glorious life that was wholly given up to its very last thought, poured out to the very last residue of its strength, and that for the task of helping us, the lowest of us, who would have turned away from one another, because the sinful felt it a degradation to stoop to such as were a degree more sinful than they acknowledged themselves to be. When we combine this consciousness of ineffable glory sacrificed with the consciousness of absolute surrender to the service of the most despised, then, and only then, do we begin to understand somewhat of the indignation with which Jesus repudiated the charge, brought by sinful men, that it was unworthy of Him to associate with publicans and sinners. With superhuman dignity the one word "Son of Man" silences that voice of murmuring in the streets of Jericho, and every echo, we may add, of that same voice from any quarter, or any age, when it presumes to criticize the Gospel of Christ on the ground that it speaks in accents of the sovereign grace of God.
But the fact that He came as the "Son of Man" is important for our Lord's seeking and
