lasts he is wholly dependent upon the words of others for knowledge of his past life. His mother, his wife, his business associates can each supply him with a new memory; and, if he can believe them, he can piece together his past life incident by incident, conversation by conversation.

Some such experience was the lot of the Son of God. There came a moment when He laid down even His consciousness of self, and with it his memory, and became an embryo in Mary's womb, to wake up to the slow mental growth of an ordinary baby. How inconceivably great a step for God to take!

Or, again, it has often happened that a vigorous athlete has been stricken with some foul disease and heard from his doctor's unwilling lips the news that never again will he feel strong or be healthy; that the best he has to hope for, after a painful operation, is the life of an invalid and a lingering death. So has he laid himself down to be anaesthetised, knowing that when he awakens the old life of prowess will be over, and the one of invalidism begun.

So the Lord of Glory was faced with the fact that after He had emptied Himself He would wake again to consciousness in a poor body without any beauty, and live out a lonely life amongst a sea of enemies, until even that was extinguished in the darkness of Hades and the company of the damned. And this He did, not in ignorance, but having followed for centuries the sufferings of those who, like Himself, had put their trust in a Living God, and earned the hatred of the ungodly.

The friends who bid farewell to the missionary at the railway station know full well that in spite of choruses and hallelujahs the life that lies ahead is strange and hard and maybe dangerous. Their hearts are full, their prayers are promised, their imaginations stirred. How must the Angels, both good and bad, have wondered as the departure of the Son of God on this voyage to earth began. Gabriel had