To put on the new man, is to continue our evolution, now a conscious and deliberate evolution, on an entirely different plane. It is to subdue the self-
regarding impulses, in obedience to the movements of the Divine life within us, which bids us deny ourselves—not some particular desire, but our own selves—and to seek the good of others; to seek and, seeking, surely to find, “the happiness which God Himself knows.”
To put on the new man is synonymous, in St. Paul, with putting on Christ. For He is the perfect revelation of the Divine in our humanity.
He is this perfect revelation of the Divine self-sacrifice in His Incarnation, when “He became poor for our sakes,” when “He emptied Himself.” So the Incarnation is, it may well be, but the climax of the Divine sacrifice involved in creation, when God limited Himself by His manifestation in “material” things; involved, we may say with greater certainty, in the creation of man, who can, in some real sense, thwart and hinder the Divine Will.
He is the revelation of the Divine in us, in the whole course of His earthly life. “Christ pleased not Himself.” “He went about doing good.”
And, above all, He is that revelation in the supreme act of love and sacrifice upon the Cross. “In this have we come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us.” We have come to know love, in its supreme manifestation of itself, for ever the test, the standard of all true love; and in coming to know love, we have necessarily come to know God. The Cross is the perfect self-utterance and disclosure
of the Mind of God, the crowning revelation of His Word. And in coming to know God, we have come to know ourselves. For the true self of man is the self conformed perfectly to the Divine Life within him.
Thus the Cross of Jesus Christ is the crowning revelation of man, as well as of God. There, side by side with humanity marred and wrecked and spoilt by sin, which is selfishness, we see man as God made him, as God meant him to be, clothed with the Divine beauty and glory of self-sacrifice.
In the Cross we see ourselves, our true selves, not as we have made ourselves, but our real and genuine selves, as we exist in the Mind of God.
In the light of that wonderful revelation, we can recognise that which is Divine and Christ-like in us, that spirit which bids us seek not the things of self, but the things of others, “even as Christ pleased not Himself.”