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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Gloria Crucis, by J. H. Beibitz
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Gloria Crucis
+       addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907
+
+
+Author: J. H. Beibitz
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 3, 2008  [eBook #24153]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GLORIA CRUCIS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1908 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+GLORIA CRUCIS
+
+
+ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL
+HOLY WEEK AND GOOD FRIDAY, 1907
+
+BY
+THE REV. J. H. BEIBITZ, M.A.
+VICE-PRINCIPAL OF THE THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE, LICHFIELD
+
+LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
+NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
+1908
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+MATRI
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+These addresses, delivered in Lichfield Cathedral {0} in Holy Week, 1907,
+are published at the request of some who heard them.  It has only been
+possible to endeavour to reproduce them in substance.
+
+The writer desires to express his obligations to various works from which
+he has derived much assistance, such as, above all, Du Bose's _Gospel in
+the Gospels_, Askwith's _Conception of Christian Holiness_, Tennant's
+_Origin of Sin_, and Jevons' _Introduction to the History of Religion_.
+
+To the first and the last of these he is especially indebted in regard to
+the view here taken of the Atonement.
+
+It seems to him that no view of that great and central truth can possibly
+be true, which (i) represents it as the result of a transaction between
+the Father and the Son, which is ditheism pure and simple; or which (ii)
+regards it as intended to relieve us of the penalty of our sins, instead
+of having as its one motive, meaning, and purpose the "cure of sinning."
+
+So far as we can see, the results of sin, seen and unseen, in this world
+and beyond it, must follow naturally and necessarily from that
+constitution of the universe (including human nature) which is the
+expression of the Divine Mind.  If this is true, and if that Mind is the
+Mind of Him Who is Love, then all punishment must be remedial, must have,
+for its object and intention at least, the conversion of the sinner.  And,
+therefore, the desire to escape from punishment, if natural and
+instinctive, is also non-moral, for it is the desire to shirk God's
+remedy for sin, and doomed never to realise its hope, for it is the
+desire to reverse the laws of that Infinite Holiness and Love which
+governs the world.
+
+Yet this must be understood with one all-important reservation.  For the
+worst punishment of sin, is sin itself, the alienation of the soul from
+God, with its consequent weakening of the will, dulling of the reason,
+and corrupting of the affections.  And it was from this punishment, from
+this "hardest hell," which is sin, or the character spoiled and ruined by
+sin, that Christ died to deliver us.
+
+It follows that it is high time to dismiss all those theories of the
+Atonement which ultimately trace their origin to the enduring influence
+of Roman law.  There is no remission of penalty offered to us in the
+Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The offer which is there held out to us, is that
+which answers to our deepest need, to the inmost longings of the human
+soul, "the remission of our _sins_."
+
+The idea of a penalty owing to the "justice" of God is a thoroughly
+legalistic one, the offspring of an age which thought in terms of law.  It
+deals throughout with abstractions.  The very word "justice" is a general
+notion, a concept, the work of the mind abstracting from particulars.
+Justice and mercy are used like counters in some theological game at
+which we are invited to play.  "Penalty," again, is a term which serves
+to obscure the one important fact that God, as a Moral Person or, rather,
+as the One Self-Existent Being, of Whose nature and essence morality is
+the expression, can only have one motive in dealing with sinners, and
+that is, to reconcile them to Himself, to restore them to that true ideal
+of their nature, which is the Image of Himself in the heart of every man.
+Who can measure the pain and anguish which that restoration must cost, to
+the sinner himself, and (such is the wonderful teaching of the Cross) to
+God, the All-Holy One, Who comes into a world of sin in order to restore
+him?
+
+There is no room here, at all events, for light and trivial thoughts of
+sin.  That charge might be levelled, with more excuse, at the view that
+sin only incurs an external penalty, from which we can be cheaply
+delivered by the sufferings of another.
+
+And theories of the Atonement which centre in the conception of penalty
+are often only modifications of the crude and glaring injustice of the
+Calvinistic view.  The doctrine of a kind of bargain between the Father
+and the Son, while it revolts our moral instincts, at the same time
+logically leads to the purely heathen notion of two gods.
+
+There are two main principles which are essential to a right
+understanding of the Atonement: (1) The oneness of Christ both with God
+and with humanity.  In regard to neither is He, nor can He be, "Another";
+(2) the death of Christ was the representation in space and time of a
+moral fact.  It happened as an "event" in history, in order that that
+moral fact, of which it was the embodiment and symbol, might become a
+fact in the spiritual experience of mankind.  That death was more than a
+symbol, because it was the actual means by which that which it
+represented might be, and has been, in the lives of all Christians
+accomplished.  These two principles the writer has, with whatever degree
+of failure or inadequacy, endeavoured to embody in the following
+addresses.
+
+And yet the Atonement, which is, in the broadest aspect of it,
+Christianity itself, is a fact infinitely greater and higher than any
+mere theories of it.  For it is nothing less than this, the personal
+action of the living Christ on the living souls of men.  That his readers
+and himself may experience this action in ever-increasing measure is the
+prayer of him who, as he fears, too greatly daring, has endeavoured to
+set forth, yet once more, "The Glory of the Cross."
+
+
+
+
+GLORIA CRUCIS
+
+
+I
+THE GLORY OF THE CROSS
+
+
+   "God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus
+   Christ."--GAL. VI. 14.
+
+There are at least two reasons, unconnected with Holy Week, why the
+subject of the Cross of Christ should occupy our attention.
+
+1.  The first reason is, that the Cross is commonly recognised as the
+weak point in our Christianity.  It is the object of constant attack on
+the part of its assailants: and believers are content too often to accept
+it "on faith," which means that they despair of giving a rational
+explanation of it.  Too often, indeed, Christians have proclaimed and
+have gloried in its supposed irrationality.  To this latter point we
+shall return.  But in the meanwhile it is necessary to say this: all
+language of harshness towards those who attack the doctrine of the
+Atonement is completely out of place.  For the justification of their
+attacks has very often come from the Christian side.  In former times,
+far more commonly than now, the sacrifice of Christ has been represented
+as a substitutory offering, necessary to appease the wrath of an offended
+God.  It used to be said, and in some quarters it is said to-day, that
+the sins of the human race had so provoked the Divine anger that it could
+be appeased by nothing short of the destruction of mankind.  In these
+dire straits of mankind, the Sinless Son of God presented Himself as the
+object on which the full vials of the Father's wrath should be outpoured.
+God having been thus placated, and His wrath satisfied, such as believe
+in this transaction, and rest themselves in confidence upon it, are
+enabled in such wise to reap its benefits that they escape the penalty
+due to their transgression, and are restored to the Divine favour.
+
+Now this is the crudest representation of a certain popular theology of
+the Atonement.  With some of its features softened down, it is by no
+means without its adherents and exponents at the present day.  But when
+its drift is clearly understood, it is seen to be a doctrine which no
+educated man of our time can accept.  We may consider four fatal
+objections to it.
+
+(_a_) It is true that there is such a thing as "the wrath of God."  It is
+not only a fact, but one of the most tremendous facts in the universe.  It
+is a fact as high as the Divine purity, as deep as the malignity and
+foulness of sin, as broad as all human experience.  It is impossible to
+construct a theistic theory of the world which shall leave it out.  The
+nature of the fact we shall investigate at a later point.  But we can say
+this at once.  It cannot be such a fact as is represented by the theory
+under review.  For that represents the wrath of God as a mere thirst for
+vengeance, a burning desire to inflict punishment, a rage that can only
+be satisfied by pain, and blood, and death.  In other words, we are
+driven to a conception of God which is profoundly immoral, and
+revoltingly pagan.  If we are rightly interested in missions to the
+heathen, are there to be no attempts to convert our fellow-Christians
+whose conception of God scarcely rises above the heathen one of a cruel
+and sanguinary deity?  Not such, at least, is the New Testament doctrine
+of Him Who is God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
+
+(_b_) There is no moral quality which we esteem higher than justice.
+Fairness, equity, straight dealing are attributes for which all men
+entertain a hearty and unfeigned respect.  There is no flame of
+indignation which burns fiercer within us than when we conceive
+ourselves, or others, to be the victims of injustice.  But what are we to
+say of a view of the Atonement which represents God Himself as being
+guilty of the most flagrant act of injustice that the mind of man has
+ever conceived, the infliction of condign punishment upon a perfectly
+innocent Person, and that for the offences committed by others?  It is a
+further wrong, and that a wrong done to the offenders themselves, that
+they are, in consideration of the sufferings of the righteous One,
+relieved of the merited and healthful punishment of ill-doing.
+
+(_c_) A third defect of this theory of the Atonement is, that it is
+profoundly unethical.  The need of man is represented as being, above
+all, escape from penalty.  Whereas, at least, the conscience of the
+sinner himself is bearing at all times witness to the truth that his real
+necessity is escape from his sin, from the weakness and the defilement of
+his moral nature, which are of the very essence of moral transgression.
+We are now dealing with the matter from the moral standpoint; but we have
+to support us the authority of the earliest proclamation of the work of
+the Christ: "He shall save His people from their sins," not from any
+pains or penalties attached to their sins.  Relief from punishment is not
+the Gospel of the New Testament, it is not a gospel at all.
+
+(_d_) Finally, the idea of a transaction between the Father and the Son
+is clean contrary to the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Unity of
+God.  Once locate justice in the Father, and love in the Son, and view
+the Atonement as the result of a bargain, or transaction between the Two,
+and once more we are left with a doctrine not Christian, but heathen and
+polytheistic.  There is unhappily little doubt, that the doctrine of the
+Holy Trinity suffers, just as that of the Atonement, even more from its
+defenders than from its assailants.  Properly understood, that doctrine
+is the vindication of the complete fulness of the personal life of the
+One God.  Too often it is so held, and so preached and represented, as in
+this case, that monotheism is tacitly abandoned in favour of ditheism or
+tritheism.  It needs to be plainly said, that the transaction theory is
+inconsistent with the trinitarian doctrine.  The Three Persons are so
+called in our Western theology owing to defects inherent in human thought
+and speech.  To set one over against the other as two parties to a
+contract, is to found a theory upon those very defects.  The Miltonic
+representation of the Father and the Son is Arian; the popular view is,
+more often than not, a belief either in two gods, or in a logical
+contradiction.
+
+To sum up, the view of the Atonement with which we have been occupying
+ourselves, is opposed to the fundamental moral instincts, and to the
+Christian consciousness, both as it finds expression in the New
+Testament, and as it reveals itself in the best minds of to-day.  And
+this type of theory, although without some of its coarser features, is by
+no means extinct.  There is all the more need then, in spite of all that
+has been so well done in this direction, to exhibit the Atonement as the
+supreme vindication of those instincts which are the witness of the
+Divine in man.  There is laid on all who would preach or teach
+Christianity to-day to show that Calvinism, and all that is touched with
+the taint of Calvinism, is not the doctrine of the Atonement which is
+taught in the Bible or held by the Church.  But, as nothing can be built
+on negations, there is an even greater and more imperative need to
+exhibit the truth of the Atonement in its beauty and majesty and
+transcendent moral power.
+
+2.  The second of our two reasons for the choice of the Cross of Christ
+as our subject, is the failure on the part of those who believe in it,
+trust in it, and even build their lives upon it, to realise the true
+vastness of its meaning.  We are too apt to regard the Cross as one of
+the doctrines of our religion, or as supplying a motive to penitence, or
+to Christian conduct.  Our view, when we are most in earnest, is
+one-sided, limited, parochial.  We must rise, if we would really
+understand the Cross, to the height of this conception: that it contains
+in itself the answer to the problem of human existence, and of our
+individual lives.  The secret of the universe, of our part of it at
+least, that tiny corner which is occupied by the human race, was revealed
+in that supreme disclosure of the Divine Mind which was made on Calvary.
+It was a disclosure necessarily given under the forms of time and space,
+else it could not have been given to us at all.  But it transcends all
+forms and limitations, and belongs to the spiritual and timeless order,
+which is also the Real.  But it is a disclosure which requires the
+thought and study, not of one generation only, but of all.  It can never
+be exhausted.  There is no view of it (including even that miserable
+caricature which we have just considered) that is altogether without some
+elements of truth.  There is no view which embodies the whole of the
+truth.  Each generation is meant to read that secret of God, which was
+uttered to mankind from the Cross of the Christ, a little more clearly
+than its predecessors.  No theology of the Atonement which is not both
+new and old, can be a true theology.  It must be old, because the
+disclosure was made under the form of historic facts which belong to the
+past.  It must be new, because each age, in the light of the progressive
+revelation of God, interprets the disclosure under the forms of its own
+experience, scientific, moral, spiritual, which belongs to the present.
+"Therefore is every scribe that is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven,
+like unto a householder which bringeth forth out of his treasures things
+both new and old."
+
+But the present point is, that we should realise the far-reaching
+significance of the disclosure of God made on and from the Cross.  Human
+history is like a long-drawn-out drama, in which we are actors.  How long
+is that drama, stretching back beyond the long years of recorded history
+to our dim forefathers, who have left their rude stone implements on the
+floors of caves or bedded in the river drift, the silent witnesses of a
+vanished race.  And how short is that little scene in which we ourselves
+appear, while, insignificant as it is, it is yet our all.  And we ask, we
+are impelled to ask, what is the meaning of the whole vast drama?  What
+is the meaning of our own little scene in it?  No questions can be
+compared in interest and importance to these two.  And the answer to them
+both, so we shall try to see, was given once in time from the Cross.  That
+is one of the chief aspects under which we shall regard the Cross of
+Christ, as the key which unlocks the mystery of human existence, and of
+my existence.  There is no more majestic or pathetic conception than that
+of the veiled Isis.  But the Cross is the removal of the veil, the
+discovery of the Divine Secret.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Before, however, we proceed to our main subject, it will be well to set
+first before our minds a few elementary considerations.
+
+The existence of God appears to be necessitated in order to account for
+two things: (i) the appearance of control in the universe; (ii) the facts
+of moral consciousness.
+
+(i)  It seems impossible to get rid of the ideas of direction and
+control.  If we regard the world as it exists at the present moment, as
+one stage in an age-long process, then at least [Greek text] the facts
+which now appear were contained in the earliest stage of all.  Man
+appears with his moral and spiritual nature.  Then already the moral and
+the spiritual were somehow present when the first living cell began its
+wonderful course.  [Greek text].  All movements have converged towards
+this end, and the co-ordination of movements implies control.
+
+This then is our first reason for our belief in God.  We live in a
+universe which seems throughout to manifest evidence of direction and
+control.
+
+(ii)  But I have much surer and more cogent evidence within myself.
+Whence comes that ineradicable conviction of the supremacy of
+righteousness, of the utter loveliness of the good, and utter hatefulness
+of the evil?  I am not concerned with the steps of the process by which
+the moral sense may have developed.  The majesty of goodness, before
+which I bow, really, sincerely, even when by my acts I give the lie to my
+own innermost convictions, that is no creation of my consciousness.  Nor
+do I see good reason to believe that it has been an invention of, or
+growth in, human consciousness during the slow development of past ages.
+There is something deeper in my moral convictions than an outward
+sanction wondrously transmuted into an internal one.  Moreover, in the
+best men, those who have really developed that moral faculty which I
+detect, in beginning and germ, as it were, in myself, I see no abatement
+in reverence for the ideal.  Rather, the better and saintlier that they
+are, the keener do they feel their fallings off from it.  A moral lapse,
+which would give me hardly a moment's uneasy thought, is capable of
+causing in them acute and prolonged sorrow.  The nearer they draw to the
+moral ideal, strange paradox, the farther off from them does it ever
+appear, and they from it.  It is an apostle who writes, "Christ Jesus
+came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief."  Nor can I
+discover any tolerable explanation of all this, except that the guiding
+and directive power in the world, reveals itself in the moral
+consciousness of men, and with growing clearness in proportion as that
+consciousness has been trained and educated, as the moral ideal.
+
+I find myself then, when my eyes are opened to the realities of the world
+in which I live, confronted with the facts of directive control and of
+the moral ideal.  If I seek for some interpretation and coordination of
+the facts, I am compelled, judging of them on the analogy of my own
+experience (which, being the ultimate reality I know, is my only clue to
+the interpretation of the ultimate reality of the universe) to regard
+them as the activities of a Person, Whom we call God.  Certainly to call
+the Ultimate Reality a Person, must be an inadequate expression of the
+truth, for it is the expression of the highest form of being in the terms
+of the lower.  But it is an infinitely more adequate presentation, than
+to represent that Reality as impersonal.  For personality being the
+highest category of my thought, I am bound to think of God as being
+Personal, if I would think of Him at all.  I can be confident that though
+my view must fall far short of the truth, it is at least nearer to the
+truth and heart of things than any other view I can form.  It is in fact
+the truth so far as I can apprehend it: the truth by which I was meant to
+live, and on which I was made to act.
+
+But the question of questions remains--What is the relation of the Person
+Whom I call God to my own personal being, to my spirit?  And, in
+answering this question, popular theology makes a grave and disastrous
+mistake.  It regards that Person as being isolated from all other
+persons, in the same way as each of us is isolated from all other
+persons.  God, that is, is viewed as but One Person among many.  Now,
+without inquiring as to the truth of this conception of personality, as
+being essentially an exclusive thing, we may at least say this, following
+the teaching of our best modern thinkers, as they have followed that of
+St. John and the Greek Fathers, that God is as truly conceived of as
+being within us, as external to us.  His Throne is in the heart of man,
+as truly as it is at the centre of the universe.  No view of God is
+tenable at the present day which regards Him as outside His own creation.
+His Personality is not exclusive, but inclusive of all things and all
+persons, while yet it transcends them.  And as He includes us within
+Himself, as in God "we live and move and have our being," so also He
+interpenetrates us with His indwelling Presence as the life of our life.
+
+To this point we shall presently return, for it is the keynote of all
+modern advance in theological knowledge, so far as that is not concerned
+with questions of literature, history, archaeology, and textual
+criticism.  But we are concerned to notice now, that this recovered truth
+of the immanence of God in our humanity, affords the full and sufficient
+explanation of that dark shadow which lies athwart all human lives.  That
+shadow has loomed large in the minds of poets, thinkers, and theologians.
+The latter know it by the name of sin.  But what is sin save the
+conscious alienation and estrangement of man from the Divine Life which
+is in him?  And if this be true, we can now see clearly why sin, moral
+transgression, always makes itself felt as a disintegrating force both
+without and within the individual life.  Without, it is for ever
+separating nation from nation, class from class, man from man.  Within,
+it produces discord and confusion in our nature.  And both results
+follow, because sin is the alienation from the Divine Life, which is both
+the common element in human nature which binds man to man by the tie of
+spiritual kinship; and also the central point of the individual life, the
+hidden and sacred source and fountain of our being, which unites all the
+faculties and powers of our manhood in one harmonious whole.
+
+Now the Cross of Jesus Christ is the overcoming of this disastrous
+estrangement and alienation.  It is the victory of the Divine life in
+man.  That is the most fruitful way in which we can regard it.  The Cross
+stands for conquest--the triumph of the Divine Life in us over all the
+forces which are opposed to it.  And in this lies the glory of the Cross;
+that which made the symbol of the most degrading form of punishment--that
+punishment which to the Jewish mind made him who suffered under it the
+"accursed of God," and which to the Roman was the ignominious penalty
+which the law inflicted on the slave--the subject of boasting to that
+apostle who was both, to the very heart of him, a Jew and also a citizen
+of the empire.
+
+The object of these lectures is to show how this is indeed the meaning of
+the Cross.  There, in Him Who was the Son of man, the Representative and
+the Ideal of the race, the Divine Life triumphed, in order that in us,
+who are not separate from, but one with Him, it may win the like victory.
+
+We fight against sin, and again and again succumb in the struggle.  But
+as often as with the opened eye of the soul we turn to the Cross of
+Jesus, we behold there the victory, our victory, already won.  Already,
+indeed, it is ours, by the communication to us of the Spirit of Him Who
+triumphed on the Cross.  It only remains for us, by the deliberate act of
+our whole personal being, our will, our reason, our affections, to
+appropriate and make our own the deathless conquest won in and for our
+humanity on the Cross.
+
+
+
+II
+THE HISTORICAL AND SPIRITUAL CAUSES OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST
+
+
+   "Him, being by the determined will and foreknowledge of God given up,
+   through the hand of lawless men, ye affixed to a cross and slew."--ACTS
+   II. 23.
+
+St. Paul places this in the very forefront of that gospel which, as it
+had been delivered to him, so he in his turn had delivered to the
+Corinthians, that "Christ died for our sins."  Neglecting all, deeper
+interpretations of this, it is at least clear that in the apostle's mind
+there was the closest and most intimate connexion between the death of
+Christ and the fact of human sin.
+
+Now it is important to remember that that connexion was, in the first
+place, an historical one.
+
+Christianity is a religion founded upon facts.  In this is seen at once a
+sharp distinction between our religion and that which claims the
+allegiance of so many millions of our race--the religion, or better,
+perhaps, the philosophy of the Buddha.  Certainly there is such a thing
+as a Christian philosophy.  For we cannot handle facts without at the
+same time seeking for some rational explanation of them.  The plain man
+becomes a philosopher against his will.  In its origin our Christian
+theology is no artificial, manufactured product.  It is rather an
+inevitable, natural growth.  Neither the minds of the earliest Christian
+thinkers, nor our own minds, are just sheets of blank paper on which
+facts may impress themselves.  Scientists, some of them at least, while
+repudiating philosophy put forth metaphysical theories of the universe.
+Theology is simply the necessary result of human minds turned to the
+consideration of the Christian facts.  But it makes all the difference
+which end you start from, the facts or the theory: whether your method is
+a posteriori or a priori; inductive or deductive; scientific or
+obscurantist.  And Christianity follows the scientific method of starting
+with the facts.  In this lies the justification of its claim to be a
+religion at once universal and life-giving.  It is universal because
+facts are the common property of all, although the interpretation placed
+on those facts by individuals may be more or less adequate.  It is life-
+giving, because men live by facts, not by theories about them; by the
+assimilation of food, not by the knowledge how food nourishes our bodies.
+
+Following, then, the Christian, which is also the scientific method, we
+now set out in search of the facts, the historical causes which brought
+about the death of Christ.
+
+Now these causes appear to have been, mainly, these three: prejudice, a
+dead religion, and the love of gain and political ambition.
+
+1.  Prejudice may, perhaps, be best defined as the resolution to hold
+fast to our belief, just because it is our belief; to adhere to an
+opinion, and close our eyes to all that has been said on the opposite
+side.  Now nowhere and at no time has prejudice exerted a more absolute
+dominion over the minds of men, than it did in Judaea in the first
+century of our era.  The people had inherited a traditional conception of
+the Messiah, from which they could not imagine any deviation possible.  He
+was the Deliverer and the Restorer predestined of God.  He would throw
+off the hated foreign yoke, and make the people of God supreme over all
+the nations of the earth.  It was for a long time doubtful whether Jesus
+of Nazareth intended to claim the position, and to enact the part of the
+Messiah.  "How long keepest thou our soul in suspense?" was the question
+put to Him as late as the Feast of Dedication, 28 A.D., the year before
+He suffered.  But, finally, the people found themselves confronted with a
+type of Messiah differing _toto caelo_ from the accepted traditional
+type.  The kingdom of God, which meant the Divine rule over the souls of
+men, was at least not such a kingdom as they were looking for, as they
+had been taught to expect.  There is a long history in the gospels of the
+gradual rise of a popular hope, more than once seeming to have attained
+its eagerly longed-for goal; but at last doomed, and conscious that it
+was doomed, to bitter and final disappointment.  And it turned to hatred
+of Him Who had aroused it from a long and fitful sleep of centuries.
+"Crucify Him" was now their cry.  Jesus was put to death on the legal
+charge of being "Christ, a King," a provincial rebel.  He really died
+because He was not "Christ, a King," in such sense as He had been
+expected to be.  Thus the first historical cause of the death of our Lord
+was prejudice, inveterate and ingrained, in the minds of the people.
+
+2.  The second historical cause of the death of our Lord was the
+existence in His day and place of a dead religion.  This is, when we
+consider the meaning of the phrase, the strangest of paradoxes, the
+existence in fact of a logical contradiction.  For religion is in its
+essential nature a living thing, for the very reason that it is part of
+the experience of a living person.  As experience is not merely alive,
+but the sum of all our vital powers, it is ever growing, both in breadth
+and in intensity.  So far then as we are in any true sense religious men,
+our religion, as part and parcel of our experience, must be alive with an
+intense and vigorous activity, growing in the direction in which our
+experience grows.  Hence a dead religion is a logical contradiction, as
+we have said.  But, as truth is stranger than fiction, so life contains
+anomalies and monstrosities which simply set logic at defiance.  A dead
+religion is indeed a monstrum, something portentous, which refuses to be
+reconciled with any canons of rationality.  But it exists--that is the
+astonishing fact about it; and it found its almost perfect expression and
+embodiment in the normal and average Pharisee of our Lord's time.  There
+are three characteristic features about a dead religion, and all of them
+receive a perfect illustration in the well-known picture in the gospels
+of Pharisaic religion.
+
+(_a_)  It tends less and less to rest on experience, and more and more to
+repose upon tradition.  It is academic, a thing on which scribes may
+lecture, while the voice of the scholastic pedant with blatant
+repetitions overpowers the living, authoritative voice within the soul.
+"They marvelled, because He taught with authority, and not as the
+scribes.  A fresh (not new) teaching, with authority!"
+
+(_b_)  It removes the living God to an infinite distance from human life.
+Religion is a matter of rules, of minute obedience to a code of morals
+and of ceremonial imposed from without, not of a fellowship of the human
+with the Divine.  In fact, God is banished to a point on the far
+circumference, and the centre is occupied by the Law.  He is retained in
+order to give authority to that Law, as the source of sanctions in the
+way of rewards and punishments.  In short, the idea of the living God
+degenerates into the necessary convention of an ecclesiastical tradition.
+
+(_c_)  Closely connected with this second feature is the third
+characteristic of a dead religion--its inhumanity.  When men substitute
+obedience to a code for service of the living God, it is no wonder that
+the truth--the central truth of religion--fades rapidly from their minds,
+that the service of God is identical with the highest service rendered to
+our fellow-men.  "This commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth
+God, love his brother also."  This explains why the Pharisee held aloof
+from the outcast and the sinner.  They might be left to perish--it
+mattered not to him.
+
+Now, all through the Gospel history our Lord appears as standing in
+absolute and sternest opposition to the dead religion of the Pharisees.
+He could make no manner of terms with it.  He acted against it.  He
+denounced it at every point.  He rebuked them for "making the commandment
+of God of none effect" by that tradition which they loved so dearly.  He
+brought the idea of a living God into closest touch with the actual lives
+of men.  He deliberately consorted with publicans and sinners.  And,
+finally, He condemned, in set discourse, the whole system, traditional,
+Godless, inhuman, with scathing emphasis.  Christ died, not only because
+His words and acts ran counter to the prejudice of the people, but
+because He spoke and acted in opposition to the dead religion of the
+Pharisees.
+
+3.  The third historical cause of the death of Christ was the love of
+gain and the political ambition of the Sadducees.  Their hatred, indeed,
+would have been powerless if our Lord had not already provoked the enmity
+of the people and of the Pharisees; but that enmity, in turn, without the
+unscrupulous intrigues of the Sadducees, a small but most influential
+section, would never have proceeded to its fatal and murderous issue.  The
+Pharisees gave up the conflict in despair: "Perceive ye that ye prevail
+nothing?  Behold, the whole world is gone after Him."  It was the
+Sadducean High Priest who gave the counsel of death.  "It is expedient
+that one man should die for the people."
+
+We must remember that the Sadducees represented the aristocracy of Judaea,
+and that, as resulted necessarily from the nature and constitution of the
+Jewish state, was an ecclesiastical aristocracy, an hierarchy.  They are
+the party denoted several times in the New Testament by the term "the
+High Priests."  The nearest analogy to their position is supplied by the
+political popes and bishops of the Middle Ages.  Their interests were
+political rather than spiritual.  A considerable amount of independence
+had been left to the Jews in their own land.  The Sanhedrin, the native
+court, exercised still very considerable power.  And the Sadducean
+minority possessed a predominating influence in its consultations.  What
+political power could be wielded in a subject state of the Empire was in
+their hands.  Incidentally, a large and flourishing business was
+conducted under their control and management in the very Temple Courts,
+in "the booths of the sons of Hanan."  Our Lord struck a blow at their
+financial interests when He drove out these traders in sacrificial
+victims and other requisites.  But, much more, and this was the head and
+front of His offence, by His influence with certain classes of the
+people, and by the danger thus presented of a popular movement which
+might arouse the suspicion of the imperial authorities, and lead to very
+decisive action on their part, He threatened the political position of
+the Sadducean aristocracy.  So with complete absence of scruples, but
+with great political sagacity, Caiaphas uttered the momentous words, an
+unconscious prophecy, as St. John points out, at that meeting of the
+Sanhedrin when the death of Jesus was finally resolved upon.
+
+Thus the main historical causes of the Crucifixion were these three,
+prejudice on the part of the people, a dead religion on the part of the
+Pharisees, love of gain and political ambition on the part of the
+Sadducees.
+
+We may see then how absolutely true St. Peter was to the facts of the
+case.  "Him . . . through the hand of lawless men, ye affixed to a cross
+and slew."  God was not the cause of the death of Jesus Christ, as in
+popular and ditheistic theory, forgetting "I am in the Father, and the
+Father in Me."  The real causes of His Death were the definite sins of
+lawless, of wicked men.  God's part was a purely negative one.  He held
+His hand, and allowed sin to work out to its fatal issue.  The
+Resurrection, indeed, is the sublime act of God's interference, at the
+most critical point in all human history, at the one point supremely
+worthy of such Divine interposition, in order to finally and completely
+vindicate the cause of moral goodness.  But up till then, sin was allowed
+to have its own way, to display fully its malign character, to reach its
+ultimate result in the Death of the Sinless One.
+
+But behind the historical causes of our Lord's death, were deeper and
+spiritual causes.  "Him being by the determined counsel and foreknowledge
+of God delivered up. . . ."  God foreknew the result.  There is no
+difficulty here.  But in what sense can He be said to have "determined"
+it?
+
+The answer leads us to a consideration of decisive importance.  God works
+by law, in the spiritual, no less than in the physical region.  The Death
+of the Christ, at the hand of lawless men, came about in virtue of the
+working of those laws.  As we have said, sin is the alienation and
+estrangement of man from the Divine life which is in him, and by virtue
+of which he is man.  Now, in the human character of Jesus Christ, we see,
+for the first time, the perfect, genuine, uncaricatured humanity, in
+which the human will is at every point in absolute agreement and
+fellowship with the Divine Will.  Shortly, He represents the complete and
+absolute contradiction and antithesis of sin.  It could not have been,
+that that Life should have been realised in a world of alienation from
+the Divine, without the result, which followed as necessarily and
+inevitably as any of the physical happenings of nature, of the death of
+the Sinless.  "He became obedient unto death."  A deeper meaning lies in
+these words of St. Paul, which contain the whole secret of the Atonement.
+But, for the present, we may understand them to mean, that death was the
+natural issue of the Life of perfect obedience lived in a world permeated
+by the spirit of disobedience.  Thus we gain a clear knowledge of the
+manner in which the death of Jesus Christ happened in accordance with the
+determined counsel of God.  That which takes place, in the spiritual or
+in the physical world, as the result of the working of those laws of God
+which are the constant expression of His will, may be said to have been
+determined by Him.
+
+There is a yet more profound meaning in the Death of Christ as the result
+of sin, than any which we have as yet considered: that Death is the
+outward sign and sacrament of an inward and spiritual fact.  When we sin
+we are, in a measure proportioned to the deliberateness and heinousness
+of our sin, doing to death the Divine life, the Christ within us.  That
+which happened once on Calvary is renewed time after time in the inward
+experience of men.  The outward fact is an historical drama representing
+an ever-repeated spiritual tragedy.  Daily, by the hands of lawless men,
+by ourselves in our moments of wilfulness and disobedience, Christ is
+being put to death.  There is no sin which, in its measure and degree, is
+not a rejection and crucifixion of the Christ.
+
+The Cross of Christ, viewed in the light of its historical and spiritual
+causes, is (i) the revelation of the malignity of sin.  There we see our
+favourite sins stripped of all pleasing disguise, and revealed in their
+true horror, and cruelty, and selfishness.  The Incarnate Son of God put
+Himself at the disposal of sinful men, and His violent and shameful death
+was the result.  There is the true meaning of the sins in which we
+delight.  (ii) It reveals the disastrous result of sin, the death of the
+Divine Man within each one of us.  There is no sin which is not an act of
+spiritual suicide.
+
+It will not then be altogether in vain, that we have now considered the
+causes of the Death of Christ if, in the "solemn hour of temptation," we,
+remembering the Cross, and Him Who died thereon, and why He died, "stand
+in awe, and sin not."
+
+
+
+III
+THE CHRISTIAN AND THE SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE OF SIN
+
+
+   "Christ died for our sins."--I COR. XV. 3.
+
+Nothing is more characteristic of Christianity than its estimate of human
+sin.  Historically, no doubt, this is due to the fact that the Lord and
+Master of Christians died "on account of sins."  His death was due, as we
+have seen, both to the actual, definite sins of His contemporaries, and
+also to the irreconcilable opposition between His sinless life and the
+universal presence of sin in the world into which He came.  But it is
+with the Christian estimate of sin, and with the facts which justify it,
+that we are now concerned.
+
+Briefly put, Christianity regards sin as the one thing in the world which
+is radically and hopelessly evil.  Pain, physical and mental, is evil no
+doubt, but in a different sense.  Without going deeply into the intensely
+difficult problem of animal and human suffering, we may at least say
+this: that he would be a bold man who would undertake to say, viewing the
+moral results of suffering in human lives, that all, or the majority of
+the instances of pain which we observe, come under the head of those
+things "which ought not to be," that is, are, without qualification or
+extenuation, evil.  But this is precisely the statement which
+Christianity makes with regard to sin.  Of one thing only in the universe
+can we say that it "ought not to be," and that one thing is moral evil.
+Perhaps then, broadly and roughly, the Christian standpoint may be summed
+up in four words, "sin worse than pain."
+
+Of old, St. John wrote that "if any man love the world, the love of the
+Father is not in him."  In its outward aspect, the world has greatly
+changed since these words were written.  And yet they are as true in the
+twentieth century as they were in the first.  The world has adopted
+Christian language and manners and modes of thought.  But always and
+everywhere it is to be detected by its antagonism to the Christian
+estimate of sin.  The spirit which accuses Christianity of gross
+exaggeration in this respect, is the very spirit of the world.  Now, as
+in days of long ago, when torture and death hung on the refusal to
+scatter a few grains of incense before the statue of Caesar, the same
+eternal choice is presented to a man, Christ or the world?  Which
+estimate of sin are you going to make your own, the world's, as a
+lamentable mistake, or failure, or necessity; or the Christian, "worse
+than any conceivable pain"?  It is not a matter of academic interest, but
+an intensely vital and practical one, affecting a man's whole outlook
+upon life.  Which is right--there is the clear and definite issue
+raised--the Christian estimate, or the world's estimate of sin?  Is it
+worse than a blunder, a misfortune, a fault?  Is it something interwoven
+into the very structure of our present stage of existence?  Or, is it an
+alien and flagrant intruder into a world where it has no business, which
+is so constructed that, sooner or later, wilful transgression meets with
+the direst penalties?  There is no question as to what is the Christian
+estimate of sin.  Christ or Caesar? is the issue still presented.  But,
+we wish to ask, is there any reason for believing that the Christian
+estimate is true?  I bring forward three reasons, based respectively on
+experience, on conscience, on the ultimately similar views of the origin
+and nature of sin given by science and in the Bible.
+
+1.  First, then, consider the argument from experience.  It is very easy
+and tempting to use the language of exaggeration.  But probably we are
+not saying more than would be admitted by nearly every one, when we make
+the assertion that a very large part of the misery and suffering which
+exists in the world is traceable, directly or indirectly, to human sin.
+We are not dealing with the results of their own sins upon offenders,
+though these are in some cases conspicuous enough.  But that the world is
+full of human lives, often wrecked, more often partially stunted and
+spoiled, in most cases falling short of the full measure of vitality and
+happiness to which they might have attained, is a statement not admitting
+of denial.  And I think we are still on secure ground when we say that at
+the root of a very large proportion of these failures is some one of the
+myriad forms of sin and selfishness.  The strange thing, the bewildering
+and baffling, although, as I believe, not wholly inexplicable thing, is
+that men in a very large number of cases suffer on account of sins for
+which they are in no sense responsible.  But the fact remains of the
+close connexion which experience shows to exist between human sin and
+human suffering.  It is impossible to prove wide assertions, but a strong
+case could undoubtedly be made out for the statement that sin is a more
+prolific source of misery and failure in human life than all other
+factors put together.
+
+2.  Next, we turn to the witness of conscience, of our moral reason.  The
+main point here is that so often brought forward, of the uniqueness of
+remorse.  I may make a foolish blunder.  I may do some hasty and
+ill-considered act, and in consequence suffer some measure of
+inconvenience, or perhaps experience a veritable disaster and overthrow
+of my hopes.  But in either case, though I may feel poignant regret, I am
+as far as possible from the experience of remorse, save in so far as my
+blunder may have involved neglect of some duty, or a carelessness morally
+culpable.  But when I have committed a sin, then it would be a most
+inadequate description of my state of mind to call it regret.  I suffer
+from that intense mental pain which we have learnt to call remorse, the
+constant and relentless avenger which waits upon every transgression of
+the moral law.  And when, leaving my own experience, I interrogate the
+experience of men better than myself, above all, that of the saints of
+God, I meet with the same phenomenon a thousandfold intensified.  And I
+have a right in such a matter to accept the witness of the experts.  A
+saint is an expert in spiritual things, and his evidence in spiritual
+matters is as cogent and trustworthy as that of the biologist or
+geologist in his special field of experience.
+
+So far, then, as the witness of the moral consciousness goes, both in
+myself and in those who have in an especial degree cultivated their moral
+faculties, it bears out the contention that sin is the only thing which
+can be described as absolutely, without qualification, evil.
+
+3.  The same result follows from the consideration of the origin and
+nature of sin.
+
+Here we have two sources of information--modern science, and the account
+given in the Book of Genesis.  To my mind, the enormously impressive
+thing is that these two sources, approaching the same subject from
+entirely different points of view, find themselves at last in agreement
+on the main issue.
+
+(_a_)  According to the teaching of science, then, man is the result, the
+finished product, of aeons of animal development.  He is, in fact, the
+crown and so far ultimate achievement of an age-long evolution.  He falls
+into his natural place in zoological classification as the highest of the
+vertebrates.  But also, in man we find moral faculties developed to an
+immeasurably greater extent than in those animals which stand nearest to
+him in physical development.  It is the possession of these, above all,
+which constitutes the differentia of man.  And it is this possession
+which makes man, alone of all animals, capable of sin.  For sin is simply
+the following out of the instincts and desires of the animal, when these
+are felt to be in opposition to the dictates of the peculiarly human, the
+moral nature.  Men have said that the only Fall of Man was a fall
+upwards.  They have given an entirely new meaning to the medieval
+description of the first transgression as the "felix culpa."  But this
+would seem to involve confusion of thought.  The first emergence of man
+as man, the appearance on this planet of a moral being, at once involved
+the possibility of sin.  That, the rise of man did necessarily include.
+An animal follows the bent and inclination of its own nature.  For it,
+sin is for ever impossible.  For it, there can be no defeat, no fall, for
+the conditions of conflict are absent.  But the actual occurrence of sin
+is quite a different thing from the appearance of a being so highly
+exalted as to be capable of sinning; so constituted as to experience the
+dread reality of the internal strife between flesh and spirit, the battle
+between the lower and the higher within the same personal experience.  I
+can never act as the animal does, because I possess what the animal does
+not--a moral nature, which I can, if I will, outrage and defy.  No animal
+can be either innocent or guilty.  Moral attributes cannot be assigned to
+it.
+
+This result follows.  When I sin, I am indeed doing what I alone can do,
+because I am a man.  But also, I am, by that very act, contradicting my
+nature, violating the law of my well-being.  The possession of a moral
+nature makes me man.  Sin is just to act in defiance of and in opposition
+to that nature.  Sin, then, is the only possible case in the universe,
+falling under our observation, in which a creature _can_ contradict the
+law of its being.  Science has at least given the final refutation of the
+devil's lie that sin is natural to man.  It is the only unnatural thing
+in the world.  It is not non-human, like the actions of animals.  The age-
+long history of the race can never be reversed.  I cannot undo the
+process which has made me man, and act as the non-moral animal.  My
+sinful actions, my transgressions, are just because they are, and just in
+proportion as they are, immoral, for that very reason, and in that very
+measure, inhuman, not non-human.
+
+Much more might be shown to follow from this most important
+consideration.  But here we adduce it for this sole reason, that science
+may be allowed to bear its witness, a most just and passionless, and an
+unconscious and tacit witness, to the truth of the Christian estimate of
+sin.
+
+(_b_)  Nothing, at first sight, could be more different from the
+scientific account of the origin of sin, than that account of it which is
+given in the third chapter of the Book of Genesis.
+
+There we have, to put it shortly, the most profound spiritual teaching in
+the form of a story, a piece of primitive Hebrew folk-lore.  The Divine
+Wisdom made choice of this channel to communicate to man certain great
+truths about his nature, realities of the highest plane of his
+experience, where he moves in the presence of God and realities unseen,
+unheard.  And we can discern at least some of the reasons for the choice
+of these methods.
+
+The most adequate revelation of the origin of sin which has ever been
+made to man, must (we are almost justified in saying) have been made to
+us in some such form as this for the following reasons.
+
+(i)  Truth expressed in the form of a story is thereby made
+comprehensible to men of every stage of culture.  "Truth embodied in a
+tale, shall enter in at lowly doors."  At the door of no man's mind, who
+is spiritually receptive, will it knock in vain.  To simple and to wise,
+to the unlearned and the learned, to the young and to the old, it appeals
+alike.  This form of instruction alone is of universal application.
+
+(ii) Truth thus conveyed can never become obsolete.  Scientific treatises
+in the course of a few years become out of date, left far behind by the
+rapidly advancing tide of knowledge.  Moreover, if we can imagine it
+possible that in the ninth century B.C., an account could have been
+composed, under some supernatural influence, in the terms of modern
+thought, it would have had to wait nearly three thousand years before it
+became intelligible, and then, in a few decades, or centuries at most, it
+would in all probability have become once more incomprehensible or, if
+not that, then at least hopelessly behind the times.
+
+The form of a story, as in the case of our Lord's parables, alone ensures
+that truth thus conveyed shall be intelligible to all men at all times.
+To object to the form, to scoff at or deride it, is as unintelligent as
+it would be, for example, to disparage the sublime teaching of the
+parable of the Prodigal Son on the ground that we have no evidence for
+the historical truth of the incidents.
+
+Moreover, when we place this and the similar stories we find in the early
+chapters of Genesis side by side with the Babylonian myths with which
+they stand in some sort of historical relationship, we can trace in the
+lofty moral and spiritual teachings of the former, as contrasted with the
+grotesque and polytheistic representations of the latter, the veritable
+action of the Spirit of God upon the minds of men.  Modern research has,
+in fact, raised the doctrine of inspiration from a vague and conventional
+belief to the level of an ascertained fact, evidenced by observation.
+Just as a scientific man can watch his facts under his microscope or in
+his test tubes, so such comparison as has been suggested, between Genesis
+and the cuneiform tablets, enables us to watch the very fact, to detect
+the Divine Spirit at work, not superseding, but illuminating and
+uplifting the natural faculties of the sacred writers.  But we now turn
+to the spiritual teaching enshrined in this particular story.
+
+(i)  First, we have the fundamental truth that man is made capable of
+hearing the Divine Voice.  Not once in the distant past, but to-day, and
+day by day, the Voice of God is heard speaking within the depths of
+consciousness as clearly and as decisively as of old it sounded among the
+trees of the garden.
+
+(ii)  But, secondly, other voices make themselves heard by us, and woe to
+us if we listen to them.
+
+There is the voice which bids us gratify our animal appetite.  The woman
+"saw that the tree was good for food."  I am conscious of the strength of
+bodily desires.  Let me seek nothing, from moment to moment, but the
+satisfaction of my inclinations.  There is the voice which bids us
+gratify the desire of the eyes.  She "saw that the tree was pleasant to
+the eyes."  The world is full of beauty.  Let me make that my end, the
+satisfaction of the aesthetic sense; let me rest in the contemplation of
+that beauty, which was made for me, and I for it, precisely in order that
+I might not find repose there, but might be led thereby to Him Who made
+this scene so fair that His dear children might be drawn to Himself, Who
+is the eternal and uncreated loveliness.
+
+There is, lastly, the voice which bids us gratify the desire of the mind.
+Eve "saw that the tree was to be desired to make one wise."  I desire to
+know.  Let me indulge this desire at any cost, even if it mean the
+filling of my mind with all manner of foul and loathsome images.  It is
+all "knowing the world."  We forget, poor fools, that mere knowledge is
+not wisdom, and that there is a knowledge which brings death.
+
+The desires of the body, the eyes, the mind, are good and healthful and
+holy in their proper place and sphere.  Through these we reach out to the
+life and love and knowledge of God.  And yet, if gratified against the
+dictates of that clear-sounding, inner, Divine Voice, they are precisely
+the materials of sin and death.  To gratify them against the dictates of
+the moral and spiritual nature is to exclude oneself from the garden of
+God's delight, from the health and joy of the Divine Presence.  We know
+it.  We have learnt it by saddest experience of our own.  To sin against
+the voice within is to find oneself separated from God; the ears of the
+soul have become deaf to the warnings of conscience, the eyes of the soul
+blind to the vision of the glory and holiness of God.
+
+Is it wrong to say that such teaching as this can never be outgrown?
+That, as time goes on, as the spiritual experience of the race and of the
+individual grows and broadens, still new lessons may be found to be
+contained in it?
+
+The Bible adds to the teaching of science that without which that
+teaching is incomplete.  It bids us know and feel and recognise the
+Divine Presence within us and, in the light of that ultimate truth of
+ourselves, realise something of the appalling grandeur of the issues of
+common life.  But, different as are the forms in which their respective
+lessons are conveyed, science and the Bible unite their testimony to that
+of experience and conscience, that the Christian estimate of sin, and not
+the world's estimate of it, is the right one.
+
+And the teaching of experience, conscience, science, and the Bible
+receives its final confirmation in the Cross of Jesus Christ.  Henceforth
+sin, all sins, our sins, are to be estimated and measured in the light of
+the fact that sin brought about the death of the sinless Son of Man.  Sin
+is the real enemy of ourselves and of the race.  It is the destruction of
+the true self, the Divine Man in every son of man.
+
+We need, for ourselves, to strive to attain to the genuinely Christian
+estimate of sin.  "Had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord
+of Glory."  But we have the Cross lifted up before our eyes and when, in
+the light of that, we begin to hate and dread sin worse than pain, then
+we shall have begun to make some real advance towards becoming that which
+we long to be, and all the time mean and aspire to be--Christians,
+disciples of the Crucified.
+
+
+
+IV
+THE MEANING OF SIN, AND THE REVELATION OF THE TRUE SELF
+
+
+   "In this we have come to know what love is, because He laid down His
+   life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."--1
+   JOHN III. 16.
+
+It is important that we should arrive at some clearer understanding of
+the nature of sin.  Let us approach the question from the side of the
+Divine Indwelling.  The doctrine of the Divine Immanence, in things and
+in persons, that doctrine which we are to-day slowly recovering, is
+rescued from pantheism by holding fast at the same time to the Christian
+doctrine of the Trinity.  God the Transcendent dwells in "all thinking
+things, all objects of all thoughts" by His Word and Spirit.  The Word,
+the Logos, of which St. John speaks, is the Eternal Self-Expression of
+God, standing as it were face to face with Him in the depths of His
+eternal life.  "In the beginning the Word was with God."  He is the
+Eternal Thought of God, Who includes within Himself this and all possible
+universes.  And the Spirit, One with the Father and the Word, gives to
+the Thought of God its realisation and embodiment in what we call things.
+And that realisation of the Thought of God by the Spirit of God is a
+progressive realisation--
+
+1.  In inorganic nature, as power and wisdom and beauty.
+
+2.  In organic beings, as vegetable and animal life.
+
+3.  In men, as the higher reason, including our moral and spiritual
+nature.
+
+The long process of evolution is thus the progressive realisation of the
+Thought of God now becoming the Word, the expressed Thought of God.  And
+this realisation is from within, a growing manifestation of God _in_
+created things.  And its climax was reached in the Incarnation when
+
+4.  The Word became flesh; the Thought of God perfectly embodied in our
+humanity.  And now this same progressive revelation of God is continuing
+on the higher plane into which it was uplifted at the Incarnation.  The
+work of the Spirit is to form within the members of Christ's Body, that
+Body which is constituted by His indwelling, the Mind and the Life of God
+Incarnate.  "He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you."  So we
+get
+
+5.  The work of the Spirit of Christ within the Church, extending the
+Incarnation.
+
+"He," writes St. Paul, "gave Him [Christ] as Head over all to the Church,
+which is His Body, the fulness of Him Who at all points in all men is
+being fulfilled."
+
+The application of this to our present subject is as follows.  The animal
+life in us, and the Divine life in us, are both alike due to the
+indwelling God, both alike are manifestations of His Presence.  But they
+are manifestations at two different levels of being.  What follows?
+
+The animal nature is good; the moral and spiritual nature is good.  What
+do we mean in this connexion by "good"?  We mean, they are the results of
+the action of Him Whose Will is essential goodness.
+
+The peculiarity of human life is, however, the conflict between these two
+elements of man's nature--the lower and the higher.  Neither as yet,
+_from the human standpoint_, is good or bad.  Moral attributes belong
+only to the will, which we may provisionally call the centre of man's
+personality.  For man is a personal being, and as such stands apart from
+God.
+
+   God, Whose power brought man into being,
+   Stands as it were a handsbreadth off, to give
+   Room for the newly made to live,
+   And look at Him from a place apart,
+   And use His gifts of mind and heart.
+
+Man alone can bring into existence the morally good or the morally bad.
+And the materials of his choice are presented by the co-existence within
+him of the lower and the higher.  Sin is the choice by the will of the
+lower, when that is felt to be in conflict with the higher.  It is the
+resolution, previous to any action, to satisfy the desires of the animal,
+when these are known to contradict the dictates of the moral and
+spiritual nature.
+
+Here we pause to notice a point of great importance for clear thinking on
+this subject.  The conflict we have spoken of is that described by St.
+Paul as between the flesh and the spirit.  Now the flesh is not
+equivalent to the body.  The works of the flesh are by no means
+necessarily sensual sins; they include strife and envy.  The flesh, the
+animal within us, is not to be identified with our physical organisation.
+
+Now we are drawing near to the very heart of the matter.  What is it
+which distinguishes the lower nature from the higher, the animal from the
+Divine in us, the flesh from the spirit?  The distinction lies in the
+objects to which the desires of each of these natures are directed.
+
+The animal, predominantly, desires the good of self: the Divine, the good
+of others.
+
+This we must now expand.  There is nothing morally wrong in the
+self-seeking of the animal.  Moral evil--sin--only arises when two
+conditions are fulfilled.
+
+The self-seeking desire must be felt to be in contradiction to the
+unselfish dictates of the higher nature.
+
+The will, having this knowledge more or less clearly before it, chooses
+to give effect to the lower rather than to subordinate it to the higher.
+We may express the same truth somewhat more accurately.
+
+The material of human sin is the co-existence of the animal nature and
+the Divine Nature within us.
+
+The occasion of sin is the conflict between the two.
+
+The conditions of sin are two--knowledge and freedom; knowledge of the
+antagonism between the desires of the two natures, and freedom to give
+effect either to the one or to the other.
+
+The actual fact of sin is the movement of the will, making its choice in
+favour of the lower in opposition to the higher.
+
+These two corollaries follow:--(i) Sin belongs only to the will, not to
+the nature.  "There is nothing good in the world save a good will."  And
+the converse is true: there is nothing sinful in the world save a sinful
+will.
+
+(ii)  Sin does not lie in the act, but in the movement of the will, of
+which the act is but the outward symbol.  We must carefully distinguish
+between sin and temptation.  No temptation is sinful, however strong and
+however vividly presented to the mind.  Sin only comes in when the will
+makes the choice of the worse alternative.  A sin in thought is an act of
+inward choice, the deliberate indulgence of, the dwelling with pleasure
+upon, the temptation presented to us.  But if I am only prevented by
+circumstances or by fear from embodying the wrong choice of my will in
+action, I have, in the sight of God, committed that sin.  If I have made
+the wrong choice, and am deterred by the faintest of moral scruples, as
+well as, perhaps, by other considerations, from carrying it out, I am
+really, although in a less degree, guilty.
+
+Now we can fall back upon our main thought.  The animal matter is
+essentially self-regarding.  This is not (_a_) the same thing as to say
+that all actions of all animals are self-regarding.  I see no difficulty
+in believing that there may be adumbrations of the moral and spiritual in
+animals below man, if the animal life is the manifestation, on a lower
+plane, of the same Word Who is the Life of nature and the Light (the
+higher reason and spiritual life) of man.  Nor (_b_) is it the same thing
+as to say that the desires of the animal nature are selfish.  For
+selfishness is a moral term and, as we have seen, moral attributes are
+inapplicable except to a wrong choice of the will.
+
+These self-regarding impulses of the animal nature are due to the fact,
+that that nature is the result of the age-long struggle for existence.
+These impulses have secured the survival and the predominance of man.
+
+But man is more than a successful animal.  He is made in the image of
+God.  In him, the Word is revealed, not as life only, but as light.  In
+an altogether higher sense than can be predicated of any part of creation
+below man, he is a sharer in the Divine life.
+
+Now that Divine life is the very life of Him Whose very essence and being
+is Love.  God is Love.  What does this mean?  It has never been better
+expressed than in the following words: "God is a Being, not one of Whose
+thoughts is for Himself. . . . Creation is one great unselfish thought of
+God, the bringing into existence of beings who can know the happiness
+which God Himself knows" (Dr. Askwith).  What happiness is that?  It is
+explained, by the same writer, as the happiness which is found in the
+promotion of the happiness, that is, in the largest sense, the well-being
+of others.
+
+We can now see the reason of the antagonism between the animal and the
+Divine in ourselves, the real meaning of the Pauline antithesis between
+the flesh and the Spirit, the old man and the new.
+
+We are to "put off the old man."  He is old, indeed, beyond our
+imaginations of antiquity, for he is the product of the hoary animal
+ancestry of our race.  Our progress as successful competitors in the
+struggle for animal existence, has been the waxing stronger of the old
+man day by day.
+
+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."
+
+All this may be summed up in one short phrase, which goes near, I
+believe, to express the innermost reality of the Christian religion.
+Christ, the Son of man, is the true self of every man.  To follow Him, to
+be His disciple, in thought, and word, and deed, is to be oneself, to
+realise one's own personality.  In no other way can I attain to be
+myself.
+
+Thus the Cross is the supreme revelation of the Divine Life in man.  And
+now we shall go on to see how it brings to us, not merely the knowledge
+of the Ideal, but also, what is far more, the very means whereby the
+Ideal may be realised in and by each one of us.
+
+We have dealt with the Cross as illumination; we now approach its
+consideration as redemptive power.
+
+
+
+V
+THE GREAT RECONCILIATION
+
+
+   "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself."  2 COR. V. 19.
+
+Such considerations as we have had before us, are of far more than
+theoretical interest.  They are of all questions the most practical.  Sin
+is not a curious object which we examine from an aloof and external
+standpoint.  However we regard it, to whatever view of its nature we are
+led, it is, alas, a fact within and not merely outside our experience.
+
+And so we are at length brought to this most personal and most urgent
+inquiry, What has been the result _to me_ of my past acts of sin?  I have
+sinned; what have been, what are, what will be the consequences?
+
+The most hopelessly unintelligent answer is, that there are no results,
+no consequences.  It behoves us to remember that we can never sin with
+impunity.  This is true, even in the apparent absence of all punishment.
+Every act of sin is followed by two results, though probably a profounder
+analysis would show them to be in reality one.
+
+(i)  Whenever I sin I inflict a definite injury on myself, varying with
+the sinfulness of the sin; that is, with its nature and the degree of
+deliberation it involved.  I am become a worse man; I have, in some
+degree, rejected and done to death the Divine in me, my true self.  Every
+sin, in its own proper measure, is both a rejection of the Christ within,
+and also an act of spiritual suicide.
+
+Again (ii), each sin, once more according to the degree of its guilt,
+involves separation from God.  And, as union with God is life, it follows
+that sin is, and not merely brings death.  That is the death of which the
+outward, physical death is the mere symbol.  It is death of that which
+makes me man--the weakening of my will, the dulling of my conscience, the
+loss of spiritual vision.  Hereafter, it may be, all this will be
+recognised by me as being death indeed, when I see how much I have
+missed, by my own fault, of the life and happiness which might have been
+mine in virtue of that unbroken communion with God, for which I was made.
+
+These two results may be regarded as the penalties of sinning; more
+truly, they are aspects of sin itself.  We can hardly be reminded too
+often that the worst punishment of sin is sin itself.  The external
+results of sin, where such occur, are not evil, but good; for the object
+for which they are sent is the cure of sin.  "To me no harder hell was
+shown than sin."  If hell is this separation from God, this veritable and
+only real death, then hell is not an external penalty inflicted upon sin,
+but is involved in the very nature of sin itself.  Or, it would be still
+more accurate to say, the constitution of the universe (including
+ourselves) being what it is, and the nature of sin being what it is,
+these results necessarily follow.
+
+Now, the universe is not something which God has created and then, as it
+were, flung off from Himself, standing for ever outside it, as it is for
+ever outside Him.  The universe, at each moment of its existence, is the
+expression, in time and space, of the Divine Mind.  What we call its
+"laws," whether in the physical or the spiritual sphere, are the thoughts
+of the Mind of God: its "forces" are the operations of the Will of God,
+acting in accordance with His thoughts: material "things" are His
+thoughts embodied, that is, Divine thoughts rendered, by an act of the
+Divine Will, accessible to our senses.
+
+Now we are in a position to understand both what is meant by the Wrath of
+God, and the manner in which it acts.
+
+By the expression, "the Wrath of God," we are to understand the hostility
+of the Divine Mind to moral evil: the eternal antagonism of the Divine
+righteousness to its opposite.  We are not now dealing with the question
+of the real or substantive existence of evil.  But revelation amply
+confirms and enforces the conviction of our moral consciousness that,
+with a hatred beyond all human measures of hatred, God hates sin.  It is
+hardly necessary to add, that that eternal and immeasurable hatred and
+hostility of the Divine Mind towards sin is compatible with infinite love
+towards His children, in whose minds and lives sin is elaborated and
+manifested.  In fact, all attempts to reconcile the Wrath of God with His
+love seem to be utterly beside the mark.  They only serve to obscure the
+truth that the Divine Wrath is itself a manifestation of the Divine Love.
+For if sin is, as we have already seen, in its very essence, selfishness,
+and if Love is the very Being of God--if He is not merely loving, but
+Love itself--then the Wrath of God, His hostility to sin, is His Love
+viewed in one particular aspect, in its outlook on moral evil, in its
+relation to that which is its very opposite and antithesis.  Hell and
+Heaven, separation from God and union with Him, are alike expressions of
+the Eternal Love, which, because it is love, burns with unquenchable fire
+against all forms of selfishness and lovelessness.
+
+This is the true, the ultimate reason why, in a universe which is the
+expression of the Mind of God, we cannot sin, and never have sinned, with
+impunity.
+
+From these two fundamental truths--
+
+(_a_)  The universe is the expression of the Mind of God;
+
+(_b_)  God is love,
+
+There follow, by a natural and inevitable law, the two results which
+accompany every act of sin.
+
+(_a_)  The destruction of the true self, the Christ, the Divine Life
+within man.
+
+(_b_)  Separation from God, which is death.  We separate these results in
+thought; but it will now be sufficiently obvious that they are, in fact,
+one.
+
+Is this taking too serious a view of sin?  I do not think that this can
+be maintained in view of our whole preceding argument.
+
+But are we taking too serious a view of little sins, of sins which spring
+from ignorance, of the sins of children?
+
+We have already seen that knowledge and freedom are both necessary to
+constitute an act of sin.  If ignorance is complete, then complete also
+is the absence of sin.  For sin lies not in any material act, but in
+consciousness and will.  The will alone can be sinful, as the will alone
+can be good.  And it is entirely consistent with our standpoint, to admit
+the existence of an almost infinite number of degrees of sinfulness.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Now we reach this immensely important result.  We having sinned, our
+supreme need is forgiveness.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel for
+this precise reason, that it meets, as it claimed from the beginning to
+meet, this uttermost need of men.  Its offer is, always and everywhere,
+the forgiveness, the remission of sins.
+
+But what are we to understand by forgiveness?  The forgiveness which is
+offered to us in the name of Jesus Christ is not, and our own moral sense
+ought to assure us that it could not be, the being let off punishment.
+"Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their
+sins," not from any external pains or penalties of their sins.  To be
+saved from sin, is to have sin brought to an end, abolished within us.  It
+is the recovery of the true self, the restoration of that union with God
+which is, here and now, eternal life.  In other words, understanding the
+Divine Wrath as we have seen reason to understand it, forgiveness must
+mean to cease to be, or to cease to identify ourselves with, that in us
+which is the object of the Divine Wrath.  In short, forgiveness is, in
+the great phrase of St. Paul, reconciliation with God.
+
+How, then, is forgiveness or reconciliation to be obtained?  The answer
+which the apostle gives is this: "God was in Christ reconciling the world
+to Himself."  Let us try to see what this means.
+
+* * * * *
+
+There can only be one way of ceasing to be the object of the Divine
+Wrath, and that is by identifying oneself with it; if we may use the
+catch-phrase, by becoming its subject instead of its object.  This means
+that, so far as is in our power, we must enter into the Divine Mind in
+regard to sin, and our own sins in particular.  Up to the limit of our
+power, we must make that Mind our own mind, we must hate sin, and our
+sins, as God hates them.
+
+There is one word in the New Testament which expresses all this, and that
+is the word only partially and inadequately translated "repentance."  The
+word thus represented is [Greek text], and [Greek text] is exactly "a
+change of mind."  It really means the coming over to God's side, the
+entire revolution of our mental attitude and outlook with regard to sin.
+The word stands for self-identification with the Wrath of God, with the
+Divine Mind in its outlook upon sin.  That change of mind is itself
+reconciliation, forgiveness, remission of sins.  And that which alone
+makes [Greek text] and, therefore, forgiveness, possible, is the Death of
+Jesus Christ upon the Cross.
+
+For that Death is the perfect revelation, in the only way in which it
+could be interpreted to us, that is, in terms of our common human life,
+of the Wrath of God, the Divine hostility to, and repudiation of sin.  For
+the Death of Christ was the complete repudiation of sin, by God Himself,
+in our manhood.  The Incarnate Son laid down His life in the perfect
+fulfilment of the mission received from the Father.  "He became obedient
+unto death."  He died, rather than, by the slightest concession to that
+which was opposed to the Divine Will, be unfaithful or disobedient to
+that mission.  "He died to sin once for all."  His Death was His final,
+complete repudiation of sin.  And thus it was the absolutely perfect
+revelation of the Divine Mind in regard to sin.
+
+This is the truth which underlies all the utterly misleading language
+about Christ's Death as a penalty, or about Christ Himself as the Ideal
+Penitent.  Both penalty and penitence imply personal guilt and the
+personal consciousness of guilt.  Both conceptions destroy the
+significance of the Cross.  Only the Sinless One could die to sin, could
+perfectly repudiate sin, could perfectly disclose the Mind of God in
+relation to sin.
+
+The Death of Christ was indeed, as we have seen, the result of His
+perfect obedience in a world of sin, of disobedience.  The historical
+conditions under which He fulfilled His Mission, necessitated that His
+repudiation of sin should take the form which it did actually take.  We
+may be sure, too, that He felt, as only the Sinless Son of God could
+feel, the injury, the affront, the malignity, the degradation of sin.  It
+is the sense of this which has given rise to the modern idea of Christ as
+the Penitent for the world's sin.  But if we are to understand the word
+in this sense, then we are entirely changing its meaning and connotation.
+And we cannot do this, in regard to words like penitent and penitence,
+without producing confusion of thought.  It is time, surely, that this
+misleading and mischievous fallacy of the penitence of Christ should be
+finally abandoned by writers on the Atonement.
+
+But, so far, we have only seen that the Death of Christ to sin, His
+repudiation of sin to the point of death, is the complete revelation of
+the Divine Wrath, the Divine Mind in regard to sin.  If we could only
+make all this our own, then we should have actually attained to the
+changed mind, the [Greek text], which is reconciliation with God.
+
+Now, it is a most significant fact that, in the New Testament, repentance
+is ever closely coupled with faith.  Faith, in its highest, its most
+Christian application, is not faith _in_ Christ, in the sense of
+believing that the revelation made by Christ is true, but in the strange
+and pregnant phrase of St. Paul and St. John, faith _into_ Christ.  And
+by this is meant entire self-abandonment, the utter giving up of
+ourselves to Christ.  To have faith into Christ is the perfect expression
+of discipleship.  It is the supreme act of self-surrender by which a man
+takes Christ henceforth to be the Lord and Master of his life.  It
+implies, no doubt, the existence of certain intellectual convictions; but
+the faith which rests there is, as St. James tells us, the faith of the
+demons "who also tremble."  In the full sense, faith is an act of the
+whole personal being.  And as the will is our personality in action, we
+may say that faith into Christ is, above all, an affair of the will.
+
+But thus to surrender oneself to Christ, to make Him, and not self, the
+centre and governing principle of our life is, in other words, to make
+His Will our will, His Mind our mind.  St. Paul is exactly describing the
+full fruition and final issue of faith when he says of himself, "I live,
+yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."
+
+Faith _is_ self-identification with the Mind of Christ.  And that Mind is
+the Mind of Him Who died to sin, Who by dying repudiated sin, and
+revealed His implacable hatred of and hostility to it, which is the
+hatred and hostility of God, in our manhood, to the moral evil which
+destroys it.
+
+Thus the man, who, by the supreme act of faith into Christ, has made
+Christ's Mind his own mind, has thereby gained the changed mind, the
+[Greek text], in regard to sin, which is the ceasing to be the object of
+God's wrath, because it is the being identified with it.  He is,
+henceforth, reconciled to God.  The state of alienation and death is
+over.  In Christ he, too, has died to sin.  The false self, in him, has
+been put to death.  With Christ he has been crucified.  With Christ he
+lives henceforth to God, in that union and fellowship with Him, which is
+the life eternal, the life which is life indeed.  His true self, the
+Christ in him, is alive for evermore in the power of the Resurrection.
+
+That is the final issue, the glorious consummation, of faith.  But so far
+as faith is in us at all, so far as daily with more complete surrender we
+give ourselves to Christ, and take Him for our Lord and Master, the
+process, of which the fulfilment, the perfect end, is reconciliation,
+union, resurrection, eternal life, has begun in us.  And He Who has,
+visibly and manifestly, "begun in us" that "good work," will assuredly
+"accomplish it until the day of Jesus Christ."
+
+But something more yet remains to be said.  Every theory of the Atonement
+in the end must come to grief, which is based upon the assumption that
+Christ is separate from the race which He came to redeem, or the Church,
+which is the part of humanity in actual process of redemption.  Professor
+Inge, in his work on _Mysticism and Personal Idealism_, has justly
+denounced the miserable theory which regards human personalities as so
+many impervious atoms, as self-contained and isolated units.  This
+popular view is theologically disastrous when the Atonement is
+interpreted in the light, or rather the darkness of it.
+
+As the Son of man He is the Head of the human race, "the last Adam" in
+the language of St. Paul.  No mere sovereignty over mankind is denoted by
+that title.  He is that living, personal Thought of God which each man,
+as man, embodies and, with more or less distortion, represents.  He Who
+became Incarnate is, as He ever was, the Light which lighteneth every man
+coming into the world.
+
+It was because of this, His vital and organic connexion with the race,
+and with every member of it, that He could become Incarnate, and that His
+sufferings and triumph could have more than a pictorial, or
+representative, or vicarious efficacy.  His work of redemption was
+rendered possible by His relation, as the Word, to the whole universe,
+and to mankind.
+
+It was because of this, that He could become "the Head of the Body, the
+Church."  Former ages interpreted the Atonement in the terms of Roman
+law.  It is the mission of our age to learn to interpret it in terms of
+biology.  We are only just beginning, by the aid of modern thought, to
+discover the true, profound meaning of the biological language of the New
+Testament.  "As the body is one, and has many members, so also is the
+Christ."  Not, let us mark, the Head only, but the Body.  The Church is
+"the fulness of Him Who at all points, in all men, is being fulfilled."
+The words tell us of an organic growth.  "I am the vine, ye are the
+branches."  Can any terms express organic connexion more clearly than
+these?
+
+It is our Head, to Whom we are bound by vital ties, in the mysterious
+unity of a common life, Who has repudiated sin by dying to it.  By
+personal surrender to Christ we make His Mind our own; but we are enabled
+to do so, because, in so doing, we are attaining to our own true mind, we
+are entering into the possession of our own true selves, we are "winning
+our souls," realising the Christ-nature within us.  By faith and
+sacraments, that which is potentially ours becomes our own in actual
+fact.
+
+In simpler language, and in more familiar but not less true words, we who
+are members of Christ's Body, in all our weak attempts after repentance
+and faith, are not left to our own unaided resources, but are at every
+point aided and enabled to advance to final, complete reconciliation and
+union by the Spirit of the Christ working in us.
+
+He is no merely external reconciler.  He reconciles us from within,
+working along with our own wills, to create that changed mind which is
+His own Mind revealed upon the Cross for no other reason than that it
+might become our mind, the most real and fundamental thing in us, that
+"new man, which is being renewed after the image of Him Who created him."
+
+
+
+VI
+REDEMPTION
+
+
+   "Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is
+   perfect."--MATT. V. 48.
+
+   "Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver from the body of this
+   death?  Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord."--ROM. VII.
+   24, 25.
+
+We have studied the meaning of reconciliation through the Cross.  We have
+said that to be reconciled to God means to cease to be the object of the
+Wrath of God, that is, His hostility to sin.  We can only cease to be the
+objects of this Divine Wrath by identifying ourselves with it, by making
+God's Mind in regard to sin, and our sins, our own mind.  The Cross gives
+us power to do this.  For it reveals to us in the terms of humanity, that
+is, in the only way in which it could be made intelligible to us, the
+Divine Mind in its relation to sin.  By faith, which is personal
+surrender to Christ, His mind thus revealed becomes our mind.  Thus we
+attain to "repentance," in the New Testament sense of the changed mind
+and outlook upon sin.  And the motive power to faith and repentance is
+supplied by our union with Christ.
+
+But all this is not yet enough.  We have not exhausted the glory, the
+full meaning of the Cross.  If this were indeed all, the work of our
+salvation would be incomplete.  For I may indeed have, in Christ, died to
+sin; in Him I may have repudiated it; but the task of life still lies
+before me to be fulfilled, and that task is nothing short of this: the
+complete putting off of sin, the complete putting on of holiness, the
+final achievement of that union with God which is life eternal.
+
+For this I was made.  "Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in
+heaven is perfect."  Our Lord is not, in these words, enunciating a rule
+of perfection for a few saintly souls.  He is laying down the law, the
+standard of all human lives.  To fall short of this, is to fall short of
+what it means to be a man.
+
+The proof that this is so, is to be found in our own consciousness,
+bearing its witness to these words of Jesus Christ.  The one most
+constant feature in human life is its restlessness, the feeling of
+dissatisfaction which broods over its best achievements, the attainment
+of all its desires.  That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the
+witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny.  We
+were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with
+Him.  No being who was merely finite, could be conscious of its finitude.
+
+   Spite of yourselves ye witness this,
+      Who blindly self or sense adore.
+   Else, wherefore, leaving your true bliss,
+      Still restless, ask ye more?
+
+"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart knoweth no rest, till it
+find rest in Thee."
+
+Then look at the other picture.  Side by side with the glory of our
+calling, place the shame and the misery of what we are.  My desires, my
+passions are ever at war with the true self, and too often overcome it.
+"I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and
+bringing me into captivity to the law of sin and death which is in my
+members."  And so there goes up the bitter cry, "Wretched man that I am!
+who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
+
+Now the Cross of Jesus Christ is the Divine answer to this great and
+exceeding bitter cry of our suffering, struggling, sinful humanity.  For
+the Cross is not merely an altar, but a battlefield, by far the greatest
+battlefield in all human history.  That was the crisis of the conflict
+between good and evil which gives endless interest to the most
+insignificant human life, which is the source of the pathos and the
+tragedy, the degradation and the glory, of the long history of our race.
+It is the human struggle which we watch upon the Cross: the human victory
+there won which we acclaim with endless joy and exultation.  Man faced
+the fiercest assault of the foe, and man conquered.
+
+   O loving wisdom of our God!
+      When all was sin and shame,
+   A second Adam to the fight
+      And to the rescue came.
+
+   O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
+      Which did in Adam fail,
+   Should strive afresh against the foe,
+      Should strive, and should prevail.
+
+Man conquered man's foe, and in the only way in which that foe could be
+conquered, the way of obedience.  "He became obedient unto death."  The
+Death was in a real sense the victory, for its only meaning and value
+consisted in its being the crown and culmination of His life-long
+obedience.  The Resurrection itself, in one aspect of it, was but the
+symbol, the "sign," of that victory which was already achieved upon the
+Cross.
+
+But what has this to do with us?  It cannot be too often repeated, that
+it has nothing to do with us, if Christ be merely "Another," separate
+from us as we are, or imagine ourselves to be, separate from each other.
+That which He took of the Virgin Mary, and took in the only way in which
+it could have been taken, by the Virgin Birth, was not a separate human
+individuality, but human nature; that nature which we all share.  It was
+in that nature that He faced and overcame our enemy.
+
+Here we pause to note a difficulty based on a misunderstanding.  If
+Christ were a Divine Person, working in and through human nature, if that
+humanity which He assumed were itself impersonal, then how could He have
+had a human will?  And, after all, is an impersonal human nature really
+human?  That is the difficulty, and the very fact that we feel it as a
+difficulty, is a proof that we have not yet grasped that conception of
+the Divine Nature which underlies the belief in the Incarnation.  God and
+man are not beings of a different order.  The humanity of every man is
+the indwelling in him of the Word Who became flesh.  Each one of us is a
+shadow, a reflection of the Incarnation.  In Jesus Christ God came; and,
+it would be equally true to say, in Him first, man came.  All human
+nature, I believe it would be true to say all organic nature, pointed
+forward to the Incarnation as its fulfilment, as the justification for
+its existence.
+
+Thus, when it is said that the human nature of Christ was impersonal,
+what is meant is, impersonal in the modern and restricted sense of
+personality.  The phrase is useful, when explained, to guard against the
+idea, which is contrary to the very principle of the Atonement, that the
+Son of man was just one more human soul added to the myriads of human
+souls who have appeared on this planet.  He Who became Incarnate is the
+true self of every man, the very Light of true personality in all men.  As
+a matter of fact, He was more truly humanly Personal than any of the sons
+of men, and all the more truly humanly Personal, because He was Divinely
+Personal, the Word in the image of Whom man was made.
+
+The immense significance of these truths in regard to our redemption is
+this, that a separate individuality cannot be imparted to us, but a
+common nature can.  And that nature which the Eternal Word assumed of the
+Virgin Mary, and in which He conquered sin and death, is communicated to
+us by His Spirit, above all, in the sacraments of Baptism and the Holy
+Communion.  Here is the heart of the Atonement.
+
+That victory over sin and death is mine, and yet not mine.  That is the
+splendid paradox which lies at the very root of Christianity.  It is
+mine, because I share in that Human Nature, which by its perfect
+obedience, the obedience unto death, "triumphed gloriously" upon the
+Cross.  It is not mine until, by a deliberate act of my will, in self-
+surrender to Christ, I have made it my own.  By grace and by faith, not
+by one of these without the other, we become one with Him Who died and
+rose again.  It is faith, the hand of the soul stretched out to receive,
+which accepts and welcomes grace, the Hand of God stretched out to give.
+
+These great thoughts we will pursue in our next address.  But meanwhile,
+we have at least seen that the Cross is both victory and attainment:
+victory over the sin by which I have been so long held in bondage;
+attainment of all I can be, all I long to be, all I was made by God to
+be.  "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
+
+
+
+VII
+REDEMPTION (CONTINUED)
+
+
+   "He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life
+   eternal."--JOHN VI. 54.
+
+We were made for holiness, union with God, eternal life.  These are but
+different expressions for one and the same thing.  For holiness is the
+realisation of our manhood, of that Divine Image which is the true self,
+expressing itself and acting, as it does in us, through the highest of
+animal forms.  That perfect self-realisation is not merely dependent
+upon, but is union with God, at its beginning, throughout its course, and
+in its final consummation.  And the life of self-realisation or holiness,
+which is the life of union with God, is eternal.  Eternal life is not, as
+in the popular idea of it, an endless and wearisome prolongation of mere
+existence.  Primarily, the idea is of the quality, not the duration of
+life.  In the teaching of the New Testament, eternal life is a present
+possession of Christians.  "These things I write to you, who believe on
+the Name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life."
+Being as it is a moral and spiritual reality, it is outside time and
+space.  It is unaffected by "changes and chances."  It is for ever beyond
+the reach of the temporal processes of decay, corruption, death.  Here it
+manifests itself in service, that service of our fellows which is the
+service of God.  Hereafter, it will be manifested in higher and more
+exalted forms of service.  "Have thou authority over ten, over five,
+cities."
+
+Now all this, the consummation and glorious fruit of our humanity,
+holiness, union with God, life eternal, we see already realised in Jesus
+Christ, the Son of man.  We see it realised, as we have learnt, not in a
+separate, solitary, individual, isolated life, but in that common nature
+which "for us men and for our salvation" He assumed of the Virgin Mary.
+
+All that is in Him was in Him first, in order that it might be in us.  And
+this is the important point: it can only be in us by virtue of our union
+with Him.  That union He describes under the vivid and forcible metaphor
+of eating His flesh, and drinking His blood.  "He that eateth My flesh,
+and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal."  His flesh and blood--a common
+Jewish phrase for human nature--is precisely that common nature which He
+assumed, in which He died to sin, which He raised from the dead and
+exalted to the Right Hand of God, and which He imparts to us, by His
+Spirit given to dwell in us for evermore.
+
+The doctrine of the Atonement is incomplete, it is irrational, until it
+is completed by the doctrine of the Spirit, the Giver of Life.  As He is
+the source of life in all living organisms, so He is in Christians the
+source of the Christ-life.  He comes to dwell in us, not simply as the
+Spirit, but as the Spirit of Christ--the Spirit Who first created, and
+then "descended" to abide in the Perfect Manhood.  That gift of the
+Spirit of Christ as the indwelling source of the life of Christ, and the
+means of the Presence of Christ in us, is the characteristic gift of the
+New Dispensation.  It is His work to make us ever more and more partakers
+of Christ, to be perpetually feeding us with His flesh and blood.
+
+And, as we are about to speak of the Holy Communion, it is well to insist
+first on this, that the work of the Spirit in there feeding us with the
+flesh and blood of the Son of man is a continuous process.  It is of the
+very essence of what is meant by being a Christian.  "If any man have not
+the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His."  The sixth chapter of St.
+John's Gospel is not a mere prediction of the Eucharist.  It is the
+revelation of that principle of which the Eucharist is an illustration.
+Our Communions are the supreme moments, the crises, in a process which is
+for ever going on, the feeding of us, by the Spirit, with the flesh and
+blood, the holy and victorious manhood, of the Redeemer.
+
+What relation, then, can this spiritual process have to the material
+substances, to the bread and wine which are used in the Eucharist?  This
+question at once opens out into the larger one, as to the relation
+between matter and spirit.  Now, that question could not be dealt with at
+all satisfactorily without undertaking a vastly larger task than we are
+prepared for at the present moment.  We should have to ask, What is,
+after all, meant by "matter," and what by "spirit"?
+
+But something may be achieved on a much humbler scale.  It will suffice
+for our present purpose to concentrate our attention on a remarkable fact
+which seems to underlie all our experience.  And we will approach the
+statement of this fact by first recalling the familiar definition of a
+sacrament, which fastens upon the union of the outward and visible with
+the inward and invisible as being the essence of what is meant by a
+sacrament.  Now, the fact we have in view is this: _every_ outward object
+in the world is, in this respect, a sacrament.  What we seem to see is
+everywhere spirit working through what we call "material" objects.  That
+sacramental principle of the universe is the very principle which
+underlies our Lord's parables of Nature.  Speaking more accurately, we
+see in "matter" (1) the means of the self-revelation of spirit; (2) the
+instrument by which spirit acts.
+
+The human organism may serve as a type of this.  Here is a spiritual
+being, the Ego, in its will, its thoughts, its affections, invisible, and
+it makes its presence manifest, and it acts, through the material
+manifestation and instrument of itself, the body.  To believers in God,
+nature itself, in its deepest reality, is the revelation of the Divine
+Presence, and the instrument of the Divine action.  A beautiful sunset is
+a veritable and genuine sacrament.  In the light of this profound truth,
+of matter as the manifestation and instrument of spirit, we are enabled
+to see how futile was the ancient dispute concerning the number of the
+Sacraments.  In view of the fuller and larger knowledge which has come to
+us, this, like so many other objects of theological strife, ought before
+this to have been consigned to the limbo of forgotten controversies.
+
+But in all this we have been, in fact, interpreting the whole universe in
+the light of the Incarnation.  For that is the supreme sacrament of all,
+the very type and complete embodiment of the sacramental principle.  There
+we see the Divine manifesting Itself through, and using as the instrument
+of its action, a Human, a "material" Body.
+
+The Eucharist thus for the first time becomes intelligible.  It is only
+one particular illustration, although a most momentous one, of the
+universal sacramental principle, of which all things else in the world
+are also illustrations.  There we have the Spirit manifesting itself and
+acting, as always and everywhere, wherever "matter" is found; but in a
+particular way, and for a particular purpose.
+
+The bread and the wine are the material substances which He uses at the
+critical moments in His perpetual action of feeding us with the flesh and
+blood of the Son of man.  And these elements were obviously chosen,
+"ordained by Christ Himself," for their most significant symbolism.  There
+is no truer philosophy of the Eucharist than that which is contained in
+the familiar words of the Church Catechism, which speak of "the
+strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of
+Christ, as our bodies are by the bread and wine."  That wonderful, and in
+itself essentially sacramental process, by which the organism lives by
+the incorporation and assimilation into its own substance of other
+substances which we call foods, is the exact analogue of the way in which
+our true, spiritual manhood lives by the incorporation and assimilation
+of the manhood of Christ, that manhood which is holy, which exists in the
+Divine Union, which has perfectly realised eternal life in the complete
+dying to sin, and the complete putting on of holiness.
+
+The Eucharist is, in the broadest sense, the final act in the drama of
+our salvation.  It is the means by which, by His own appointment, all
+that Christ achieved _for_ us upon the Cross, the repudiation of, or
+dying to sin, the realisation of perfect obedience, obedience unto death,
+comes to be _in_ us, is made all our own.
+
+But it is most important that we should ever remember that this truth has
+two sides.
+
+(i)  It is Christ Who saves us; that is, Who is the actually putting away
+of sin, attainment of holiness, union with God, eternal life, by what He
+does in us.  "Christ _for_ us" finds its perfect fulfilment and end in
+"Christ _in_ us."
+
+(ii)  Yet, Christ does not save us apart from ourselves.  Else the
+Eucharist would be degraded to the level of some heathen, magical charm.
+We must will and intend the putting off of sin, and the putting on of
+holiness.  We must recognise, and this is a truth of experience, our
+complete inability to attain this without Him.  That will, and that
+recognition, are the repentance and faith which constitute the necessary
+contribution on our part to the work of Christ for our salvation.
+
+Our Communions are the most important moments in our lives.  Each marks a
+distinct and definite stage in the fulfilment of the purpose of God for
+us, the fulfilment in us of all that is meant by the Death and
+Resurrection of the Lord.  We ought to come, therefore, not only after
+due preparation, with repentance and faith, but also with hope and joy;
+not to perform a duty, but to receive the best gift which God Himself can
+bestow upon us--that gift which is the perfect conquest of sin, the
+complete realisation of holiness, union with God, eternal life; the
+fulfilment of every aspiration, the accomplishment of every dream, the
+achievement of every glory, the crown, the consummation, the attainment
+of our manhood in union with Jesus Christ the Son of man.
+
+
+
+VIII
+THE SACRIFICE
+
+
+   "For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer
+   sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how
+   much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit
+   offered Himself to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve
+   the living God?"--HEB. IX. 13, 14.
+
+No Christian doctrine is more commonly misunderstood than that of the
+sacrifice of Christ.  This misunderstanding arises from ignorance as to
+the meaning of sacrifices in the ancient world.
+
+Sacrifice is one of the earliest and most widely spread of all human
+institutions.  Behind the laws regulating sacrifice in the Old Testament
+there lies the long history of Shemitic ritual and religion.  These
+sacrificial rites were not then introduced for the first time.  They
+formed part of the inheritance of the Israelites from their far-off
+ancestors; an inheritance shared by them with the Ammonites and Edomites,
+and other kindred and neighbouring nations.  They differed from these not
+in matter or form, but in the loftier moral and spiritual tone which
+formed the peculiar and distinguishing mark of the Hebrew religion, and
+in which we to-day can clearly trace the actions in the minds of men of
+the Spirit of God.
+
+It follows that it is hopeless to attempt to understand the sacrificial
+teaching of the Old Testament without some grasp of the meaning of
+sacrifice in the ancient world.  Failure to attain this has led to the
+idea that the sacrifice of Christ must mean the appeasing of an offended
+Deity by blood and death.  But this view of sacrifice is not merely a
+heathen, but a late and debased heathen conception.  "Shall I give my
+first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of the
+soul?" was the cry of the King of Moab, and it marks the lowest depth
+into which the pagan idea of sacrifice had sunk.  It is a genuine
+instance of deterioration in ethnic religion.  The primitive view was far
+loftier and more spiritual than this.
+
+Recent researches, dependent on the comparative method, into the earliest
+forms of religion have brought to light two principles which underlay the
+conception of sacrifice, and which to a great extent can be discerned
+more clearly in the most ancient period than in later times.  Now these
+two principles which, taken together, constitute the primitive theory of
+sacrifice, which make up the fundamental idea of it, however little
+prehistoric man may have been capable of giving distinct and logical
+expression to them, were these:
+
+1.  Death is necessary to the attainment of the fulness of life.
+
+2.  Man is, by his very nature, capable of sharing in, becoming a
+partaker of, the Divine life.
+
+The earliest known form of sacrifice is the killing of the sacred animal
+of the tribe, the animal which was held to be the representative of the
+tribal god, followed by the sacred tribal meal upon the victim.  There,
+in this earliest _totem_ rite, we have already implicit the two great
+ideas of sacrifice, the communion of man with God by actual participation
+in the Divine life (the feast on the sacrifice), and that this communion
+is rendered possible by the death of the sacred victim.
+
+These ideas were very largely obscured in ancient times by the conception
+of sacrifice as a gift, a tribute, or a propitiation.  But these ideas,
+though they bulk largely in modern minds unacquainted with the recent
+researches of specialists in comparative religion, were, in fact, of
+later growth.  They are accretions which, by a very natural and
+intelligible process, have overlain the oldest and really fundamental
+ideas which lie at the root and origin of sacrifice.
+
+These two ideas were, however, present all through, in what we might
+perhaps call (without committing ourselves to any psychological theories)
+the racial subconsciousness.  They were always there, ready to be evoked
+by the appropriate stimulus, whenever applied.  They constituted the real
+essence and meaning of the ancient mysteries, which from 800 B.C.
+downwards formed so important a part of the real religion of the ancient
+world, and which have left their mark on the language of St. Paul and
+other early Christian teachers.  These mysteries, roughly and broadly
+speaking, were of the nature of a religious reformation.  They
+represented the discarding of the propitiatory idea in favour of the
+original meaning of sacrifice as communion.
+
+These earliest notions of sacrifice really underlay the sacrifices of the
+Old Testament, especially in the case of the peace offerings.  But, in
+these, we become conscious of a third element, the conviction that sin is
+a barrier to the Divine Communion.  When the worshipper, in the
+sin-offering, laid his hands upon the head of the victim, he was, by a
+significant action, repudiating his sin, and presenting the spotlessness
+of the victim as his own, his own in will and intention henceforth.  The
+blood was sprinkled upon the altar as the symbol of the life offered to
+and accepted by God; it was sprinkled upon the worshipper as the sign of
+the communication to him of that pure Divine life, by virtue of his
+participation in which man can alone approach God.
+
+All this can be summed up in one word, "symbolism."  All the value of
+ancient sacrifices, including those of the Old Testament, lay wholly in
+the moral and spiritual truths which, in a series of outward and
+significant actions, they stood for and symbolised.  To attach objective
+value to that which was external in the Old Testament sacrifices, or even
+to the outward accompaniments of the Supreme Sacrifice, the Death of
+Jesus Christ upon the Cross, is to be guilty of a relapse from the
+Christian, or even the prophetic spirit, into the late and debased pagan
+idea of sacrifice, from which the ancient mysteries of the Eastern and
+Greek world were a reaction.  Certainly, the outward sufferings of our
+Lord should sometimes form the subject of our thoughts as a motive, and
+one of the strongest motives, to penitence and love.  But to lay such
+stress on these as to exalt them into the real meaning of the sacrifice
+of Christ, as constituting its value as a sacrifice, to regard them as in
+some way changing the Mind of God towards us, is contrary to the whole
+spirit of the New Testament.  What the real teaching of the gospels is in
+the matter, is made plain by two significant facts.
+
+(i)  While it is quite clear that the inspired writers regard the Death
+of Christ, and the Christian life, as being, each of them, in a real
+sense, a sacrifice, direct sacrificial language is applied sparingly to
+the former, but without stint or hesitation to the latter.  This is a
+point which has been strikingly brought out by Professor Loftus in his
+recent work on _The Ethics of the Atonement_.
+
+(ii)  While devoting a large portion of their narrative to the account of
+the Death of Christ, they exercised a very great and marked reserve as
+regards the physical details of the Crucifixion.  In this respect the
+gospels are in harmony with the earliest Christian representations, as
+distinguished from the repulsive realism in which the medieval artists
+revelled.
+
+To ask, then, in what sense the Death of Christ was a sacrifice, is to
+ask how far that Death realised the moral and spiritual truths which
+underlay the ancient institution of sacrifice, and to which all
+sacrifices ultimately pointed.
+
+1.  The first of these ideas, as we have seen, is that death is necessary
+to the fulness of life, that life can only be won by the surrender of
+life.  That ancient conception constitutes the fundamental teaching of
+Christ: "He that willeth to save his life, shall lose it, and he who
+willeth to lose his life . . . shall save it unto life eternal."  And of
+that great truth, which is nothing less than the formative principle of
+the Christian life, the Cross was the supreme expression "Herein have we
+come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us, and we
+ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."
+
+The laying down of life, self-sacrifice, of which the Cross is the
+highest manifestation, alone brings life, alone is fruitful.  "Except a
+grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone: but if it
+die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
+
+Selfishness, whether as self-assertion or self-seeking, is essentially
+barren and unproductive, both in regard to the lives of others and our
+own lives.  Only so far as we are, in some real sense, laying down our
+lives for others, denying (not that which belongs to us, but) ourselves,
+for their sake, can we hope to influence other persons for good, to be
+the cause of moral fruitfulness, of spiritual life in them.  And for
+ourselves, we only win the fulness of our own lives, so far as we lose
+them in the lives of others, so far as we identify ourselves with their
+joys, sufferings, interests, pursuits, well-being; for our lives are
+real, and rich, and full exactly in proportion to the extent to which
+they include the lives of others.
+
+And the Death of Christ ceases to be an unintelligible mystery, when it
+is regarded as the consummation of His Life of self-sacrifice.  "Christ
+also pleased not Himself."  "He went about doing good."  And at last, in
+the fulfilment of a mission received of the Father for the good of men,
+His brethren, He crowned the Life, in which self-pleasing was not, by His
+Death, the necessary result, as we have seen, of His carrying out that
+mission in a world of sinful men.  For Himself, that Death was, so He
+willed, the portal to the glory of the Resurrection.  And the fruits of
+His uttermost self-sacrifice are still, after all these centuries, being
+gathered in, as in innumerable souls brought back from the darkness of
+sin into the light of the Divine Life, "He sees of the travail of His
+soul, and is satisfied."
+
+2.  But what answers, in the Death of Christ, to that in regard to which
+the death of the victim served but as a means to an end, the sacred meal
+of communion?  The sacrificial principle has been laid down by the writer
+of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "without shedding of blood, there is no
+remission."  Blood to the modern mind speaks of death, and usually of a
+violent and painful death.  To the ancient mind, heathen or Israelite,
+blood stood for and symbolised life.  "The Blood makes atonement by the
+Life that is in it."  Man can only be made at one with God, can only have
+"remission of sins"--the barrier which sin interposes to communion with
+God can only be removed, he can only be restored to that Divine
+fellowship for which he was made--by actual reception into himself of the
+Divine life, of the life of Him Who, being God, became man, in order to
+impart His own Divine Life to our humanity which He assumed.  And
+Christ's Life only then became available for men, capable of being
+imparted to each man, when it had passed through Death to Resurrection.
+If the grain die--only if it die first--"it bringeth forth much fruit."
+"If I go not away, the Comforter, the Paraclete, will not come unto you."
+Only by virtue of that "going away" of Christ, which includes His Death,
+Resurrection, and Ascension, could the Spirit which indwells His
+glorified manhood, come to impart the life of Christ to the members of
+the Body of Christ.  Pentecost is the final consummation of man's
+atonement and redemption.
+
+We may still more briefly summarise these two fundamental principles
+which constitute the sacrificial aspect of the Death of Christ.
+
+1.  Christ died, not that we should be excused from offering, but that we
+might be enabled to offer the one acceptable sacrifice to God, that is,
+the sacrifice of ourselves in that service of God which is the service of
+our fellow-men.
+
+2.  Christ died, in order that we might receive His Divine Life into
+ourselves, through the indwelling Spirit of Christ bestowed by the
+Ascended Lord.
+
+Thus the Death of Christ is not merely a sacrifice, one out of many, or
+(as has been so mistakenly taught) simply the last of a series.  It is
+rather the one sacrifice which alone realises the ideas of which all
+other so-called sacrifices were but the faint adumbrations.  As the one
+true sacrifice it stands at the end of an age-long spiritual evolution.
+In the physical evolution, the first protoplasmic cell was not man,
+though it pointed forward to man, and implied man.  So the _totem_ feast
+and the old Jewish rites, were not truly and genuinely sacrifices, though
+both pointed forward to and implied the realisation of sacrifice in the
+Death of Christ.  That Death was the fulfilment of the universal human
+aspiration, the assurance of the truth of that ancient dream of mankind,
+that man was capable of being, and might attain to be "partaker of the
+Divine nature."
+
+And this whole teaching of ancient ritual as fulfilled and accomplished
+on the Cross of Jesus Christ, is summed up for us in our Christian
+Eucharist where on the one hand we, in union with the sacrifice of
+Christ, "offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a
+reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice "to God; and, on the other hand,
+by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man, become
+partakers of Him Who, in the words of St. Athanasius, "was made man, that
+we might be made God," became partaker of our human nature, in order that
+we might realise the end of our manhood, by being made partakers of His
+Divine Life.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEVOTION OF THE THREE HOURS
+
+
+I
+INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS
+
+
+The object with which we meet here can be expressed in a Pauline phrase
+of three words, it is "to learn Christ."
+
+But, in those three words, there is contained, in the manner of St. Paul,
+a wealth of meaning.  To learn Christ is clearly an affair of the
+intellect, in the first place.  It quite certainly, in this sense, does
+not mean merely to accumulate information regarding the words and acts of
+our Lord.  St. Paul himself is singularly sparing of allusions to the
+history of Christ, if we exclude from that His Death, Burial, and
+Resurrection.  The phrase, in fact, describes that kind of knowledge to
+which a detailed study of the Saviour's Life is related as means to an
+end, the knowledge, namely, of Christ's character, of His Mind and Will.
+Such knowledge is not to be acquired in one hour or in three.  It is, it
+ought to be, the life-long object of a Christian man to gain it in an
+ever-increasing measure of fulness and accuracy.  But the last words of
+the Lord, the seven sayings from His Cross, constitute a special and in
+some measure unique disclosure of His Mind and Will.  And, therefore, to
+meditate upon them, as we are now proposing to do, will be to advance one
+stage further, and a distinct stage, in the process of "learning Christ."
+
+1.  But we do well to remind ourselves, at the very outset, that our aim
+is not merely intellectual, but also practical.  There is no real gain
+arising from the knowledge of Christ's Mind and Will, save so far as that
+knowledge enables us to make that Mind and Will our own mind and our own
+will.  _That_ is the very meaning of Christian discipleship.  "Let this
+mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."
+
+2.  The end thus set before us is one capable of attainment by all.  The
+individual, indeed, cannot hope to realise that end completely by
+himself.  The embodiment of Christ's Mind and Will is the supreme task
+and the final achievement of the whole Body of Christ.  The purpose of
+the long development of the Church on earth is, that "we should _all_
+(not _each_) arrive at a perfect man, at the measure of the stature of
+the fulness of the Christ."  The whole Church, the Body in its
+completeness, is meant to reflect back in the eyes of the Father, the
+moral glory of the Son of man.  Each individual has been called into
+membership in the Body, in order that he might reflect some one of the
+scattered rays of that glory; might embody in himself one aspect of the
+infinite perfection of the Son of man.  So would each of us truly "come
+to himself," realise all that he is capable of becoming.
+
+That progress of the Body of Christ towards its goal is described by St.
+Paul as being a growth of the Christ Himself.  He is "at all points in
+all men being fulfilled."  There is a true and important sense in which
+the Incarnation is as yet incomplete, in which the life-history of the
+Church is its growing completeness.  Our individual task is the
+realisation in ourselves of that part of the Christ life which we,
+individually, have been created to embody.
+
+3.  It will be useful to sum up the Character, the Mind and Will of
+Christ, in a single phrase.  Consider how He impressed His
+contemporaries.  What was it which they saw in Him, who knew Him best,
+and had been united to Him by close ties of comradeship and discipleship?
+In one word, what they saw was Sonship.  "We beheld His glory, as of an
+Only-Begotten from a Father."  The Mind and Will of Christ are the
+perfect realisation of the Divine Sonship in our humanity.
+
+But what is the meaning of God's Fatherhood and man's sonship?  The
+ultimate truth of the relationship, the truth which underlies all such
+conceptions as care, love, obedience, is community of nature.  Our human
+nature is really akin to the Divine.  We are sons of God because our
+spiritual life is of one piece with His as derived from it.  Baptism
+introduces no new element into our nature.  By sacramental union with the
+Only Begotten, the Ground and Archetype of all sonship, it enables us to
+realise that which is in us, to actually become that which, potentially,
+we are.  It gives us "power to become children of God," to attain the
+meaning of our manhood, to regain our true selves.
+
+4.  Baptism gives power, all sacraments give power, but in such wise that
+that power is useless, even, _in a sense_, non-existent, till we make it
+ours by deliberate exertion, by co-operation of mind and heart and will
+with the Divine in us.
+
+The end of our living, to become truly and completely the sons of God, is
+to be attained by the joint action of two factors--
+
+(1)  The Spirit of Christ conforming our minds and wills more and more to
+the likeness of Christ.
+
+(2)  The co-operation of our whole personality with the work of the
+indwelling Spirit.
+
+Our meditations this morning on the Seven Words in which Christ made some
+partial disclosure of His Mind and Will, will form some part of that co-
+operation, one little stage in the accomplishment of our life-long task.
+
+
+
+II
+THE FIRST WORD
+
+
+   "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."  ST. LUKE
+   XXIII. 34.
+
+1.  Here we are watching the behaviour of the Son of God, the Ideal and
+Ground of Divine Sonship in humanity.
+
+Is this supreme example of forgiveness an example to _us_?  Is it not
+something unnatural to humanity as we know it?
+
+We must recall, from a former address, the distinction which we then drew
+between the animal in us, with its self-assertive instincts, and the
+Divine in us, that which constitutes us not animal merely, but human, of
+which the very essence is the self-sacrifice of perfect love.  Christ
+came to reveal God in our manhood.  And I need this revelation, just
+because the animal in me has won so many victories in the past over the
+Divine, because in me the spiritual fire habitually burns so low and dim.
+
+It is a very different thing to say that forgiveness of all serious
+injury is a hard thing.  It is hard, but not impossible.  That which
+makes it to be possible is the serious intention of discipleship,
+co-operating with the indwelling Spirit of Christ transforming us into
+His likeness.
+
+To assert, on the other hand, that forgiveness of serious wrong is
+impossible, is to ignore the fact that He Who uttered these wonderful
+words is the true self of me, and of every man who breathes.  He Who hung
+on the Cross, and spoke these seven words, is the Son of man, the
+Representative to all ages, to all varieties of human character, of true
+humanity.
+
+2.  Christ-like forgiveness is no weak thing, but the strongest thing in
+the world.
+
+Yet, for its true effect to be produced, its true character must be
+recognised.  No suspicion of cowardice or impotence must cleave to it.
+The man who being obviously able to resent an injury, and not lacking in
+the capacity of resentment, yet for Christ's sake forgives, exercises on
+earth no inconsiderable share of the moral power of Christ.  God now, as
+of old, "has made choice of the weak things of the world," those things
+which the world accounts weak, "to confound the strong."  "The meek"
+still "inherit the earth."
+
+We are dealing, all through, with the injury which is personal, with the
+resentment which is the reaction of the individual against unprovoked
+wrong.  Personal resentment we are bidden to relentlessly crush out--"to
+turn the other cheek" is the command of Christ.  But the Christian man
+will recognise that the interests of the social order are not to be
+disregarded.  These interests, and those of the offender himself, will
+sometimes demand that the wrong, even if it primarily affects ourselves,
+shall not go unpunished.  Again, no one can be in the full sense a
+Christian, that is, a fully developed man, or a man on the way to the
+full development of his nature, who is without the capacity of moral
+indignation, in whom no flame is kindled by the oppression of the weak.
+
+What the Christian moral law does demand of us, is the complete
+suppression of the merely personal anger which sometimes burns so
+fiercely in us when we receive unmerited insult or injury.  That kind of
+anger belongs to "the flesh," is part of the defensive equipment of the
+animal nature.  Before we can in any sense be Christ-like, the spirit
+must win many hard-won victories over its ancient foe.
+
+To say "I will forgive, but I can never forget," is only to conceal from
+ourselves the defeat of the spiritual man, the Christ in us.
+
+3.  But carefully note the reason appended to the prayer: "they know not
+what they do."  That is true, with every variety of degrees and shades of
+truth, of every sinner.  It was true, clearly, of the soldiers then
+performing their duty: it was less true, but still in a real sense it was
+true, of the Pharisees, of the High Priests, of the Roman judge.  It is
+true, but to a far less degree, even of us, that when we sin, we "know
+not what we do."
+
+Sins are, in the language of St. Paul, works of darkness.  That is the
+element in which alone they can exist.  Sin is a huge deception.  The
+very condition of its existence is the concealment of its true character.
+All this is summed up in that experience which we call "temptation."  We
+are so familiar with sin, the atmosphere we breathe is so infected with
+it, we have given way so many times in the past, that it needs the
+objective revelation of the Cross to bring home to us the real horror and
+malignity of sin.  It has been finely said, "Sin first drugs its victims
+before it consumes them."  We, too, or some of us, have known the strange
+petrifying, hardening effect of sin on the conscience.
+
+Great, then, is our need that we should pray that the revelation of the
+Cross may more and more come home to us; great our need to pray for an
+ever fuller measure of that Spirit of Christ, Whose first work it is "to
+convince the world of sin," to make men realise its true character and
+its inevitable issue.
+
+
+
+III
+THE SECOND WORD
+
+
+   "Verily I say unto thee, To-day thou shall be with Me in Paradise."
+   ST. LUKE XXIII. 43.
+
+We judge of any power by the results which it effects.  We gain some
+knowledge of the power of steam by its capacity to drive a huge mass of
+steel and wood weighing twenty thousand tons through the water at the
+rate of twenty knots an hour.  There we have some standard by which we
+can gauge the force which sends our earth round the sun at twenty-five
+miles a second, or that which propels a whole solar system through space.
+But we may apply the same method, of estimation by results, to the powers
+of the moral and spiritual worlds.  Judged thus, it was indeed a
+stupendous power which was exerted by Christ from the Cross.  For what
+result can be more amazing than the reversal, at the last, of the
+character slowly built up by the habits of a lifetime?  It is, of course,
+useless to speculate on the antecedents of the robber (not "thief") who
+turned to our Lord with the words, "Jesus, remember me when Thou shalt
+come into Thy kingdom."  We know only what is implied by the word
+"robber" or "brigand," and the fact that he had joined, with his fellow-
+sufferer, in the mockery of our Lord.  But the words thus addressed by
+him to Christ, in their context, represent the most wonderful
+"phenomenon" of human life, a genuine and thorough-going conversion.  And
+the power which wrought that stupendous result was the patience and
+forgiveness of Jesus Christ.  The weak things had, as so often since,
+confounded the strong.  In His matchless forbearance, in the prayer for
+His executioners, the royalty of Christ our Lord was disclosed, and the
+"title" over His head was vindicated.
+
+1.  First then, we learn from the Second Word the Mind and Will of God
+towards penitence.  There is no interposing of delay.  Forgiveness is
+instantaneous.  No pause intervenes between the prayer for pardon, and
+the pardon itself.  But, that instant response was to genuine "change of
+mind," not to the repentance which is merely regret for the past, still
+less to a cowardly shrinking from a deserved punishment, but to a
+definite act of the man's will, repudiating sin, and ranging himself on
+God's side.  The rejection of sin, the identifying of self with God's
+attitude towards it, that, we have seen, is alone, in the New Testament
+sense of the word, repentance.
+
+2.  The penitence of the robber, on analysis, discloses the three
+familiar elements--
+
+(_a_)  Contrition is obviously implied in the whole action.
+
+(_b_)  Confession--"we receive the due rewards of the things which we
+wrought."
+
+(_c_)  Amendment--in the separation of himself from those with whom he
+had hitherto joined in reviling Christ.
+
+Now it is worth noting, that our Catechism bids us examine ourselves not
+about our sins, but about our repentance; "whether they truly repent."  We
+are meant to ask ourselves--
+
+(_a_)  Is our contrition real?  And here, for our comfort, we remember
+that God accepts as contrition the sincere desire to be contrite.
+
+(_b_)  Have we made such a painstaking self-examination as to ensure our
+making a good confession?  "If we confess our _sins_" (separate, detailed
+sins, not our sinfulness in general terms), "He is faithful and just to
+forgive us our sins."
+
+Have we used "sacramental" confession, according to the teaching of the
+Prayer Book, that is, when our conscience told us that we needed it?
+
+(_c_)  Is our resolution of amendment a clear and honest one?  What sins
+are there, some of whose results we are able to modify or in part reverse
+(false impressions, untruths, acts or words of unkindness)?  God is
+generous in forgiveness.  Surely we are bound to be generous in our
+amendment.  There is a sense in which the results of sin abide beyond
+possibility of recall.  Yet I believe that the instinct which bids us
+"make up for" a hurt inflicted on a beloved person, is a Divine instinct
+in our nature, and one which we are to carry into the region of our
+relation to God.
+
+3.  We notice another important truth as regards the Divine forgiveness.
+It has nothing to do with the removal of punishment, the release from
+penalty or consequence of sin.  The forgiveness of the robber was
+immediate and complete.  But he had still to hang in agony, and there
+awaited him the frightful pain of the crurifragium, the breaking of the
+legs by beating with clubs.
+
+The sooner we learn the two great truths about the punishment of sin, the
+better.
+
+(_a_)  Punishment is inevitable.  It is a necessary result of the
+constitution of the physical and moral universe, of the working, in both
+regions, of those laws which are the expression of the Divine Mind.
+
+(_b_)  Punishment is remedial.  Many Christian theologians have fallen
+far below Plato's conception of God, as One Who can only punish men with
+a view of making them better.
+
+Think of one of the punishments of repented sin, the haunting memories of
+past evil.  In this case, both principles are very clearly discernible.
+Each recollection may be made the means of a renewed act of rejection of
+sin, and thus become an opportunity for the deepening of repentance.
+
+And what disclosure does this second word contain of the Mind and Will of
+God in us, as manifested not towards, but by ourselves?  Our lesson is
+the prompt recognition and welcome of any, even the slightest signs of
+amendment.  It may be our duty to punish.  It is always our duty to keep
+alive, or to kindle, the hope in an offender of becoming better.  In that
+hope, alone, lies the possibility of moral amendment.  There is the
+golden rule, laid down by St. Paul for all who have to exercise
+discipline over others, in words which ring ever in our ears--"lest they
+be discouraged."
+
+
+
+IV
+THE THIRD WORD
+
+
+   "Lady, behold thy son."
+   "Behold thy mother."
+
+   ST. JOHN XIX. 26, 27.
+
+In this Word we see the Son of God revealed as human son, and human
+friend, all the more truly and genuinely human in both relations, because
+in each and every relation of life, Divine.
+
+1.  The first lesson in the Divine Life for us to learn here is the
+simple, almost vulgarly commonplace one, yet so greatly needing to be
+learnt, that "charity," which is but a synonym of the Divine Life,
+"begins at home."
+
+Home life is the real test of a person's Christianity.  There the
+barriers with which society elsewhere hedges round and cramps the free
+expression of our individuality, no longer exist.  We are at liberty to
+be ourselves.  What sort of use do we make of it?  What manner of self do
+we disclose?  Would our best friends recognise that self to be the person
+whom they admire?  If we are to be Christians at all, we must begin by
+being Christians at home.
+
+At home, and beyond the limits of home, one great Christian virtue stands
+out as the supreme law of social behaviour--that is, for a disciple--the
+virtue of consideration for others.
+
+In the midst of torturing physical pain, in the extreme form of that
+experience, of which the slightest degree makes us fretful, irritable,
+self-absorbed, our Lord calmly provides for the future of His mother and
+the disciple whom He loved.
+
+What is required of us is not high-flown sentiment, but the practical
+proof of consideration, that we have really learnt the first lesson of
+the Christ-life, to put others, not self, in the first place.  The proof,
+the test, is our willingness to put ourselves to inconvenience, to go
+without things, for the sake of others.  If in such a little matter as so
+ordering our Sunday meals as to give our servants rest, as far as may be,
+and opportunity for worship, our practical, home Christianity breaks
+down, then we must not shirk the plain truth, there is in us _nothing_ of
+the Spirit of Him Who spoke the Third Word.  On the other hand, the
+readiness with which we do yield up our comforts is a proof--nothing
+short of that--a proof of the indwelling of God in us.  "In this we know
+that He abideth in us, from the Spirit"--the Spirit of the Christ--"which
+He hath given to us."
+
+2.  We notice, in the second place, that Christ's proof of friendship is
+the assignment of a task, the giving of some work to do for Him.  "Behold
+thy mother."  We are His friends, as He Himself has told us.  "No longer
+do I call you slaves, for the slave is one who knows not what his master
+is doing; but you I have called friends."  St. John had forsaken his
+Friend:
+
+         a torchlight and a noise,
+   The sudden Roman faces, violent hands,
+   And fear of what the Jews might do,
+
+had been too much for the disciple's courage and the friend's devotion.
+
+   And it is written, I forsook and fled:
+   That was my trial, and it ended thus.
+
+But St. John had returned.  There he is, in his true place, beside his
+Master and Friend.
+
+We too have forsaken, sometimes denied, the same Master and Friend.  We
+too with true repentance have returned, and are struggling to take up the
+old allegiance.  What is the proof, where is the assurance for which we
+long more, perhaps, than for anything else in the world, that our
+repentance has been accepted, that we are once more in the number of
+those whom He calls His friends?
+
+There is one decisive test.  Upon all His friends He lays some task.  If
+we have anything to do for Jesus Christ, then we may assure our hearts.
+Our desertion has been forgiven.  He has spoken to us the words of peace,
+"Behold thy mother, thy brother, thy son."  For, let us not forget, all
+work for others, for the bodies, the minds, the souls of our brethren in
+the family of God, is capable of being raised from the level of
+professional drudgery, and of becoming the direct service of Jesus
+Christ.
+
+To work for Christ is the real foretaste of heaven, far removed from the
+sensuous imagery of some modern hymns.  "Be thou ruler," there is the
+supreme reward, "over ten cities."
+
+If we are doing any work for Christ, i.e. for others for Christ's sake,
+and as part of our service to Him, willingly and cheerfully, then we have
+the final and convincing proof that we are indeed forgiven, that the
+offer of renewed allegiance has been accepted, that we have been restored
+to His Friendship.
+
+
+
+V
+THE FOURTH WORD
+
+
+   "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani."--ST. MATT. XXVII. 46; ST. MARK XV. 34.
+
+There are three peculiar and distinguishing features of this fourth word
+which our Saviour uttered from His Cross.
+
+1.  It is the only one of the Seven which finds a place in the earliest
+record of our Lord's life, contained in the matter common to St. Matthew
+and St. Mark.
+
+2.  It is the only one which has been preserved to us in the original
+Aramaic, in the very syllables which were formed by the lips of Christ.
+
+3.  It is the only one which He is said to have "shouted" ([Greek text]),
+under the extremity of some overpowering emotion.
+
+In fact, we are here at the very heart of the Passion.  In this dread cry
+I see something of the height of the Divine love, something of the depths
+of my own sin.
+
+The meaning of this dread "cry" is not perhaps so difficult to understand
+as some have thought.  It is to be found in the entire reality of that
+human nature which the Son of God assumed--not merely a human body, but a
+human consciousness like our own; in the thoroughness with which He
+identified Himself with every phase of our experience, the knowledge of
+personal sin alone excepted.
+
+In this identification more was involved than we commonly think.  Sin
+cannot be in a world of which the constitution is the expression of the
+Mind of God, without introducing therein a fatal element of discord,
+confusion, and pain.  To all consequences of sin the Saviour necessarily
+submitted Himself, by the mere fact of His entry into a world which sin
+had disordered.  In respect of the external consequences, this is
+abundantly clear.  We have seen, and it is, in fact, obvious, that His
+sufferings and Death were the result of the actual sins of men.  But
+there were, it is important to remember, internal sufferings attributable
+to the same cause.  We are at once reminded of His tears over the doomed
+city, doomed by the persistent refusal to recognise the Divine voice.  But
+we are here on still deeper ground.  The true explanation of the fourth
+word is to be found in that great principle which St. Paul has laid down
+in a familiar, but little understood, sentence: "the sting of death is
+sin."
+
+The simplest and most obvious meaning of these words is that, whatever be
+the physiological meaning and necessity of human death, its peculiar
+horror and dread, that which makes death to be what it is for us, is to
+be found in sin, in the separation of man from God.
+
+Now that horror consists, ultimately, in the fact that death is the
+analogue, or, in New Testament language, the "sign," of what sin
+is--separation.  If sin is, essentially, the violent and unnatural
+separation of man, by his own act, from his spiritual environment, death
+is clearly the separation--and, _as our sins have made it_, the violent
+and unnatural separation of man from all that has hitherto been his
+world.  It may be, that the final, extremest pang of death is the supreme
+moment of agony, when we feel that we are being made to let go our hold
+on reality, are slipping back into what, in our consciousness of it, must
+appear like nothingness, the mere blank negation of being.  Here, then,
+we have the explanation of this awful cry.  He Who came "for our
+salvation" into a world disordered by sin, willed so to identify Himself
+with our experience, as to realise death, not as it might have been, but
+as man had made it, the very sign and symbol of man's sin, of his
+separation from God.  That moment of extreme mental anguish wrung from
+His lips the Cry, not of "dereliction," but of faith triumphing even in
+the moment when He "tasted death" as sin's most bitter fruit, "_My_ God,
+why didst Thou forsake Me?"
+
+What this view involves is briefly
+
+(i)  Death is an experience natural to man.
+
+(ii)  Sin has added to this natural experience a peculiar agony, a
+"sting."
+
+(iii)  This "sting" is an experience of utter isolation at some moment in
+the process of death, the feeling that one is being violently rent away
+from one's clinging hold of existence.
+
+(iv)  This "sting" is due to the disorder sin has introduced into the
+constitution of the world and of man.
+
+(v)  In virtue of this, death has become the "sign" in the "natural"
+world of what sin is in the spiritual.
+
+(vi)  Our Blessed Lord so utterly identified Himself with our experience,
+with the internal as well as with the external consequences of our sin,
+as to undergo this most terrible result of man's transgression.
+
+(vii)  And He felt the full agony of it as realising, what none but the
+Sinless One could realise, the horror of sin as separation from God.
+
+In a word, the Cry represents the culmination of our Lord's sufferings, a
+real experience of His human consciousness.
+
+The experience was "objective," as all states of consciousness are.  Our
+sensations are as objective as "material things."  It was, as we have
+just said, real: inasmuch as the only definition of reality is that which
+is included in personal experience.
+
+Thus understood, this fourth word teaches us at least two valuable
+lessons.
+
+1.  It discloses to us the Mind of Christ, which is to be our own mind,
+in its outlook upon human sin.  We, if "the same mind" is to be in us
+"which was also in Christ Jesus," must hate sin, and our sins, not
+because of any results or penalties external to sin, but because sin
+separates us from God, our true life.  The worst punishment of sin, is
+sin itself.  Into depths which make us tremble as we strive to gaze into
+them, Christ our Lord descended to deliver us from that deadly thing
+which is destroying our life.  That appalling Cry burst from His lips,
+that we might learn to fear and dread sin worse than any pang of physical
+pain.
+
+2.  This Word, again, discloses the Mind of Christ, true Man, in its
+relation to God.  He possessed fullest self-consciousness both as God and
+as Man.  Thus He Himself alone knew, in their absolute fulness, the joy
+and the strength which come from the communion of man with God.  That joy
+and that strength, in the measure in which we can attain to their
+realisation, are to be the goal of all our striving.  Thus this Word has
+for us more than a merely negative teaching.  Not only are we to shrink
+from that which destroys union with God.  We must seek far more earnestly
+to make that union a greater and a deeper reality.  This end we can
+achieve by making our prayers more deliberate acts of conscious communion
+with that Person Who is not merely above us, but in us, and in Whom "we
+live, and move, and have our being."  We must all make the confession
+that we have not yet nearly realised all that prayer might be to us, if
+only we were more energetic, more strenuous, more utterly in earnest, in
+our attempts to pray.  It is by prayer that we are to attain to our
+complete manhood, to "win our souls," to become our true selves.
+
+   For what are men better than sheep or goats,
+   Which nourish a blind life within the brain,
+   If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer,
+   Both for themselves, and those that call them friend?
+   For so the whole round world is, every way,
+   Bound with gold chains about the feet of God.
+
+
+
+VI
+THE FIFTH WORD
+
+
+   "I thirst."--JOHN XIX. 28.
+
+This is the only utterance of our Blessed Lord in which He gave
+expression to His physical sufferings.  Not least of these was that
+intolerable thirst which is the invariable result of all serious wounds,
+as those know well who have ever visited patients in a hospital after
+they have undergone a surgical operation.  In this case it must have been
+aggravated beyond endurance by exposure to the burning heat of an Eastern
+sun.  This word, then, spoken under such circumstances, discloses the
+Mind of the Son of God, perfect Man, in regard to physical pain.
+
+1.  Notice then, in the first place, the majestic calm of this word.  It
+was spoken in intensest agony, yet with deliberation, exhibiting the
+restraint of the sovereign and victorious will of the Sufferer.  "After
+these things, knowing that all things had now been accomplished, He saith
+[not 'cried'], I thirst."  We cannot be wrong in reading this marvellous
+word in the light of that strange passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
+where the writer tells us that Christ, "although He was Son, yet learnt
+He obedience by the things which He suffered."  How are we to reconcile
+this with the moral perfection of our Lord's humanity?  We can only do
+so, by applying the Aristotelian distinction between the potential and
+the actual.  The obedience of the Son of God, existing as it did in all
+possible perfection from the first moment of His human consciousness, yet
+existed, prior to His complete identification of Himself with all our
+human experience, as a potentiality.  It became actual, in the same way
+as our obedience can alone become actual, as a result of that experience,
+and, above all, in consequence of those sufferings which were part of
+that experience.  In this sense He "learnt obedience," where we too must
+learn it, in God's school of pain.
+
+Therein lies the answer, as complete an answer as we can at present
+receive, to the problem of pain.  While that problem is, beyond doubt,
+the most perplexing of all the questions which confront us, the real
+difficulty lies, not in the existence of pain in God's world, but in the
+apparent absence, in so many instances, of any discernible purpose in
+pain.  In itself, pain does not, or at least should not, conflict with
+the highest moral conception which we can form of the character of God.
+But purposeless pain, if such really occur anywhere in the universe, is
+hard indeed to reconcile with the revelation of the Highest as Infinite
+and Eternal Love.  The real answer to the problem lies in our gradually
+dawning perception of the high purposes which pain subserves.
+
+It is well, then, to remind ourselves of the teaching of natural science
+in regard to the function of pain in the animal world.  There, at least,
+it has originated, and has survived, only because of its actual use to
+the possessors of that nervous system which makes pain possible.  It
+serves as a danger signal of such inestimable value that no race of
+animals, of any high degree of organisation, which could be incapable of
+suffering pain, could for any length of time continue to survive.  Pain
+here, at any rate, so far from being purposeless, owes its existence to
+the purpose which it subserves.
+
+Ascending higher in the scale of being we see, as has been recently
+pointed out, that the progress of human civilisation has been very
+largely due to the successful efforts of man to resist and to remove
+pain.  The most successful and progressive races of mankind are those
+which inhabit regions of the world where the conditions of life are
+neither so severe as to paralyse all exertion, or even to preclude its
+possibility, nor so favourable that men can avoid the pain of hunger or
+of cold without strenuous and unremitting effort.  The stimulus of pain
+has been the means of perfecting the animal nature of man, and the secret
+of those victories which he has won over the inclement or dangerous
+forces of the material world, and which we call, in their totality, human
+civilisation.
+
+And thus we come in sight of a great law, "perfection through suffering."
+And the revelation of the Cross is the exhibition to us of this law
+acting in the higher reaches of man's existence, in the moral and
+spiritual regions of his life.  As the animal has gained its victories in
+the past, so the spiritual is advancing towards the final triumph of man,
+along the same path, of healthy reaction stimulated and necessitated by
+pain.
+
+For wherein lies the triumph of the spiritual nature, save in its
+complete and sovereign control over all the other elements in our complex
+being?  The spiritual man is not the man who has starved his physical or
+intellectual being; but the man whose whole nature, harmoniously
+developed in the whole range of its varied gifts and powers and
+faculties, is altogether brought under the mastery of that which is
+highest in him, that spirit in which he is akin to God, the wearer of the
+Divine Image.  The saintliest, loftiest characters of men and women have
+been the fruits of this discipline.
+
+We see the final demonstration of the purpose of pain in Him Who "learnt
+obedience by the things which He suffered."  This one word which tells of
+physical suffering, tells also, as we have already seen, of the victory
+gained over it by His human Spirit.  It was by the reaction of that
+Spirit under sharpest bodily pain, that the moral perfection of the Son
+of man ceased to be potential, and became actual.  So it is with us, so
+at least it may be in ever-increasing measure, when pain is accepted and
+met in the way in which Christ accepted and met His pain, not in the
+spirit of useless and wild rebellion against the laws of the universe,
+nor in that of a blind, fatalistic, and unintelligent fatalism, which
+calls itself resignation.  We may, hence, learn to look beyond and behind
+pain to that great law of perfection through suffering which takes
+effect, as it were, spontaneously in lower forms of life; but which, in
+the realm of the moral and the spiritual, demands the co-operation of the
+human mind and will.
+
+2.  We may see also, in the fifth word, the revelation of the attitude of
+the Son of God towards His own body.  That attitude, and hence the only
+genuinely and characteristically Christian attitude, may be best
+described as the mean between the pampering of the body, and its savage
+neglect in the interests of a _false_ asceticism.
+
+As at first He put aside "the slumberous potion bland" and willed "to
+feel all, that He might pity all," so, now His task is over, He craves,
+and accepts, alleviation of His bodily pain.  It is a wonderful
+illustration of the true, the Christian way of regarding the body.  The
+human body is essentially a good and holy thing.  Those sins which we
+call "bodily," like all sins, have their origin in the rebellious will.
+They are only distinguished from other sins, because in them the will
+uses the body, and in other sins other God-given endowments of our
+nature, in opposition to the eternal goodness which is the Will of God.
+We cannot too often remember, that "good" and "evil" are terms applicable
+to the will alone.
+
+That splendid gift of the body has been given to us, in order that in it,
+and through it, we might "glorify God"; that is, do His Will, the only
+thing utterly worth doing.  _Therefore_, we have to keep our bodies
+"fit," fit in all ways for their high and holy purpose.  There is the
+law, the standard of all Christian self-discipline.  Think of the glory
+of the prospect which it holds out to us, of the development and destiny
+of the body.  Think of the care which we should bestow upon it, of the
+awful reverence with which we should regard this (in the Divine
+intention) splendid and perfect instrument for the fulfilment of the Will
+of God.  For what reverence can be too great for that which the Eternal
+God chose as the tabernacle in which He should dwell among men, as the
+instrument by which He should do the Father's Will on earth?
+
+Of all the religions of the world it is the religion of Jesus Christ
+alone which bids us "glorify God" in the body, that is, do His Will in
+and by that glorious instrument which He has created and redeemed for His
+service.
+
+3.  Finally, we may remind ourselves, very briefly, that we, in our own
+day, may share the blessedness of the Roman soldier who relieved the
+sufferings of Christ.  "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
+these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."
+
+As Christians, we _must_ have _some_ ministry to fulfil towards the
+suffering members of Christ's Body.  In the parable of the sheep and the
+goats, the eternal destiny of men is shown to depend, in the last resort,
+upon the manner in which they have performed, or failed to perform, this
+ministry.  The complexities of modern life call for careful thought in
+regard to the manner in which we are to fulfil this duty, but they cannot
+relieve us of it.  Somewhere or other in our lives we must be diligently
+relieving the necessities of others, ministering to their needs of body,
+mind, or spirit.  Else--there is no shirking this conclusion--we are
+simply failing in the most characteristic of all Christian virtues; we
+are far removed from the Mind of Him Who "went about doing good"; we are
+on the way to hear that final condemnation, "Because ye did it not to the
+least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me."
+
+
+
+VII
+THE SIXTH WORD
+
+
+   "It is accomplished."--ST. JOHN XIX. 30.
+
+1.  What had been accomplished?  In the first place, that work which
+Christ had come into the world to do.  All that work may be resumed in a
+single word, "sacrifice."  The Son of God had come for this one purpose,
+to offer a sacrifice.  Here is room for serious misunderstanding.  The
+blood, the pain, the death, were not the sacrifice.  Nothing visible was
+the sacrifice, least of all the physical surroundings of its culminating
+act.  There is only one thing which can rightly be called sacrifice--or,
+to put it otherwise, one sacrifice which alone has any worth, alone can
+win any acceptance in the sight of God--and that is, the obedience of the
+human will, the will of man brought into perfect union with that Divine
+Will which is its own highest moral ideal.
+
+The perfect obedience of the human will of Christ to the Divine Will,
+could only be realised--such were the circumstances under which the
+mission received of the Father was to be fulfilled by Him for the good of
+man--by His faithfulness unto death.  "He became obedient unto death,"
+because in such a world perfect faithfulness must lead to death.  But the
+death of Christ was no isolated fact, standing out solitary and alone
+from the rest of His ministry.  It was not merely of one piece with, but
+the natural and fitting close of the whole.  The death of uttermost
+obedience was the crown and consummation of the obedient life.  On the
+Cross, He was carrying His life's work to its triumphant close.  His
+Death was, itself, His victory.
+
+This victorious aspect of the Passion is that on which St. John chiefly
+dwells.  The "glorification" of the Son of man, His "lifting up," was the
+whole series of events extending from the Passion to the Ascension.  So
+the first Christians loved to think of the Cross, not as the instrument
+of unutterable pain, but as the symbol of their Master's triumph.  It is
+this feeling, this apprehension of the Johannine teaching on the Passion,
+which accounts for the late appearance of the crucifix.  Even when, at
+last, the actual sufferings of the Saviour are depicted, we are still far
+removed from medieval realism.  There are no nails--the Saviour is
+outstretched on the Cross by the moral power of His own will, steadfast
+and victorious in its obedience.  The Sacred Face is not convulsed with
+agony, but is turned, with calm and benignant aspect, towards men whom He
+blesses.  The earliest representations of the Passion, as we have noticed
+before, are far nearer to the spirit of the gospels, that of St. John
+above all, than those of the Middle Ages.
+
+2.  But the ministry itself was but the consummation of the age-long work
+now "accomplished."  Throughout the whole course of man's history, in the
+entire spiritual evolution, whose first steps and rude beginnings we
+trace in the burial mounds of prehistoric races, He Whose lips now
+uttered that great "It is accomplished" had been the light of men, never
+amid thick clouds of error and cruelty and superstition wholly
+extinguished.  In every approach of man to God however dimly conceived
+of, the Word, the Eternal Son, had been offering Himself in sacrifice to
+the Father.
+
+So here, in the perfect act of the moral obedience of a human will, is
+that to which all sacrifices not only pointed forward but, all the time,
+meant, and aimed at, and symbolised, as men so slowly and so painfully
+groped after, felt their way to God, "if haply they might find Him."
+
+"It is accomplished"--the true meaning of sacrifice, of all religion,
+heathen and Jewish, is attained and laid bare.
+
+Thousands of years of human development reach their climax, find their
+issue and their explanation in these words.
+
+3.  In its teaching, this sixth word ascends to the heights, to the
+mysterious and ineffable relationships of the Godhead--which are the
+inner reality and meaning of all morality and religion--and it descends
+to the depths, to the lowliest details of the most commonplace life.
+
+All work, for the Christian, is raised to the level, to the dignity of
+sacrifice.  Once and for all we must rid ourselves of that idea which has
+wrought so much mischief, that sacrifice necessarily connotes pain, loss,
+death.  Essentially our sacrifice is what essentially Christ's sacrifice
+was, the joyous dedication of the will to God, the Source and Light of
+all our being.
+
+   The daily round, the common task,
+   Will furnish all we need to ask.
+
+All work is sacred, or may be so, if we will.  For all work has been
+consecrated for evermore by the perfect obedience, that is, the perfect
+sacrifice of the Son of man, the Head of our race.  There is no task
+which any Christian, anywhere, can be called upon to do, which cannot be
+made part of that joyous service, that glad sacrifice, which, in union
+with that of Jesus Christ our Lord, we, one with Him in sacramental
+union, "offer and present" to the Father.
+
+
+
+VIII
+THE SEVENTH WORD
+
+
+   "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit."  ST. LUKE XXIII. 46.
+
+The consummation of sacrifice, the union of the human will with the
+Divine, leads to the perfect rest in God.
+
+1.  We have tried to deal with the Seven Words as constituting a
+revelation of the Divine Sonship of humanity.  From this point of view it
+is significant that the first and the last begin, like the Lord's Prayer,
+with a direct address to the Father.
+
+The service of the Christian man is that of a son in his father's house,
+of a free man, not of a slave.  The Fatherhood of God is the very key-
+note of the Christian view of life and of death.  In both alike we are
+the objects of the Father's individual care and love; in both we bear the
+supreme dignity of "the sons of the Most High."
+
+That dignity belongs inalienably to our human nature as such.  Baptism
+conveys no gift alien and extraneous to our manhood.  Rather, that union
+with the Only Begotten Son is not an addition to, but the restoration of
+our nature by Him in Whose Image it was created.  United thus to the
+Eternal Son, we are placed in a position to realise the possibilities of
+our being, to become that which we are constituted capable of becoming.
+That is the true answer to the question, how can we be made children of
+God by Baptism?
+
+And through work, and prayer, and suffering, we are to grow into, and
+perfectly realise, our Divine sonship.
+
+2.  These dying words of the Son of God breathe no spirit of mere passive
+resignation.  That is the spirit of the Oriental fatalist, not of the son
+conscious of his sonship, of his heirship.  Even the Lord's Death was not
+the yielding to inexorable necessity, to the inevitable working of the
+laws of nature.  It was, if anything in His Life was, the deliberate act
+of His conscious Will.  "I commend," rather, "I commit My Spirit."  "I
+lay down My life . . . therefore the Father loveth Me."
+
+Submission to the Will of God is not necessarily a Christian virtue at
+all.  What is Christian is the glad recognition of what manner of will
+the Divine Will is, how altogether "good, perfect, and acceptable," how
+infinitely righteous, and holy, and loving; the doing of that glorious
+Will with mind, and heart, and will, and body; the praying with all
+sincerity and intention that that Will, which is the happiness and joy
+and life of all creatures, may increasingly "be done, as in heaven, so on
+earth"; the free and glad surrender, in life and death, to that Will
+which is the perfection and consummation of our manhood.
+
+3.  Such an attitude of our whole being, which is what is meant by being
+a Christian, can only be ours by virtue of the Spirit of the Son of God
+dwelling and working within us, and moulding us into His perfect
+Likeness.  In Him alone we can come to our sonship, to that which is from
+the first, potentially, our own.  "Ye are all sons of God, through faith,
+in Christ Jesus; for as many of you as were baptised into Christ did put
+on Christ."  Work and suffering, life and death, can only be borne, and
+lived, and endured by us in the spirit of sonship, so far as we are
+actually "in Christ."
+
+Let us pray that the Mind and Will of the Son of God, disclosed to us in
+these Seven Words, may be ours in ever-increasing measure.  They can be
+ours, if we are in Him, and He in us.
+
+The foundation fact of the Christian life, that which alone makes it
+possible, is our union, through sacraments and faith, with Christ; our
+actual sharing in His Life, imparted by His Spirit to the members of His
+Body.  We are meant to be ever drawing upon the infinite moral resources
+of that Life by repeated acts of faith.  For, as with all other gifts of
+God, so it is with this, His supreme gift; we only know it as ours--it
+is, in a real sense, only truly our own--in proportion as we are using
+it.
+
+
+
+X
+ADDRESS ON EASTER EVE
+
+
+   "We were buried, therefore, with Him through baptism into death; that
+   like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so
+   we also should walk in newness of life."--ROM. VI. 4.
+
+   "I delivered unto you, among the first things, that . . . He was
+   buried."--I COR. XV. 3, 4.
+
+St. Paul lays extraordinary and, at first sight, inexplicable stress, on
+the fact of our Lord's Burial.  It is certainly strange that, in the
+second of these two texts, he mentions it as constituting, along with the
+Death of Jesus Christ for our sins, and His Resurrection on the third day
+according to the Scriptures, the foundation truths of the apostolic
+gospel, as being one of those "first things" of the Christian religion
+which, as he had "received," so had he "delivered" to the Corinthians.
+
+This extreme importance attached by St. Paul to the Burial of Christ, can
+only be explained by the mysticism of the great apostle.  To him the
+outward facts, however wonderful and striking in themselves, are of value
+only as "signs," as representing great moral and spiritual realities.  To
+him, as to every man who thinks soberly and steadily, the internal is
+"real" in a sense in which the external is not: thought has a reality
+denied to "things."
+
+The real meaning of Christ's Burial is the mystical meaning, that meaning
+which was brought home to the minds of the early Christians by the
+picturesque and symbolic ritual of baptism.  The man who had, by faith,
+accepted Christ as his Lord and Master, was baptised into His Death; that
+is, in Him he died to the old life.  His submergence beneath the
+baptismal waters, the very likeness of the Burial, was the assurance and
+the sealing of that death.  As truly as the man who is dead and buried is
+cut off for ever from the life of this world, so was the baptised
+separated, once and for all, from the old heathen life with all its
+associations.  As clearly did his emergence from those waters show forth
+his actual participation in the Lord's Resurrection.  He had not merely
+left the old life behind, he had from that moment entered upon the new
+life, the "life of God"; that is, the life which henceforth had God for
+its foundation, its centre, and its goal; the life of moral health and
+sanity; the life which was to be, in all its relations, open and clear
+and undismayed; the life "in the Light."
+
+1.  The first thought, then, of Easter Eve must surely be one of profound
+sorrow and humiliation.  We ought to be bowed to the very earth with self-
+abasement by the thought that we have been, so many times in the past,
+untrue to our baptism.
+
+Soldiers of Christ, we have denied our Lord.  More, ours has been the
+guilt, not of Peter only, but of Judas.  Too often we have betrayed Him
+for the veriest pittance of this world's good.
+
+We have missed the glory of the Risen Life.  All the magnificent language
+of the Epistle to the Ephesians, the quickening with Christ, the raising
+together with Him from the dead, the enthronement in Him in the heavenly
+places--all this was written of Christians in this life.  All this might
+have been true of us, and is not; for, worse than Esau, we have bartered
+away an incomparably more magnificent heritage.
+
+What remains for us to do on this Easter Eve but, with truest penitence,
+with utter loathing of self, and utter longing for Him Who is our true
+self, to cast ourselves at the Feet of Christ?
+
+2.  But the second thought of Easter Eve is one of boundless hope.  But
+remember, hope can only begin at the Feet of Christ.  For Christian hope
+has evermore its beginning and its ground in humility.  We only find
+safety, comfort, joy, encouragement, as we lie, prostrate in penitence,
+before our Redeemer.  It is clear, is it not, what we mean by all this?
+We are, simply and naturally, to kneel before our Lord, and acknowledge
+to Him all our untruth, all our disloyalty, all the manifold failures of
+our service.  And the very fact that we can do this sincerely and
+honestly, is the earnest of all good things to come in us.  If only we
+can make this genuine and heartfelt confession, there is no degree of
+moral recovery beyond our reach.
+
+For on Easter Eve we try to realise once more that greatest of Christian
+truths, the _power_ of Christ's Resurrection.  The power which was
+manifested in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the power
+which is universally present in nature and in mind, which is the reality
+behind all forces of nature, which all forces reveal.  It has been finely
+said, that "the opening of a rose-bud and the Resurrection of Jesus
+Christ are facts of the same order, for they are equally manifestations
+of the one force which is the motive power of all phenomena."
+
+We see that power in the glories of the opening spring; we are conscious
+of it in ourselves, in every good resolve, every upward aspiration.  There
+comes to us the inspiring thought, that the physical and the moral
+Resurrection alike, in nature, in ourselves, in Jesus Christ, are
+different manifestations of one and the same power.  Was the Resurrection
+of the Lord a mighty fact, the greatest of all the facts of history, a
+transcendent and astonishing miracle?  The power which wrought it is in
+me; the same wondrous fact, the same stupendous miracle, if I will, may
+be accomplished in me.
+
+That was the very meaning of my Christian calling--that "as Christ was
+raised from the dead by the glory of the Father," so I, by the self-same
+power, might be raised from the death of sin, and enabled "to walk in
+newness of life."  The Death, the Burial, and the Resurrection of Jesus
+Christ are not merely historical facts, external to me: they are meant to
+be spiritual facts in my own experience, in the experience of all
+Christians.  And spiritual facts are beyond measure greater in value and
+meaning and influence than those historical facts which happened in space
+and time, in order to serve as signs and symbols of the inward and
+eternal realities.
+
+So let us come to our Easter Communion, not only in the spirit of
+penitence, but in the spirit of undying and unconquerable hope.  There is
+no limit to that which the power of God, symbolised, embodied externally,
+in the Resurrection, may effect within us, in the region of our moral and
+spiritual life.  Or rather, there is no limit to the exercise of the
+Divine power, save that which we ourselves impose upon it, by our failure
+to correspond with it.  Now as ever it is true, true of the work of God's
+grace upon our souls, as of the healing power of Christ over the bodies
+of men, that "according to our faith" it shall be done to us.
+
+WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
+PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{0}  Some of them also in the Parish Church of Colton, Staffordshire.
+
+
+
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