CHAP. IX] PURPOSE OF THE CROSS

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whole of Christ's teaching (as has been seen at p. 126), is not His sacrifice but the simple Gospel, or message, Repent, and your sins are remitted.

It may be asked for what purpose, then, did Christ submit to be crucified? The answer is that it was for the same purpose for which He submitted to be born and to dwell on the earth for thirtythree years before His crucifixion. He assumed the form of man in order that He might be an example to men, and He came into the world to bring to it the direct message of God. But so perverted were the minds of men that they could not accept His gracious message in its true and simple sense. The people indeed received Him gladly, but it was in the belief that He was the Messiah Whom they expected to restore to them their earthly kingdom. Even His own chosen disciples could not divest themselves of this idea, for in their bitter disappointment they all forsook Him and fled; and even after the crucifixion they mourned, because they had trusted that it had been He that should redeem Israel.1 Therefore He was despised and rejected of men, and it was necessary, both as an example to men, and to make them at last understand His true spiritual teaching,

1 Luke xxiv. 21.

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that He should die on the cross and be raised again. For this it behoved Him to suffer, this end was the sign and testimony of His Godhead, and the seal of God's infinite love; this at last carried the truth of His Gospel into the hearts of His disciples; and thus Christ's death was necessary to secure acceptance by mankind of that message of the free pardon of sins to those who repent.

Men's hearts are

As it was then, so it is now. still as hard and as unbelieving. We do not, it is true, look for an earthly Messiah to make us the greatest among nations, and to proclaim us the chosen people of God. aspirations, yet they are

Our age has different equally hostile to the The world is too much

reception of God's grace. with us; we spend our days in trying to grow rich; we set our hopes on gaining honour from men, or in the enjoyment of sensual pleasures, and God is little and seldom in our minds. Some among us sin deeply, almost all of us are callous and careless. But when in moments we are aroused from the torpor of indifference, the one thought that has power to pierce into our consciousness is that of Jesus on the cross, because of God's love to us. It is this by which the heathen are awakened, whether they dwell afar or in our midst. It is the

CHAP. IX] THE TRUE ATONEMENT

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one final, convincing, heart-rending evidence of the eternal things amidst which we stand, and of the eternity to which we are hastening.

This then is what our Lord bade His disciples commemorate in recalling, under the symbols of bread and wine, that He laid down His human life for the purpose of restoring us to the life with Him. The bread symbolised His body, the wine His blood, though they could not possibly be His actual body and blood, which were still present; but the disciples partaking of these were made conscious of His desire that they might be one with Him. This is the Atonement, in its literal and unperverted sense, and this may well satisfy every devout longing of our souls. But there is a wide diversity of mental craving and sentiment in different minds, and if there are many who find comfort in imagining that there is an actual presence of our Lord in the outward symbols which He authorised, and in surrounding them with more or less distinct adjuncts of reverence or even worship, it is not for any of their fellow-men to condemn them. The one thing which is common to all believers is that what we do is 'in remembrance of Me.'

Only, in receiving into our souls the sign of inconceivable compassion, let us not pervert the

truth of God's love. We who are Protestants

reject the display of the crucifix, the image of Christ nailed to the cross, because we deem it comes too close to the worshipping of gold or silver or wood. But let us ourselves beware of setting up for worship a mere idea, conceived in our own minds, and based on Jewish ritualism, that the death of Christ was a sacrifice offered to appease a relentless God. No wrath was on Calvary. A human life was yielded only as the proof of deathless love. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!' was the last entreaty of that love. That cry is for us too. Let us in spirit be present at that scene, let us look on the Holy One in the agony of human death, let us think that He suffered because He brought to us the message of pardon if only we would turn to Him, let us remember how deeply we need that pardon, and then we may be able to say, as one at least said, 'Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom.' And then in an hour which must come to us all, and to some of us very soon, we may hear the blessed answer, 'To day shalt thou be with Me in paradise,'

CHAPTER X

MIRACLES

THE meaning of miracle is simply a wonderful or surprising event, and surprising means unexpected. There is in the order of the world in which we live a certain uniformity, a regular sequence which is familiar to us, and which being regular we call laws. Such laws do not explain the cause of any action, they only express that the action in similar conditions always occurs. Thus we say that an apple or a stone or a feather falls to the ground, when unsupported, by the law of gravity, but we cannot tell what causes gravity; we only know that the same action always happens. So we have laws of motion, laws of heat, light and electricity, laws of growth of plants and animals, laws of health, and, in short, everything that recurs with regularity is called subject to a law. Having observed this regularity to exist in the past, we expect it to continue in the future, and if a failure