Social aspects of the cross

; SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

HENRY SLOANE COFFIN

L><viai«^a >.J> ^^ —

Srctioo

:?6?(

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

SOCIAL ASPECTS
OF THE CROSS

By
HENRY SLOANE COFFIN ""'

Minister in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian
Church and Associate Professor of
Homiletics in Union Theolog-
ical Seminary, New
York City

HODDER & STOUGHTON

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1911,
By George H. Doran Company

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Sin 3

II. Duty 27

III. Man 49

IV. God 67

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

SIN

I

SIN

Isaiah 53 : 12 : "He was numbered with the trans-
gressors."

Cf. Luke 22: 37:" For I say unto you, that this which is
written must be fulfilled in Me, and He was reckoned
with transgressors."

JESUS was numbered with the trans-
gressors by many of His contem-
poraries, and they were by no means
the worst men among the inhabitants of
Palestine. It is perhaps impossible for us at
this distance to assign accurately the reasons
which impelled them to enact the tragedy of
Calvary. In the complicated network of their
motives it is easy to distinguish misunder-
standing, prejudice, bigotry, ambition, self-
ishness, fear, and much else that is base;
but these are inextricably tangled with honest
convictions, patriotism, loyalty to time-hon-
oured opinions, devotion to revered institu-
tions. Had we met the scribes of Galilee who
began the agitation against Jesus, or the

3

4 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

members of the Sanhedrin who condemned
Him, we should have found most of them
courteous, kindly, upright, loved at home,
respected by their friends, pleasant companions,
with much in them to admire and love. Even
Pilate and Judas were not monsters. But the
fact remains that to them Jesus of Nazareth,
for one reason or another, seemed an undesir-
able member of human society whom they
combined to execute as a criminal.

"All we like sheep have gone astray," says
the prophet, speaking of the strange mistake
that numbered the sinless Servant with trans-
gressors. Sheep seem unreasoning in their
movements but extremely gregarious. Landor
once made the significant remark that "we
admire by tradition and criticise by caprice."
Caprice — that is sheep-like unreason; tradi-
tion — that is sheep-like imitation. The death
of Jesus startles us by its demonstration that
both the traditions and caprices of people of
average, or perhaps more than average, good-
ness are so far from right. It makes us ques-
tion the labels we so readily attach to move-
ments and opinions and persons. There is
nothing unique in the attitude of a ^aiaphaa

SIN 5

or a Herod, of the rulers of the synagogues of
Galilee who sent word up to Jerusalem of the
suspected Innovator, or of the politician who
was Roman procurator of Judaea. We know
dozens of men and women who share substan-
tially their point of view. We seem to see the
face of a rigorous Pharisee or a lax Sadducee
or a false Judas staring out at us from our own
thoughts and impulses. The world about us*
and within us is made up of exactly the same
sort of people as composed the world of Jesus'
day, and He was numbered with the trans-
gressors. How cautiously must we form our
judgments, how searchingly try our motives,
how hesitantly pass condemnations, how
sternly check our whims and prejudices, how
resolutely refuse to take traditional views
merely because of their antiquity, or current
opinions because of their universality ! We live
in a world where it is so easy to be tragically in
the wrong, to mistake love for something else,
to nail a Son of God to a cross, while we know -
not what we do.

Again, and this is more surprising, Jesus
numbered Himself with the transgressors.
There is not the slightest indication that He

6 SOCLVL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

felt Himself a sinner. The keenest conscience
our world has known found nothing with which
to charge itself. There is no expression of
penitence and no plea for forgiveness among
the personal prayers of Jesus. But this does
not mean that He considered Himself without
responsibility for the ignorance and folly and
iniquity of the world in which He lived. While
fully aware of His uniqueness, placing Himself
apart from and over against all the rest of
humanity, Jesus realized His oneness with men
in all that they achieved or failed of, suffered
or enjoyed. If there was a Zacchseus whose
honesty and generosity had given way under
the bad system of revenue collecting then in
vogue, Jesus felt Himself implicated in his
downfall. If there were sick folk, their dis-
eases were to Him, in part at last, due to in-
herited weaknesses or wrong conditions of
life which might frankly be termed devilish,
and for which He felt Himself socially account-
able. If the Church of His day was unable
to reach large sections of the population,
if it succeeded very imperfectly in making
children of the Most High out of those
whom it did reach, if it exaggerated ridiculous

SIN 7

trifles and under-emphasized such essentials
as justice, mercy, and faithfulness, He,
as a member of that Church, was chargeable
with its failures. The young Mazzini at
sixteen determined to dress always in black,
feeling himself in mourning for his country;
and Thomas Arnold, oppressed by the lacl^l
of moral principle in the policies of the
British government of his day, writes a
friend that he suffers from "A daily pain-
fulness — a moral east wind, which makes
me feel uncomfortable without any par-
ticular ailment." "Himself," comments ourj
first evangelist, "Himself took our infirm-
ities and bare our diseases." "For them
that were sick, I was sick." Sinless Him-
self, He felt socially involved in the in-
iquities and frailties of all His brethren.
He was one in the transgressing family
of God.

And because His conscience was so much
more sensitive than theirs, and because He
was bound to them by a sympathy we
cannot hope to understand, He was bur-
dened by their transgressions as they
were not. One of the noblest of the

8 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

characters in the Greek drama, Phaedra's

nurse in Euripides's " Hippoly tus, " says:

"Oh, pain were better than tending pain! 1
For that were single, and this is twain, I
With grief of heart and labour of hmb. "

There was not only a doubleness, there was
a multipHcity, in the life of Jesus. He could
not see able-bodied and willing workmen
standing idle in the market place because no
man had hired them, without sharing their
discouragement, nor prodigals making fools
of themselves in far countries without think-
ing of their heart-broken fathers and feeling
the shame the careless boys should themselves
have felt, had their consciences functioned
normally.

"And he who lives more lives than one.
More deaths than one must die."

When the dark shadow of His own murder
falls upon Him, He shrinks from it, and falters,
and seems overwhelmed. It is not lack of
physical courage that accounts for the agony
in Gethsemane; it is not His reluctance to part
with a life with which He can accomplish so
infinitely much; but it is His sympathy with
the very men who were murdering Him,

SIN 9

which made Him feel their bhndness, their
perversity, their utter disharmony with the
God they professed to honour, as a load of
guilt that rested on Him. They were His
brothers for whom He was responsibje, and
what they did was a household disgrace which
involved Him. As the conscientious member of
a family feels the shame of a kinsman's crime,
while the culprit himself may not be seriously
disturbed, so Jesus was the conscience of His
less conscientious brothers, and felt what they
should have felt. "The reproaches of them
that reproached Thee, fell on Me." He real-
ized, as they did not, the enormity of what
they were doing. He was aware, as they were
not, of the pain they were causing God. In
the curse they brought on themselves. He was
accursed. John Woolman, the Quaker, enters
in his journal: "I felt the depth and extent
of the misery of my fellow-creatures separated
from the divine harmony, and it was greater
than I could bear, and I was crushed down
under it." "He began to be greatly amazed
and sore troubled. And He saith to His disciples,
* My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto
death.' " The prayers He utters are cries from

10 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

a black abyss. **My Father, if it be possible,
let this cup pass away from Me." He num-
bered Himself with the transgressors; and no
one ever appreciated how heavy was the
burden of their transgression, until the Son
of God staggered under it — what this tangled
network of mixed motives meant to a sensi-
tive conscience implicated in it, until He
recoiled from its deathly contact.

And, far more astounding still, Jesus was
numbered by God with the transgressors. "It
pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put
Him to grief." This is not to say that the
Most High by some juggling of terms called
a sinless man a sinner, nor that by some device
of celestial book-keeping He transferred our
debit column to Jesus and His credit colunm
to us. But back of the sense of solidarity which
made Jesus consider Himself answerable for
every wrong done by His brethren, and behind
the sympathy which made Him feel their guilt
weighing on His heart, was the Father prompt-
ing, sending, inspiring Him. " God made Him,"
says Paul in one of those bold sentences that
can easily sound repulsive unless we stop to
understand them, "God made Him to be

SIN 11

sin for us, who knew no sin." God did not
make Jesus a sinner, but that love which led
Jesus to feel socially accountable for every
injustice and oppression and falsity among the
sons of men and to take to Himself what they
should have felt and could not for their dulness
of conscience, that was the divine, was God in
Jesus, for that love is what God is. " Christ by
an eternal spirit offered Himself." In His
pouring out His soul unto death. He is not
displaying some new spirit, but the eternal
Spirit who is behind and in all history. The
Father, abiding in Him, felt this responsibility
and was burdened with this guilt. Jesus and
the Father were one in this. God feels impli-
cated in every wrong in the family life of His
children and shamed by the guilt we ought to
feel, and usually do not, for our wrong doing.
**God commendeth His own love toward us, in
that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for
us. " In all that Jesus felt and endured we touch
God, or rather God Himself touches us. In a true
sense the holy God numbers Himself with the
transgressors, feels accountable as our Father for
what we do, and shamed as our Father in the dis-
grace we bring on Him as well as on ourselves.

12 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

But this is not all. There came a point in
the sufferings of Jesus when He did not feel
Himself at one with God. He numbered
Himself with the transgressors over against
the righteous Father. "My God, My God,
why hast Thou forsaken Me.^" It is common
to explain the cry by saying that Jesus thought
Himself in His extreme weakness and appar-
ent defeat abandoned by God, while in reality
the Father was never nearer. But surely we
must hesitate to call Jesus mistaken, and
mistaken in that touch with God where above
all He excels us. Older theologians used to say
that Jesus tasted the wrath of God. We
shrink from their language, but were they so
far wrong? Wrath is our name for love's
instinct of self-preservation. If God be love,
He must hate every thing that hampers and
hinders His children from entering that fulness
of life with one another and with Him which
He purposes for us. "Your goodness,'* writes
Emerson, "must have some edge to it — else
it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine
of love, when that pules and whines." The
love which is a purifying flame kindling us

SIN 13

to godlikeness cannot but be a consuming
fire destroying every ungodlike element. There
is a "fierceness which from tenderness is never
far. " One night after talking privately with a
number of medical students who had unbosomed
their own sins to him and spoken of others'
iniquities, Henry Drummond was found by a
friend leaning against a mantel, pale and tired,
and when asked if he were sick, replied: "Oh,
I am sick; sick with the sins of these men!
How can God bear it?'* How can God bear
His children's sins? In one sense He does
bear them with a patience and a sympathy
past understanding. But His bearing is no
easy tolerance of the intolerable. His love
for us is hot with wrath for them. In that
un wrathful recoil of love is our hope that He wil]^
not cease until all that is ungodlike in our owr
and the world's life is abolished. The sinlessL
Sufferer on the cross, in His oneness with His
brethren, felt their wrong doing His own, con-
fessed in His forsakenness that God would have
nothing to do with it save destroy it, felt that
it separated between men and God, and that
He was so at one with us that He was actually
away from God. "That was hell, "said a Scotch

14 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS
theologian, "and He tasted it." By no fic-
titious process, but by the inevitable sequence
that resulted from Jesus' social conscience and,
sympathetic heart, "the Lord laid on Him
the iniquity of us all. He was numbered with
the transgressors, and He bare the sin of
many." There is a horror of deep darkness
here. We may be sure that the forsaking cost
the Father as much pain as it cost Jesus; but
it had to be. "The mystery of the cross,^
writes a woman of rare insight, "did not, it
is true, explain any one of the enigmas con-
nected with our mortal existence and destiny,
but it linked itself in my spirit with them all.
It was itself an enigma flung down by God
alongside the sorrowful problem of human life,
the confession of Omnipotence itself to some
stern reality of misery and wrong." "He
was numbered with the transgressors." Jl

"Follow Me," said Jesus to His disciples;
and lest there should be any doubt how far
they were to accompany Him, He specified:
"If any man will come after Me, let him take
up his cross and follow Me." The cross wa.^

Hi ?/'\w ^^rd rnnnrrt^d ^"ly with the wnr^h
QriminflilSt How can the servants be, as their

SIN 15

Lord, "numbered with the transgressors?"
*'Woe unto you when all men shall speak
well of you!" Until the Kingdom of God has
come, and all life is conformed to the divine
will there must be an eccentricity in the chil-
dren of light. We are doomed to be non-
conformists. This is not to put a premium
on peculiarities and measure a man's goodness
by its oddity. It is to insist that we can take
nothing for granted in the standards and
principles and usages we discover. We must
think for ourselves, and think with the mind of
Christ. Our eccentricity will follow as a
matter of course. To go with the crowd is
like sheep to go astray. To follow our own
inclinations is like sheep to turn every one
to his own way. There is nothing for us as
Christians, but a constant, thoughtful, de-
liberate loyalty to Jesus. There is but one type
of disciple — that well pictured in Milton's
Archangel Michael:

"For this was all thy care
To stand approv'd in sight of God, tho* worlds
Judged thee perverse."

Here is an angel numbered with the trans-
gressors.

16 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS
critirism and pnHnrP K^m^ rr^i,^iip() erst noH ^^.

flftfr all, hnt a small part of thft fftUowohip q£
(;;hrist\g! s]^fy^rin^s, There is a sharing of His
social conscience. If a life is being extinguished
by a preventable disease, or by an accident
due to heartless want of forethought, there is
a trail of blood traceable to our door as really
as though we had committed murder. If
there is a prisoner behind bars who is innocent
of his crime, or one whose birth amid degrading
conditions foredoomed him to excessive temp-
tation, or one whom prison life is turning into
tenfold more a child of hell than when he
entered, we are to bl^ame for what he is. If our
industries overtask fandj under-reward some;
if there is greed and chicanery; if there is want
of heart in the world of business; if public life
is not just, honourable, pure; if there is cor-
ruption in government; if our country is not
displaying a Christ-like spirit in its international
relations; if among us man is pitted against
man in racial antipathy and class hatred;
if the Church of Christ is negligent; if there is
waste through sectarian rivalry and failure
through want of co-operation; if there are lives

SIN 17

at home or in the ends of the earth without
the inspiration of the gospel of Christ, because
the Church lacks the means or the will to serve
them; if any human being is deprived of a
just share in the race's comfort, pleasure,
culture, faith — we are accountable. There is
no needless suffering and no sin in all the world
that does not in a very genuine sense come
home to you and me as something for which
we are personally blameworthy. We "sin
by syndicate," by the industrial order which
we help maintain, by the government which
we place in power, by the Church into which
we throw our personalities, by the whole
corporation of humanity which is one vast
multi-personality of which we are integral
parts. "For none of us livpth unto himself,
jy^d none HiptVi to liimsplf" Wherever there
is a Zacchseus, a son of God is bound to say,
"I must"; for Zacchseus's plight lays an ob-
ligation on him. Wherever there is a woman
bound with some curable malady, followers of
Christ say with Him, "Ought not this woman
be loosed?" Wherever there is a wretched
Magdalen selling her womanhood on city
streets, her shame soils every clean man and

18 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

woman in the family of God. "He Himself,"
writes Martin Luther to a correspondent,
*'will teach thee how in receiving thee He
makes thy sins His, and His righteousness
thine. When thou believest this firmly, then
bear patiently with erring brothers, making
\their sins thine. "

To many this may seem far-fetched. Their
consciences tax them with their own wrong
doing, but the woe and injustice and sin which
they are not aware of doing any thing to cause,
never give them a twinge. But conscience,
like a taste for music or the appreciation of
poetry or the sense for God, is a developable
instinct. It has to be expanded to function
at long range. George Fox prayed "to be
baptized into a sense of all conditions, that I
might be able to know the needs and feel the
sorrows of all. " This is not a gratuitous prayer,
a superfluous sympathy, which a folio er of
Christ may omit if he will. Until all the wrong
and needless pain of a whole world is felt by
us as something for which we are responsible
before God, responsible in our degree as
He is responsible for it in His, we have not
had formed in us the conscience of the

SIN 19

Son of man, who was numbered with the
transgressors.

And, further, when we come to share Christ's
intense love for men we shall also share "the
wrath of the Lamb." We shall become good
haters, and that means passionately earnest
fighters and toilers for righteousness, ablaze
with indignation at wrong, and with blood
that runs as liquid flame at the sight of in-
iquity. A God, who is a consuming fire, de-
mands that His children of light shall be
children of as pure and purifying heat.

And, still further, as, like Christ, we appre-
ciate God's iniquity-destroying wrath on the
one hand and enter on the other into men's
lives with a sympathy that makes all that is
theirs ours, we shall share in some measure
Christ's burden of a world's guilt. Paul
speaks of his sense of the inseparable love of
God in Christ, that holds him, and at once
adds, "I say the truth in Christ, I lie not,
my conscience bearing witness with me in the
Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and
unceasing pain in my heart. For I could
wish that I myself were anathema from Christ
for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen accord-

20 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

ing to the flesh." A recent man of letters,
himself a degenerate, but with a conscience
rendered impressionable by his own conscious-
ness of wrong, caught in "the gin that waits
for sin," tells how in jail on the night when
a murderer was to be executed that man's
crime weighed on his fellow prisoners:

"He lay as one who lies and dreams

In a pleasant meadow land,
The watchers watched him as he slept.

And could not understand
How one could sleep so sweet a sleep

With a hangman close at hand.

"But there is no sleep when men must weep

Who never yet have wept:
So we — the fool, th^ fraud, the knave —

That endless vigil kept.
And through each brain on hands of pain

Another's terror crept.

"Alas! it is a fearful thing

To feel another's guilt!
For, right within, the sword of Sin

Pierced to its poisoned hilt,
And as molten lead were the tears we shed
s^^ For the blood we had not spilt."

"Do you know," says William Morris,
"when I see a poor devil drunk and brutal,
I always feel, quite apart from aisthetical
perceptions, a sort of shame, as if I myself
had some hand in it? " The social conscience

SIN 21

which makes us feel responsible for all
transgression and failure, must bring with
it a sense of guilty complicity which
numbers us self-reproachingly with the
transgressors.

But after all there remains this difference
between Jesus and ourselves: we belong with
the transgressors, and He does not. We
have actually added to the sin of the world.
Our thoughtlessness has left men to struggle
vainly by themselves, while a word from us
might have turned the day. Our cowardice
has kept us from speaking out what others
needed to hear to brace them for their battle.
Our self-indulgence has crippled a good cause
with lack of adequate support. Our negative
attitude has weakened the influence of right-
eousness. Our compromise has befogged the
issue of Christian and un-Christian. But He —
the closer He comes to us in His amazing
sympathy, the farther He seems from us in
His utter unlikeness. "Holy, guileless, un-
defiled, separated from sinners, and made
high^ than the heavens," we say with that
New Testament writer who most emphasized
Jesus' complete sharing of our human expe-

22 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

riences. What did it mean to Him to be num-
bered with transgressors?

All sympathy in a world of imperfect beings
involves pain. Schopenhauer compares men
to porcupines, trying to huddle together for
warmth and presently repelled again by the
contact of their prickles. But what of the
incomparably sensitive Jesus, as His sympathy
drew Him toward men whose every thought
and emotion must have hurt Him? Charlotte
Bronte wrote frankly to G. H. Lewes, the phil-
osopher and man of letters whose name is
linked with the story of George Eliot; "You
w^ould often jar terribly on some feelings, with
whose recoil and quiver you could not possibly
sympathize." What was the "recoil and
quiver" in the acute conscience of the Son of
God when He shared our life with its home
ties and friendships, its town gossip and national
ambitions, its push for gain and fame, its
business relations and church fellowship? It
is His sinless conscience which is the unique
factor. Paul speaks of filling up on his part
the deficit in Christ's sufferings, but he asks,
^^Was Paul crucified for you?" It is not the
crucifixion that matters, but the Crucified.

SIN 23

"He" — not His death — "is the propitiation
for our sins." That He with His recoil and
quiver should still have loved us so intensely
that, when He felt the gulf fixed between God
and sinners, He thought Himself on our side
of the breach and numbered Himself with the
transgressors — that is the marvel. It is that
which puts the tone of unfailing wonder into
our voices when we say, "The Son of God
loved me, and gave Himself up for me. "

DUTY

II

DUTY

1 John 3: 16: "Hereby know we love, because He
laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our
lives for the brethren. "

DUTY for the men of the New Testament
is love. John would have agreed
with Paul, when he wrote: "Owe no
man anything, save to love one another: for
he that loveth his neighbour hath fulfilled the
law." And love is a debt we must continue
to owe. There are no moral bankruptcy pro-
ceedings through which we can pass and be
discharged. So long as we exist, here or here-
after, we owe love.

But our best words suffer from usage. Lan-
guage is liable to great wear and tear. People
use the word "love" for their delight in a
particular variety of china, their fondness for
a kitten, their appreciation of flowers, as well
as for their devotion to human beings. And
even when the word is confined to the feelings
of person for person, it may represent a vast

27

28 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

variety of emotions — the doting affection that
spoils, the domineering attachment that bullies,
the blind infatuation that undiscriminatingly
adores, the passion that demoralizes, as well
as the love described in the thirteenth chapter
of First Corinthians. Whether the Greek word
for **love'* which John employs be, as some
scholars have held, "born within the bosom of
revealed religion" and unused by heathen
writers, or, as others more recently have
sought to prove, a word in use in the vernacular
adopted by the Christians, John is careful to
give it a precise definition. "Hereby know we
love, because He laid down His life for us."
The cross defined love for him. It was not
liking, but devotion; not an emotion but a
service, and a service regarded as an obli-
gation, so that John can attach the word
"ought" to it. "Because He ... we
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. "
You may already have noticed a slight
difference between the translations of our text
in the Authorized and Revised Versions.
It used to read, "Hereby perceive we the love
of God:'' but the revisers felt that the words
"of God," which are not in the Greek, did

DUTY 29

not need to be added. Love is the same
whether in God or in man. This needs to
be insisted on. Love has often been repre-
sented as a duty in man, but as a mere favour
on the part of God. We feel that we ought
to love Him and one another, but we have
hesitated to say that God ought to love us.
But the Bible writers are exceeding bold. They
know that God never asks His children to say
*' ought" in connection with anything with
which He has not already felt an "ought."
We are to be perfect as, not otherwise than.
He is perfect. When God fathered us and
brought us into being, He obliged Himself to
love us, and to do for us all that love involves.
A century ago it was the custom for children
to address their parents as those to whom they
were greatly indebted as the authors of their
existence. To-day we regard parenthood as
a responsibility, and emphasize far more the
obligation which rests on them than on their
children. The obligation, to be sure, is mutual ;
but it rests primarily on those who, without
their children's will, bring them into being.
God's fatherhood puts Him in debt to us. He
owes us love. Duty is the same for God and

30 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

man; love is for both the fulfilling of the law;
and "hereby know we love, because He laid
down His life for us. " Calvary is the standard
of duty, divine and human.

We never understand the meaning of the
cross for God unless we recall what is implied
in John's description of His character: "God
is love." Then Calvary becomes inevitable
from all eternity. From the moment when
God gave another being life. His parental
responsibility required Him to devote Him-
self to that other's perfecting. If His child
sinned. He must suffer with and for him, and
He cannot cease loving him, nor doing for him
all that love endlessly suggests. The Lamb
was slain in the conscience of God from the
foundation of the world. From the moment
there was a world for which God was account-
able, He could not withhold His nearest and
dearest, He could not spare Himself. He was a
debtor to all on whom He had brought the
miseries and exposed to the temptations of
life, so as much as in Him lay He was ready
to serve them. Calvary is the typical event
in time through which we look in on God's
eternal self-devotion to His children.

DUTY 31

The cross, then, is part of God's justice;
that which He feels He owes us. We speak
of the grace of God sometimes as though all
that God did for us sinners were a sheer gift
on His part. No doubt all that He is to us
and does for us is a gift in the sense that we
do nothing to deserve it nor to pay Him for it.
But grace is obligatory on Him. Forgiveness
is not a gratuity which He feels He may bestow
or refuse. A distinguished theological pro-
fessor in Union Seminary a generation ago
preached a sermon entitled "The Exercise of
Mercy Optional with God," and Thomas
Chalmers said that "forgiveness is a duty with
man but a problem for God." It is no more
optional with Him than with us, and it is a
problem for us both. "He is faithful and just
to forgive us," writes John, and were He un-
forgiving He would be neither. "God," said
Socrates, "may forgive sin, but I do not see
how He can." "God," says this writer,
"must forgive sin, and can do no other without
ceasing to be the God we know in Christ."
Jesus did not consider His suffering and death
an optional service which He was not bound
to render to His brethren. "The Son of man

32 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

must suffer." "Ought not the Christ to have
suffered these things?" What claim had we
on Him? The family claim — we are His
brothers. Love is not a condescension on His
part, but an obligation, and an obligation which
is not met by possessing a benevolent dispo-
sition, a good nature that would harm nobody,
but by a sacrificial service that pours out the
soul unto death, that gives until here is literally
nothing left ungiven. And this is not charity,
but duty; not being kind merely, but being just.
Men have sometimes pictured God's mercy
and His justice as conflicting characteristics.
The Talmud in a striking passage says, "God
prays, and His prayer is this: *Be it My will
that My mercy overpower My justice.'" But
the Bible knows of no such strife. "He is
a just God and a Saviour." His justice and
His saving are connected by an "and" not a
"but." He could not be just without saving.
Mr. Huxley wrote to Charles Kingsley: "The
absolute justice of the system of things is as
clear to me as any scientific fact. The gravi-
tation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of
the earth to the sun — and more so — for
experimental proof of the fact is within reach of

DUTY 83

all; nay is before us all in our own lives, if
we had but the eyes to see it." Mr. Huxley
would have refused to say that forgiving and
redeeming love was clear to him in the facts
of the universe, but in the same letter he says
of his own family experience, "Love opened
up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature,
and impressed me with a deep sense of respon-
sibility." If we read the facts of the universe
with the insight of Jesus and are convinced that
behind and in all is a God of love, that God
must as surely be impressed with "a deep sense
of responsibility," and the justice which in-
evitably connects sin with sorrow must as
certainly link it with redemption. There is as
reliable a gravitation of love to sin, as of sin
to sorrow. The Son of man, who comes
saying ''I must" as He seeks and saves the lost,
is not better than His God and Father but
like Him. He has caught His "must" from
Him. Love naturally regards redemption
as duty. Love beareth, belie veth, hopeth,
endureth all things and never faileth. That
is love's nature. It cannot do less and be love.
So long as one child of God remains in sin, his
Father must and will lay down His life for him.

34 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

Some may feel that to call love for us God's
duty is to reduce it to a right that we can de-
mand of Him, and to rob it of that amazing-
ness which led the first Christians to exclaim,
*' Behold what manner of love the Father hath
bestowed upon us!" We need not fear if we
look at the love of God through Christ's cross
that it will ever cease to be a marvel. No
thoughtful man can look at Calvary without
calling the cross "wondrous" and such love
"amazing." Perhaps the conscience of Him
who feels that He is obliged to go as far as this
for men, most of whom He has never seen,
none of whom can wholly please Him,
and many of whom pain Him unutterably,
is the crowning marvel. The sense of
obligation revealed at Calvary is its supreme
surprise.

"And we ought ..." If the cross of
Jesus reveals a love that says "must," its effect
is to redeem us to feeling a like obligation.
Sin is irresponsibility, failure to recognize and
meet the claims men have on us. Sin is any
want of conformity unto the conscience of
God shown in Christ. The man who fell
among thieves on the road to Jericho may have

DUTY 35

been extremely careless. He may have dis-
played his money in a way that positively in-
vited robbery. But however much of a fool
he may have been, there in his wretchedness
he had a claim upon the humanity of every
passer-by. Priest and Levite ought to have
laid down their lives for their brother. Their
sin was their lack of love's sense of obligation.
The Good Samaritan (were we interpreting
him in the light of present conditions) would
not only have felt responsible for the half-
dead man at the roadside, but for other possi-
ble victims who might meet the same mishap,
and beside caring for the wounded sufferer,
he would have seen to it that the government
took effective measures to protect all future
travellers on that road. Further, his love would
think of the highwaymen and recognize that
they too had a claim on him. He must spend
and be spent for their reclamation. And none
of this would be charity on his part, but duty;
not something he might omit without blame,
but something he must do.

Would that we could get the "ought"
of love into our consciences! There is an
exacting parable of our Lord's that most

36 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

Christians forget. It is that in which the
master orders the slave who has just come in
from work outside to serve him at table, and
Jesus asks: "Has the slave any favour with
his master because he did what he was told?
Even so ye also, when ye shall have done all
the things that are commanded you say,
*We are simply servants: we have done that
which it was our duty to do.' " If love masters
us, we must do all that it prompts without feel-
ing that we are going beyond our duty. Our
extreme of self-sacrifice deserves no praise
from God or man. Millions may be exclaim-
ing, *' Worthy is the Lamb that hath been
slain!" but we may be sure that Jesus does
not consider that He has done anything
meritorious. He has done His duty by us;
that is all. How free from the desire for
recognition and the consequent dishearten-
ment when we are not appreciated would we
be, if only His "ought" were our imperative!
And how refreshing it is to find any one who
surprises us by his generosity and self-sacrifice,
and when we thank him, looks astonished and
says, "You need not feel grateful. I've
merely done what I should!" It is only they

DUTY 37

who are dominated by love's "ought" within
themselves, who are adult sons of God. All
others are children, whose judgment cannot
be trusted and who must be urged and coaxed
into doing right. But the man with a con-
science set by the cross keeps time with God
and can be relied on to be correct in life's
every relation.

"And we ought to lay down our lives,^' A
recent acute observer of social morals writes:
"It is not an exaggeration to say that un-
selfishness makes no effect on the London
streets. Decency does, respectability does,
and in a certain degree courtesy does; but the
great note of Christianity — selflessness —
makes no sound in the symphony of the public
streets." Does it in the Christian churches?
How many of us give the impression of hav-
ing laid down our lives in the sense that we
have placed them unreservedly at the disposal
of the Kingdom, and the only question in our
minds when some additional appeal meets us
is, "Have I time and strength for this? or is it
of more moment than something else that has
been claiming me?" When one thinks how
many of us have to be roused by a harrowing

38 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

plea before we feel in the mood to give, and
pled with by some zealous worker before
we will devote part of our unoccupied time to
Christian service, and coerced by the impor-
tunities of friends to accept a position of re-
sponsibility in some public organization, it
can hardly be said that we give the appearance
of lives laid down. We must rigorously test
ourselves by the cross. To what extent do
people feel that we are at their disposal, so
that they can draw on us for sympathy, counsel,
inspiration, assistance, as though we were a
bank account standing in their name? As
we scan our assets in education, means, in-
fluence, leisure, opportunity, acquaintance,
personality, how completely are they invested
for the Kingdom? *'He poured out His soul
unto death" — is there any business dealing
or social intercourse into which we do not
put our souls^ Can any one say of us, "Yes,
I met him in connection with a transaction,
or I knew him socially, and found him able,
or clever, or pleasant, or even obliging, but I
never was aware that I was in touch with a
soul?" "If thou draw out thy soul to the
hungry, " writes a prophet — but a hungry man

DUTY 39

wants bread. No, he wants bread and us. He
has a right to find the loaf we give him an incarn-
ation of ourselves, our brotherly regard for him.
"The gift without the giver is bare.'*
Some one has described the Christian life
as "infinite love in ordinary intercourse." It
must be in ordinary intercourse, so that a life
laid down does not mean a life stripped of the
comforts and enjoyments that come to us in
connection with the positions in the world we
fill. It is not a synonym for a life reduced to
the barest necessities. It means, to be sure,
a life freed from every cumbering luxury, from
every self-indulgence that consumes thought
or energy or time or means that could be
better employed. But essentially it is the
life which has the sense of being owned by men;
and, as belonging to them, spontaneously
answers their needs with the feeling that they
are entitled to its all. Scott's old servant,
Tom Purdie, once remarked, "Sir Walter
always speaks to every man as if he were his
born brother." To let our very speech and
attitude convey the impression that we rec-
ognize men's claim of kinship on us, to let them
feel that with as much as in us is, we are at

40 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

their service, to make them certain that our
refusals are never due to lack of heart but
to our obligation to other and superior claims,
to convince them that we are without self-
seeking and are concerned solely to be just —
that is to let them find in us a life laid down,
a conscience kin to that disclosed at Calvary.
"And we ought to lay down our lives for
the brethren.''' Scholars tell us that John was
thinking only of fellow Christians, when he
said brethren. One may wish that he had not
restricted his vision. But limitations to the
sphere of duty are not an unmixed evil. It is
easy to talk glibly of serving humanity and to
forget to pass the salt to the man who sits
next us at table, to think of placing our lives
at a world's disposal and neglect the small
attentions which mean so much to those in our
own homes. Hogarth never drew a more
useful moral than in the cartoon which repre-
sents a man in the debtors' prison occupying
himself with plans for the payment of the
national debt. The father of the distin-
guished master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, Sr.,
let his own business go to pieces, and reduced
his family to poverty, while he wrote letters

DUTY 41

to Australia on the proper treatment of the
aborigines and attempted a new metrical
version of the psalter for the Church of England.
When Paul spoke of working "that which is
good toward all men," he added, lest such
universal devotion should become a vague,
general philanthropy, "especially toward them
that are of the household of faith"; and when
he enforces a man's duty to provide for his
own, he insists, "specially they of his own
household. " Our duties surround us in a series
of concentric circles. We have to exercise
conscience to function accurately and thor-
oughly at short range first; then the circle can
widen out into a more inclusive round of obli-
gation. It is through fidelity to the family
in childhood that we become fitted for friend-
ship in youth; through patriotism that we
develop into responsible citizens of the world;
through faithfulness in a church home that
we grow to share with all Christians the re-
sponsibility for the universal Kingdom of God.
The danger is that the circle which marks off
the narrower sphere for which we are specially
answerable, and which should be just an
imaginary line like the parallels of latitude and

42 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

longitude on our maps, convenient guides
for our moral navigation, may become a high
wall that shuts out every thing beyond. Jesus
felt Himself definitely sent to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel. With His limited time
and opportunities He must confine Himself
to them. But He had His vision of the king-
doms of the world and the glory of them, and
recognized that He had other sheep not of
that fold whom He must also bring. They
too had a claim on His love, and for them also
He laid down His life. Paul was debtor both
to Greeks and to barbarians. There was no
man in God's earth that had not a right to
the unsearchable riches that were his, and
gladly he wore out his life to present every
man perfect in Christ. Our offering to foreign
missions is no gift. As truly as our own fam-
ilies have claims upon us, that we dare not
repudiate, the world-wide family of God own
whatever we possess, and are entitled to share
our most prized wealth — Jesus Christ. Mis-
sions are not for us optional, but obligatory,
not charity, but justice. When we say "breth-
ren," we cannot exclude one child of God,
however remote and backward in development.

DUTY 43

**We ought to lay down our lives for the
brethren."

A moment ago we were speaking of the
Christian life as "infinite love in ordinary
intercourse." But that is hardly correct. It
is extraordinary intercourse that Christ strove
to create, a sense of world-wide kinship and
responsibility. His cross was to draw all men
to Himself, and it is only when all have fellow-
ship one with another that His blood cleanses
from all sin. Until then there remain the sins
of imperfect sympathy and prejudice, of
misunderstanding and contracted conscience.
Only when "brethren" means for us everybody,
past, present, and to come, and only when
everybody means enough to us to demand and
gain from us a life laid down, have we come
under the atoning power of Christ's death
making us at one with God and all His
children.

"Infinite love in extraordinary intercourse"
— infinite in the sense that it exacts our all,
and that nothing about us is not laid down!
We must guard against belittling the heroism
required of the lowliest Christian. Gethsemane
is proof that even the Son of God had to battle

44 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

to bring Himself to lay down His life. The
tendency of our tolerant age is to make the
Kingdom as inclusive as possible and to reduce
the demands made of Christians to a minimum.
The result is a cheap Christianity. But a
Christianity which costs little and comes easy
cannot be Christian. There is nothing harder
and more exacting than to follow Jesus. The
cross is unavoidable; and who is able to say
invariably, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt?"
It is hopeless to face the Christian life as a
duty, the discharge of our obligations to men.
Such love is impossible for us. If this be re-
quired, then who can be saved?

But the Christian life never presents itself
to us as a duty merely. There is no abrupt
statement out of a clear sky. "You ought to
lay down your lives for the brethren. " It reads,
"He laid down His life for us, and we ..."
The Christian life is not an achievement we
must force ourselves to accomplish, but a
spirit which lays hold of us at the foot of
Christ's cross and compels us to embody it
in a life laid down. "The love of Christ
constraineth us." "There are some natures,"
writes George Eliot, "in which, if they love us,

DUTY 45

we are conscious of having a sort of baptism
and consecration: they bind us over to recti-
tude and purity by their pure belief about us;
and our sins become that worst kind of sac-
rilege which tears down the invisible altar of
trust. " Jesus' death was His supreme demon-
stration of His trust in us. "For their sakes
I sanctify Myself, that they ..." If He
did all that love could for us, and let God
through Him reveal Himself as doing ffis
divine all, He was confident that our con-
sciences would become sensitive to a like
obligation, and that love would be a bounden
duty we could not fail to fulfil to our nearest
and remotest kinsmen in the Father's family,
in life's ordinary and extraordinary inter-
course — a bounden duty we were irresistibly
inspired to discharge. Because He laid down
His life for us. He knew there would be a com-
pelling and empowering spirit within us, saying,
"And we ought to lay down our lives for the
brethren. ' ' Was He mistaken ?

MAN

Ill

MAN

Galatians 2:20: "Who loved me, and gave Himself
up for me. "

1 Corinthians 8:11: "The brother for whose sake
Christ died."

ONE who stands on the shore of a lake
on a moonlit evening sees a silvery
band of light running across the water
directly to his feet. He may reason with
himself that the moon's reflected light is
diffused with equal brilliancy over the surface
of our globe for many hundred miles about the
spot where he happens to be; but do what he
will he cannot make that path of light seem
broader, nor deflect it from coming straight
toward him.

It is so when one looks at the cross of Christ.
We may remind ourselves that Jesus died for
all men; that the "many" of whom He was
thinking when He called His life a ransom were
primarily those of His own generation; and
that in any case it is inconceivable that we
49

50 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

individually should have been present to His
mind, as He hung in anguish on Calvary; but
as our eyes cannot but see the moon-beam
connecting the light from the sky specifically
with us, our consciences cannot help bringing
home the cross of Christ personally to
ourselves.

We may explain this sense of a personal
connection with that supreme tragedy in
history in a variety of ways. The inevitable
effect of the cross on thoughtful people is to
awaken their consciences; and when, with sen-
sitive and susceptive consciences, we think
of the circumstances which caused the cruci-
fixion of Jesus, we are aware that this is a
family catastrophe, in which the actors are
our kinsmen, and the blood of the Victim stains
us as sharers of our brothers' crime. Further,
as we scan the motives of Christ's murderers
— Pharisee and Sadducee, Roman politician
and false friend, bawling rabble and undis'
criminating soldiery — they seem strangely
familiar to us. They have all been, they are
still, alive by turns in us. We have been and
are Caiaphas and Pilate and Herod and Judas
Iscariot. The harmless spark of electricity

MAN 51

that greets the touch of one's hand on a metal
knob on a winter's day is one with the bolt of
lightning that shatters a giant tree. The
selfish impulse, the narrow prejudice, the ig-
norant suspicion, the callous indifference, which
frequently dominate us and determine our de-
cisions, are one with that cruel combination
of motives which drove the nails in the hands
and feet of the Son of man. Still further,
the suffering of Jesus never seems to an acute
conscience something that happened once but
is over now. The Figure that hung and bled
on the tree centuries ago until He cried in
victorious relief, "It is finished," becomes
indissolubly joined in our thought with every
life to-day that is the victim of similar misun-
derstanding and neglect, injustice and brutality
— with every life in pain or poverty or loneliness
or iniquity; and, while our sense of social re-
sponsibility charges us with complicity in all
the wrong and woe under the sun, that haunting
Form on Calvary seems to hang before our eyes,
and

"Makes me feel it was my sin,
As though no other sin there were.
That was to Him who bears the world
A load that He could scarcely bear.'*

52 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

It may be felt that much of this is imagi-
native exaggeration. After all we were not
members of the Sanhedrin who condemned
Jesus, nor the Roman procurator who ordered
His execution, nor the scoffing soldiers who car-
ried it out. But, although our explanation of
it may be faulty, for our eyes the path of
moonlight on the water is an inescapable fact.
We cannot look without having it stare us
in the face. That band of silvery glory makes
for us an inseparable part of the scene. For
our consciences the charge of participation in
the murder of the Son of God is an equally
inescapable moral fact. It forms an unfor-
getable element in our outlook upon obli-
gation, giving our life its tragic seriousness.
It forces upon us the conviction that it is all
too possible for us to repeat the crime of Gol-
gotha, and by doing or failing to do, directly
or indirectly, for one of the least of Christ's
brethren, to crucify Him afresh and put Him
to an open shame. As real as is the beauty of
the band of moonlight on the lake to us, so
grimly real is our personal implication in the
death of Jesus.

But it is not only this consciousness of our

MAN 53

accountability for the crucifixion that a look
at Calvary brings home to us. The cross
casts not a black streak of shadowing disgrace
but a radiant gleam of glory toward us.
"Who loved me, and gave Himself up for
me."

We Christians must always puzzle outsiders
by what seems to them our amazing conceit
when we speak of God's personal interest in us.
Such a saying as *'The very hairs of your head
are all numbered" sounds like preposterous
self-importance. If there be a Deity, however
beneficent, behind and in all the mysterious
forces of this universe, Creator of continents
and oceans and skies, Lord of all lives past,
present, and to come, how can there be a direct
and individual relationship between Him and
each of the myriads of human beings? There
is much in the look of history with its swarm-
like movements of humanity, with its record
of the slow evolution of man from lowly begin-
nings in savagery, with its apparent disregard
of the individual in the interest of the race,
to confirm this skepticism. There is more,
perhaps, in the look of the facts of human life
to-day with statistics of birth and death rates.

54 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

of the number of criminals and insane persons
in every thousand of the population, of the
ratio of paupers and suicides; with the bewilder-
ing effect crowds have on us, robbing us of all
sense of the individuality of those who compose
them; with the depressing impression given by
the uninteresting character of the majority
of faces; to render the Christian view absurd.
Think of the line of faces opposite one in a street
car ! Jesus's own faith rested not on His obser-
vation of humanity, but on His personal
experience of what God was to Him. That
experience, in so far as we have shared it, must
assure us that the image of a Father for whom
we each have a special significance is the picture
to which the facts most nearly correspond.
No other explanation does justice to our in-
dividuality, nor to the personalness of our con-
tacts with God, if we have had any genuine
contact at all. And as for the cross, which is
the point at which the divine makes its deepest
impress on us and comes closest to us, we can-
not help feeling a direct line of personal de-
votion running from Calvary toward us. Call
it fanciful if you will. There are dependable
laws of optics which make it inevitable that

MAN 55

a normal pair of human eyes must see a moon-
beam coming toward them. There are as
inexorable laws which insure that the normal
human heart looking at Calvary shall feel love
reaching out and laying personal hold of it.
The one is as regular as the other. And if the
result of this outreach of love be the formation
of a life-long, an eternity-long intercourse,
which only words of personal relationship
like "the friendship of Christ" and "the
fatherhood of God' adequately describe, are
we not justified in saying, "Who loved me,
and gave Himself up for me P"

And when we say this with conviction,
what a light is flung by the cross on one's
self!

"The grand comment, which displays at full
Our human height, scarce sever'd from divine.
By heaven composed, was publish'd on the cross.
Who looks at that, and sees not in himself
An awful stranger, a terrestrial god?
If a God bleeds. He bleeds not for a worm. "

There are moods in which the worm con-
ception of humanity as applied to ourselves
seems pitifully apt. Most of us must fre-
quently despise ourselves. We are aware of
such contemptible smallness — low thoughts,

56 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

petty feelings, mean impulses, trifling pur-
poses, scanty love. John Henry Newman's
mother, when he was at college, was at one
time alarmed by reports of his appearance,
and wrote to inquire as to his health. In reply
he said: "Take me when I am most foolish
at home and extend mirth into childishness;
stop me short and ask me then what I think
of myself ... I should seriously answer
that *I shuddered at myself.'" But it takes a
considerable self to shudder at, and most of us
are sickened by self-contempt. We count for
nothing, accomplish nothing, are nothing.
Or, worse yet, we count as negatives, adding
to the retarding and demoralizing forces in
society. Our thoughtlessness, our crass stu-
pidity, our insincerity, our miserable self-
seeking and self -absorption — these stand
between ourselves and self-respect. The affec-
tion of others for us, their generous esteem,
while it gives us huge satisfaction, at times must
also torture us by rousing the sense of our unde-
servingness. Our own ideal condemns us. But
there on the cross hangs our Ideal, the
Conscience of our consciences. And lo. He
loves usl

MAN 57

It is in the light of that personal attachment
to us that we assume infinite significance in
our own eyes. Dr. Channing wrote a friend,
"I have seldom, perhaps never, met a human
being who seemed to me conscious of what was
in him." So pitifully few of us look at our
possibilities by the personal devotion shown
for us in the cross. We individually mean
every thing to God. Each of us is worth
the life of His Son. In every mood of depres-
sion and discouragement, in every moment of
self-depreciation, look at the Crucified! The
personalness of His love is unmistakable. He
must have you and me. We cannot help feel-
ing the direct appeal to ourselves. We each
have a special place in God's purpose here and
forever, and that devotion lays hold of us and
lifts us into it. However despised in our own
eyes, God cannot replace us, and having made
us "indescribably ourselves," He deals with
each of us as unique, and convinces us through
the personal plea in the cross that He cannot
do without us. The cross never impresses
us as a wholesale method of drawing men
en masse to God, but as a special and most
intimate friendly approach to each of us,

58 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

which we cannot sHght without completely
breaking the Heart that so loves us.

*'As men from men
Do, in the constitution of their souls.
Differ, by mystery not to be explained;
And as we fall by various ways, and sink
One deeper than another, self-condemned,
Through manifold degrees of guilt and shame;
So manifold and various are the ways
Of restoration, fashioned to the steps
Of all infirmity, and tending all
To the same point, attainable by all —
Peace in ourselves, and union with our God."

Nor does this individual appeal of the cross,
making each of us feel that had he been the
only sinner Christ would have died for him,
render us conceited. While the moonlight
falls across the water in a direct line to us, the
shimmering beauty of the beam itself, the
height of the sky from which the glory de-
scends, the vastness of space all about, sober
and subdue us. The Crucified is so far above
us in the height of His conscience. His special
devotion to us is so astonishing, the eternal
purpose of God with which it surrounds us
is so illimitable, that both our greatness and
our littleness, what we may be and what we
are not, come over us in the same moment.
We are aware of a sting of shame and a thrill

MAN 59

of immeasurable hope in the same experience,
when we realize the personal meaning of the
cross for us, and say, "Who loved me, and
gave Himself up for me, "

But while we stand on the lake shore in
solitary admiration, a friend's voice may
call us to join him, and look out over the water
from his point of view; then we see that to him,
too, the moonlight makes a shining path. Paul
knew that the personal relation of the Crucified
to him was equally true for every man. He
reminded himself and others of it when they
were dealing with some trying or small individ-
ual. When he writes the Corinthians about
the weak brother, the man who is too muddle-
headed to be able to draw entirely obvious
distinctions, and so tottering in his Christian
walk that anything against which he can stub
his toe gives him a tumble, he calls him " the
brother for whom Christ died." It is hard to
be considerate of a man of this kind; hard not
to say: "He's a mere nonentity; why should
we be prevented from doing perfectly sensible
things because he is too stupid to see their
reasonableness? Suppose he does drop out of
the church, we are not losing anything. " Paul

60 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

answers, "You may not feel that you are
losing anything; but look at the straight line
of devotion between the cross on Calvary and
that man of no account! He is the man Christ
died for."

When we are speaking of persons with odd
peculiarities we often add, "Well, it takes all
kinds of people to make a world." That is
a bit of cheap and shallow optimism. It takes
only Christlike people to make a God's world;
all others more or less unmake it. But there is
this much of truth in the common remark, that
it does take all people to make God's world.
The most unchristlike cannot be left out. He
must be kept, and changed, and included in the
Kingdom, or that remains incomplete. And
it is very diflBcult for us to appreciate that some
persons are indispensable. These are not the
deep-dyed villains. We may cordially hiss
an lago; but we cannot help acknowledging
that he is enough of a man to be well worth
saving. We may speak with abhorrence of a
Judas, and shudderingly picture him as going
"to his own place"; but he has sufficient dis-
tinction to make a place of his own. "Ah
Sam!" said Carlyle once to Froude, a propos

MAN 61

of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the typical
worldly and somewhat unscrupulous ecclesias-
tic of that generation, "Ah Sam! he is a very
clever fellow; I do not hate him near as much
as I ought to do. " A man with an individuality
of his own, even when he is thoroughly bad,
strikes us as possessing some interest for his
Creator. But the weak brother, the person
without a sensible idea in his head, or with
touchy feelings which get hurt where there isn't
anything hard or sharp enough to hurt him,
who at his best is an entirely negligible factor,
the chronic nobody-in-particular wherever you
happen to find him, how would the world be
the poorer for his omission? John puts into
his Lord's mouth bold words when he hears
Him say: "I would thou wert cold or hot.
So because thou are lukewarm, and neither
hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth. "
It is the insipid, the characterless, who are
nauseating to God and man. But Paul pleads
for the nonentity. He shared the conviction

that

"No creature's made so mean
But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate.
Its supreme worth : fulfils by ordinance of fate,
Its momentary task, gets glory all its own,

62 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

Tastes triumph in the world, preeminent, alone.
Where is the simple grain of sand, mid millions heaped
Confusedly on the beach, but, did we know.
Has leaped, would we wait, i' the century, some onoc,
To the very throne of things? — earth's brightest for

the nonce.
When sunshine shall impinge on just that grain's facette
Which fronts him fullest. . . . Quick sense pcroeives

the same
Self-vindicating flash illustrate every man
And woman of our mass, and prove, throughout the plan,
No detail, but, in place allotted it, was prime
And perfect.

The "vindicating flash" which "illustrates"
the most insignificant nobody falls on him from
the cross. He is the man for whom Christ died.

Mr. Chesterton has said of Browning's
"The Ring and the Book": "It is the great
epic of the age, because it is the expression of
the belief, it might almost be said of the dis-
covery, that no man ever lived upon this earth
without possessing a point of view." It was,
perhaps, Paul's discovery that no man lives
without possessing a distinct point of view
toward Christ's cross. He may be blind to
his own outlook, and you may have to put
yourself in his place and see it for him; but a
glory path of particular love for him leads
straight from Calvary to his heart.

We talk of "the dark mass of heathenism";

MAN 63

we lump together a crowd of lives under some
general caption like "the unchurched," or
**the submerged tenth"; we are confronted
with statistics to show us the appalling need
in this and that direction; but we never begin
to feel the full measure of our obligation until
a discriminating sympathy attempts to visual-
ize the individuals in the throngs and connects
each in thought with the personal love of Christ.
Men often speak slightingly about "saving
souls," and tell us that we are rather to "save
society"; but Christ's interest in a saved
society is only for the sake of the children of
God whom it will safeguard and perfect. He
does not dwell on groups or numbers, but on
men — "one sinner that repenteth," "one of
these little ones," "one of these least." It is
only when we are convinced of Christ's in-
dividual concern in every one of the millions of
China, or of the thousands on a congested
city block that we are at one with Him. We
then cease arguing about their worth, their
improvability, their need of more justice or
better religion. What each is to the heart of
God in Christ, that and nothing less he is to us.
There is surely no aspect of the cross we more

64 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

need for practical use than this. The best-
natured of us knows some who tax him severely;
the most appreciative finds those in whom he
can see nothing whatever; the broadest in
sympathy discovers some one outside the pale
of even his interest; and the great majority of
us, who are not conspicuously good-natured,
or appreciative, or sympathetic, who have a
fairly cordial dislike for a few, are bored by
some, see nothing attractive in many, and would
feel none the poorer if most dropped out of
existence to-morrow, must train ourselves to put
every man on a line between us and Calvary,
that we may catch sight of that love-beam
which glittera through the world's indifferent
darkness toward him. To adjust ourselves
rightly with every man in life's complex re-
lationships, to lengthen our patience, to soften
our roughness, to control our irritability, to
dissipate our prejudice, to sensitize our tact, to
lift us out of ourselves into genuine sympathy
with him so that we render unto every man his
due and fulfil that hardest of injunctions,
"Honour all men," each must be to us "the
brother for whose sake Christ died."

GOD

IV

GOD

Romans 5:8: **God commendeth His own love toward
us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. "

1 Corinthians 1 : 23, 24. " Christ crucified ... the
power of God, and the wisdom of God."

MARTIN LUTHER, commenting on
the First Commandment, asks,
"What means it to have a God, or
what is God?" and answers, "Whatever thy
heart clings to, and relies upon, that is properly
thy God," and **to have a God is nothing else
than to trust and believe in Him with all our
hearts."

When we look at Jesus of Nazareth hanging
on the cross, our hearts go out to Him and
cling to Him and give Him their all in adoring
devotion. He is the divinest we know or
can conceive of. His conscience and His
love bow us before Him. We cannot think
of Calvary without becoming awed. Pal-
grave, in a diary of a trip to Paris in 1848,

67

68 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

records the wrecking of the Tuileries, and tells
how the mob suddenly broke into the chapel
and faced the picture of Christ over the altar.
"Some one cried out that every one should
bare his head. The crowd at once did so, and
knelt down, whilst the picture was carried out
through the utmost silence — *you might have
heard a fly buzz' — into a neighbouring church.
Then the suspended wave of destruction rolled
on." Instinctively we bare our heads and
kneel before the cross. The Crucified com-
mands all our reverence, all our aiffection,
all our loyalty. We have no intenser admi-
ration left for a better than He, no more pros-
trate homage for a loftier. He is for us the
Most High. We have no good beyond Him.
We agree with Isaac Watts:

"Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all."

We offer Him every thing we have to offer
God — trust, worship, consecration — and if,
as Luther insists, "trust and faith of the heart
alone make both God and idol," Jesus is for
us God, or we are idolaters.

But by the word "God" we mean not only
that Being who evokes our supreme reverence

GOD 69

as the best we can imagine and draws out our
affectionate trust, but also the Lord of the uni-
verse and of history, whose are sun and moon
and stars of light, and the successive gener-
ations of the children of men. Jesus on the
cross is after all a defeated Man, who cherished
a fair hope, gave Himself to its achievement
with singular fidelity, cast a spell over a dis-
cerning few by the loveliness of His character
and the idealism of His teaching, but seemed
entirely out of harmony with the world in His
own or in any succeeding age. What con-
nection can we prove between this dying
Man, whose sublime sense of obligation and
heroic self-sacrifice compel our honour and
fealty, and the mysterious Power we instinc-
tively fancy as Creator and Controller of this
and all worlds?

There are spots in the Highlands of Scot-
land where the stranger is confused by the
various bodies of water, all of which are called
" lochs. " Some are fresh water lakes, but others
of the same general shape and appearance,
winding in and out about the feet of the great
hills and making their way far inland, are
long arms of the ocean. Dip in your finger

70 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

and taste the water and it is brine. The loch
rises and falls with the tides of the sea, and is
one with the vast Atlantic. To the men of
the New Testament the devotion of Jesus on
Calvary is one with the eternal devotion of
God. The conscience that impels Him to lay
down His life is timed by the conscience of Him
that sitteth upon the throne of everlasting
right. The love that spares not His own blood
and pours out His soul unto death is the dis-
closure of the heart of Him, of whom and
through and unto whom are all things, the
Lord of heaven and earth. Jesus, and Jesus
supremely in His death, is for them their
definition of God. " God is love, " and " Hereby
know we love, because He laid down His life
for us.'*

And in viewing Jesus, particularly in His
death, as the disclosure of God, they are not
making an arbitrary selection of an event
which has most impressed them, but following
Jesus' own selection of the most clearly divine
act in His career. He usually emphasized
the likeness of God and man, in order to make
plain God's humanness; but the cross was to
Him the point at which God and man stood

GOD 71

farthest apart. It was when Peter indignantly
protested against His letting Himself be cru-
cified, that Jesus heard in him man's judg-
ment clashing with God's "thou mindest not
the things of God, but the things of men." To
spare Himself was satanic, to sacrifice Himself
divine. As Jesus looked forward to Calvary,
it was there that He saw Himself most mani-
festly Godlike.

It has been commonly assumed that the
correct way to ascertain what God is like
is to study the facts of the world and infer the
kind of Being who designed and directs it.
The universe is vast, its God must be omnip-
otent; it is intricate and complicated, so He
must be omniscient; men think they see signs
of His control and activity in every part of it,
therefore He must be omnipresent. Order
and arrangement are everywhere, and they
conclude that God has a mind like ours, only
wiser. They find a conscience and ideals in
themselves, and reason that God must be at
least as good as the best of men. It is a sys-
tem of guessing, and may perhaps come near
the truth, but it can result only in a man-made
notion of Deity. The Bible writers look at

72 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

the problem differently. They are men of
vivid religious experience to whom God is an
indubitable fact, and in their experience with
Him, it is not so much they who are seeking to
reach Him, as He who is trying to get at them.
And when from Calvary they are mastered
by a love which constrains them to answer
with their all, when they see in the Crucified
their Ideal, the Better than their Best, they
are sure that God is laying hold of them and
disclosing Himself to them. Jesus is for them
God's own description of Himself. **It was
the good pleasure of the Father that in Him
should all the fulness dwell." "God com-
mendeth His own love toward us in that, while
we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." In-
stead of starting with the universe and guessing
out God from it, the Christian feels that God
comes to him through Jesus, and especially
at the point where Jesus makes His divinest
impression through the cross, and reveals
Himself to us. Ours is a Jesus-like God. " God
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Him-
self," and through Jesus's reconciling love for
us, we know God.

Let us stop and think what we are saying.

GOD 73

We are facing Christ crucified, and letting a
voice tell us, "Be still and know that I am God."
Through the cross we are peering into the very
centre of things — through this conscientious
Brother, who owes and pays His kinsmen a
life, to a conscientious Father, who acknowl-
edged Himself indebted to His children and
obliged to spare no thought or pains for them;
through this Man of sorrows to a God who
feels the shock and shame of His children's sin;
through the writhing body and burdened spirit
of this broken Life to the quivering and laden
Heart who bears the world; through the vic-
torious love of the Crucified drawing all men
unto Himself to the good- will of Him who is
First and Last, Author and Perfecter of all.
We live in a world where God has entirely hid-
den Himself. We neither see nor hear Him.
Benjamin Jowett said of Greek literature,
"Under the marble exterior was concealed
a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion." At
Calvary men discover, under the seeming in-
difference of the universe, a most sensitive
conscience and a most tender devotion. " God
is love."

But is it credible that the Crucified is the

74 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

clearest portrayal of the final Reality back of
and dominant in all existence? How hard it
is always to be sure of it! Think of the world
we know with its grandeurs and terrors — skies,
seas, mountains, sunshine, and storm — birth,
growth, decay, pain, death — with its history,
writ large on our race or small on every man,
a strangely chequered tale of light and shade,
infamy and glory. Think of our own expe-
riences when we have breathed the words "O
God!" — moments of rapture in some seventh
heaven of happiness and moments of anguish
in some nethermost pit of shame or in some
tophet of torture; moments of eager desire
when our whole hearts went out in passionate
craving for a coveted joy and moments of
abject failure when our sole wish was to be
relieved altogether of the responsibility of
living; moments of perplexity when we longed
for some clear guidance in this bewildering
maze of circumstance; and moments when we
looked to the unresponsive heavens for some
sign of understanding and sympathy. Can
Calvary be the correct symbol of Him who
controls this world's actual life.^

Is it not, as a matter of fact, through the

GOD t5

cross that men wanting God most desperately
have most certainly been satisfied? A recent
novelist pictures her heroine in a supreme ordeal
and tells us: "The only thought that seemed to
soothe the torture of her imagination was
the thought stamped on her brain tissue by the
long inheritance of centuries — the thought
of Christ on Calvary. . . . She did not
pray in words, but her agony crept to the foot
of what has become, through the action and
interaction of two thousand years, the typical
and representative agony of the world, and,
clinging there, made wild appeal, like the gener-
ations before her, to a God in whose hand lie
the creatures of His will." It is not an acci-
dent which has drawn the years to act and in-
teract upon the recollection of the cross. What
men sought a God for they have found through
it. Comfort, sympathy, inspiration, a sense
of oneness with their Ideal, forgiveness, con-
secration, guidance, indomitable hope — these
and much more Calvary has actually given
them. What they mean by the word "God"
— redeeming, transforming, glorifying love —
lays hold of, masters, moulds, vitalizes them
through the Crucified. They cannot bear

76 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

truthful witness to their own experience save
as they declare, *'God commendeth His own
love toward us in that, while we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us."

But some may object to this definition of
God by the cross. They grant that Calvary
reveals one element in His character — love —
but they insist that God must have other
qualities than love to be really the God we
want. Unlike that odd French ecclesiastic.
Cardinal de Retz, who declared that "it re-
quires much greater qualities to become the
successful head of a party than to rule the uni-
verse, " they feel that the problem of being God
is so serious that mere character, however good,
will not suffice. God must possess wisdom and
power as well. But are these supplementary
to love, or is love itself both wise and strong?

To many people there seems no necessary con-
nection between love and wisdom. Generosity
often appears divorced from judgment, and
affection from cleverness. The devoted are not
invariably the far-sighted. A God who is merely
love may be fooled and frustrated: but this
is not the conviction of the New Testament.
Christ crucified is the wisdom of God. The

GOD 77

Palm Sunday venture of Jesus trusting Himself
to a hostile city was an act of bravery, but it
seemed foolhardy. Mary's impulsive breaking
of her flask of precious ointment, which Jesus
so prized as the expression of a spirit akin to
His own, was touching, but apparently wasteful
and useless. But time, which is the test of
wisdom, has demonstrated that Jesus' dying
was supremely wise; and Mary's ointment is
still filling an ever larger world with its fra-
grance. Jesus' dying was as sane and sensi-
ble as all His living. To Him love was wisdom,
and to choose the most loving course was in-
evitably to select the wisest.

And at this point most of His followers fail
to share their Master's faith. When we dis-
cuss questions of poHcy — the decisions a
business firm must make, the course a nation's
statesmanship should adopt, the practical
methods a church can most successfully em-
ploy — it does not occur to us to ask, " Which is
the most Calvary-like of our alternatives?"
and choose that, sure that we cannot be mis-
taken. In the complicated personal problems
that confront us — family questions, our deal-
ings with particularly difficult persons, our

78 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

relations with the disagreeable, the aggressive,
the ne'er-do-weel, the degenerate, our de-
cisions as to obligation — how infrequently we
take them to the cross, and, seeking to settle
them in accord with its spirit, feel confident
that we are certainly correct ! We do not really
believe that Christ crucified is the wisdom of
God, and that to be of His mind is to share the
only omniscience within our reach, the only
omniscience in existence if through that cross
we see God's self-disclosure.

A few years ago a French engineer, M. Dibos,
happened to be on board a Channel steamer
which ran into a dense bank of fog. He
noticed that about the mouth of one of the
stoke-hold ventilators there was a considerable
clear space. He immediately conceived the
idea that the mechanical shock of the heated
air destroyed the equilibrium of the particles
of water and made them fall. He has, after
a good many experiments, devised a simple
apparatus which under test produces in a dense
fog a clear space over two hundred yards long.
As the shock of heat precipitates the obscuring
fog, the warmth of consecration, the heat of
a redemptive passion, dissipates the mists of

GOD 79

life which hinder us from seeing. A love like
Jesus Christ's cuts a long stretch of clear out-
look ahead and lets Him see. His fog-bound
brethren may speak of His imprudence, His
poor judgment, His unpracticalness. His folly;
but that devotion by which He is guided is
for Him the wisdom of God.

And, again, there seems to many to be no
connection between love and force. To do
the kindest thing is not necessarily to do the
most effective. Affection often impresses us
as impotent. Legislators planning the national
defence do not consider good-will our most
impregnable fortification. Workmen strug-
gling for a juster distribution of the results of
industry are unlikely to regard brotherliness
as their strongest argument. Prisons and re-
formatories are not consciously moulded by
Calvary as though the reembodiment of its
principles in the institutions and men who must
handle the hardest human beings gives the
most satisfactory results. Even preachers and
teachers hesitate to use the cross of Christ
as their strongest appeal; less unselfish motives
they think more readily accessible in their
congregations and pupils. The cross has never

80 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

been widely accepted by Christians as suffi-
ciently practical to be used. Its patient endur-
ance of wrong, its lamb-like self-surrender, its
sacrifice of rights, ambitions, happiness — of
every thing except principle — its utterly dis-
interested love, have seemed ineffective in a
world like ours. It is not to many the power
of God.

Mr. Kipling in his last volume pictures a
baron overhearing snatches of the song:

" 'Gold is for the mistress, silver for the maid I
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade! '
'Good!' said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
*But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all!' '*

And relying on his strength, he wages an un-
successful rebellion against his King, and finds
himself behind cold iron bars.

*'Yet his King spake kindly (Ah, how kind a Lord!)
*What if I release thee now and give thee back thy sword?'
*Nay !' said the Baron, 'mock not at my fall.
For Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all ! '

"Yet his King made answer (few such Kings there be!)
*Here is Bread and here is Wine — sit and sup with me.'
He took the Wine and blessed it; He blessed and brake

the Bread.
With His own hands He served them, and presently He

said:
'Look! These Hands they pierced with nails outside

My city wall
Show Iron — Cold Iron — to be master of men all !' "

GOD 81

** 'Wounds are for the desperate, blows are for the strong,
Balm and oil for weary hearts all cut and bruised with

wrong.
I forgive thy treason — I redeem thy fall —
For Iron — Cold Iron — must be master of men all.'"

The old song rang on in the Baron's ears:

" ^Crowns are for the valiant — sceptres for the bold!
Thrones and powers for mighty men who dare to take and

hold.'
*Nay !' said the Baron, kneeling in his hall.
But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of men all ! ' "

Jesus consciously plans a royal entry into
Jerusalem when He knows that He rides to
His death. It is His way of proclaiming His
faith that through self-sacrifice He will reign,
through service be Lord of all. And the cen-
turies since testify that the mightiest force
of which they know comes from the summit of
that hill where a defeated Man is done to an
ignominious death.

We speak of the omnipotence of God; and,
starting with the assumption that He can do
every thing, are puzzled by that which He does
not do, and at that which He allows. To be
genuinely Christian we must not speak of the
omnipotence but of the "amorpotence," the
love power, of God. He does every thing that

82 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS

love can, and allows nothing that love is able
to prevent. Love has limitations, and so has
God. "And when He drew nigh, He saw the
city and wept over it . . . How often
would I . . . and ye would not." Were
not love powerless in the face of some cir-
cumstances, the tragedy of Golgotha would
not have been enacted. "He was crucified
through weakness.'* There is a weakness in
God. He is at His children's mercy: and in
that are involved all life's tragedies — the
Judases God cannot keep from treachery, the
Christs from whom it is not possible that the
cup can pass. The spitting and scourging, the
crown of thorns, the nails and spear, are vivid
symbols of present methods of treating the
Love that loves us. God cannot prevent us;
He can only bear us. But "crucified through
weakness" the patience that bears has a
strength all its own. We look on Him whom
we have pierced, and are mastered. '*The
weakness of God is stronger than men."

"What means it to have a God?" to repeat
Luther's searching question. "To have a God
is nothing else than to trust and believe in
Him with all our hearts." Is the God who

GOD 83

defines Himself for us through Christ crucified
the Being we adore, depend on, serve with
our all, and confidently expect to see Lord of
heaven and earth? Is His self -giving love
that which we invariably employ as the wisest
guide and the strongest force in the universe?
In a genuine sense God is not yet manifestly
God. His godship He has still to gain. His
glory, which is His character, will not be re-
vealed until all flesh see it together, and that
cannot come to pass until Love is all in all.
But is He God to us? Is the love commended
by Calvary our wisdom and our power?

THE END

Date Due

■0 gBjjl

^n.

FAdUMA

ainniiMfflitfiiJlllOTiy

"flOV ^ ^.