; SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS 
 
 HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 
 
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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 l ivpth un to 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 
 
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