* R. J, Drummond, Faith's Certainties, 145.
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get rid of the consciousness of guilt, to atone for sin, and to effect a perfect restoration to Divine favour — in short, everything regarding the nature of God and His designs which glimmered as a ray of light here and there in this darkness obtains in Christ and in Christ crucified its goal, because in Him it finds its full manifestation. In the cross we have revealed most perfectly every one of the Divine attributes, and, in the very forefront, the completeness of the Divine understanding of, and the intensity of the Divine sympathy with, human suffering and sorrow.
^ In one of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova, Dante instils the essence of sympathy into two lines. Speaking of one who offered him comfort in his great grief over the death of Beatrice, he says,
Our life revives, since one doth now console Who sorrows with us, healing grief with grief.
That goes to the heart of things. The sympathy that we feel to be most real is that which has behind it a kindred experience — can heal grief with grief.
% By what has Christianity subdued the world if not by the apotheosis pf grief, by its marvellous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the crown of thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet into a symbol of salvation ? What does the apotheosis of the cross mean if not the death of death, the defeat of sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the raising to the skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain ? — " 0 Death, where is thy sting ? 0 Grave, where is thy victory ? " By long brooding over this theme — the agony of the just, peace in the midst of agony, and the heavenly beauty of such peace — humanity came to under- stand that a new religion was born, a new mode, that is to say, of explaining life and of understanding suffering.^
"What shall I ask for Thee, my Child?"
Said Mary Mother, stooping down Above the Babe all undefiled.
" 0 let Him wear a kingly crown."
From wise men's gifts she wrought the crown, The robe inwove with many a gem;
Beside the Babe she laid them down. He wept and would have none of them.
* ^iniel'a Jowmai (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 167.
474 GLORYING IN THE CROSS
"What shall I get for Thee, my Child?" Unto the door she slowly went, , And wove a crown of thorn-boughs wild:
He took it up, and was content.
Upon the floor she gathered wood,
And made a little Cross for Him; The Child smiled for He understood,
And Mary watched with eyes grown dim.
"Since these He doth prefer to gold,"
She sadly said, "Let it be so; He sees what I cannot behold,
He knows what I can never know."
That night the eyes of Mary saw
A Cross of stars set in the sky. Which after it the heavens did draw,
And this to her was God's reply .^
2. The cross gives us a new hope. — Not only does the cross reveal the Divine nature and the Divine purpose, but it is the great and efficient means by which this Divine purpose is carried out. On the cross atonement is made for sin, pardon is procured for the sinner, the work of grace is carried out to its last requisite, and everything perfected that belongs to the plan of redemption. Through the cross we have our consciences purged from dead works. We have a right to enter the holy place through His blood. We stand in the presence of the burning glory of the Shechinah, unabashed, unashamed, accepted in the Beloved, for we know that "there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus."
It is evident that St. Paul is here contemplating the Eedeemer's work in this vital aspect of it. He speaks in the next verse (ver. 15) of " a new creature " — that renewal of the heart which is everything in personal religion, and without which all mere rites and ceremonies are utterly worthless. And he manifestly traces the power which produces a new birth and new life to the cross of Christ. It is there that the opened eye of the heart first learns that God is not eager to punish, but generous to atone :
^ W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 120.
GAL. VI. 14 475
that our sins in the past offer no longer a hopeless bar to our return to His favour ; that on the contrary, He waits to receive and is prompt to forgive us for Jesus' sake.
^ The cross of Christ is no longer to you the symbol of a bargain between a vindictive Deity and a self-sacrificing Deity, between the individual and selected Soul and the Trinity, but the expression of the great truth of life that self-renunciation, the way of the cross, is the only pathway in spiritual life, and that not as a duty or a trial, but as the only means of freedom, hope and joy. People will tell you Buddha taught this, and that all the ascetics have taught the same ; but their teaching was not like Christ's. They wanted to kill self, an impossible feat. He meant the self to be lost in love for others, and devotion to them ; that by the miracle of spiritual life the lost self should return on the great spiral of progress to its old point in the plane, but to such elevation in height that it shines with immortality, and light, and love as with the garments of God's Kingdom. This was the joy that was set before Him. This is the unhoped, unexpected joy set before our dim eyes. God help us 'to attain it, and in this we make no selfish prayer, for so truly is God love that He has made the condition of our progress (as James Hinton so well says) "others' needs," no selfish and self-sympathizing isolation and introspection, no weary attempts to perfect the self by the self. Thank God, the cross sweeps all those hardnesses away; and you in Dumbarton and I in Buenos Ayres, this busy and excited town, can live the life better than any hermit. And we won't shrink from any suffering and anxiety He, in His love, puts before us, knowing that these things and His sweet love bring us into the fellowship of suffering, the world's suffering, little understood and little aided.^