up to Jerusalem and hazarded this issue; He came of His own accord; and we can think of dozens of reasons that might have induced Him to remain in Galilee, going about quietly and accomplishing all manner of good. Why did He give up the opportunities of a life that was so incalculably serviceable, and apparently court death? Jesus was always conscientious in what He did; He felt Himself bound to the lives about Him by the firmest cords of obligation, and whatever He attempted He deemed He owed men. If there was a Zacchæus whose honesty and generosity had given way under the faulty system of revenue-collecting then in vogue, Jesus considered Himself involved in his moral ruin and obliged to do what He could to restore him: "I must abide at thy house." If there were sick folk, their diseases were to Him, in part at least, morally wrong, devil-caused (to use His First Century way of explaining what we ascribe to inherited weakness or to blameworthy conditions); and demoniacal control over lives in God's world was something for which He felt Himself socially accountable: "Ought not this woman, whom Satan hath
bound, to have been loosed?" If the Church of His day was unable to reach large sections of the population with its appeal, if it succeeded very imperfectly in making children of the Most High out of those whom it did reach, if with its narrowness and bigotry it made of its converts "children of hell," as Jesus Himself put it, if it exaggerated trifles and laid too little stress on justice, mercy and fidelity, He, as a member of that Church, was chargeable with its failures, and must strive to put a new conscience into God's people: "I must preach the good tidings of the Kingdom of God." Ibsen, the dramatist, wrote to his German translator, Ludwig Passarge, "In every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification—for a man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs." Jesus felt implicated in all that was not as it should be among the children of men, and cleared Himself from complicity with it by setting Himself resolutely to change it. He considered that the human brotherhood in its sinfulness exacted nothing less of Him.
It is commonly taught that the Lord's
Prayer is a form that was suggested by Jesus to His disciples, but that it could not have been a prayer which He Himself used with them, because of its plea for forgiveness. It is true that it is introduced in our Gospels as provided by the Master for His followers, "When ye pray, say." But millions of Christians instinctively associate it with Jesus' own utterances to the Father. And may they not be correct? "Forgive us our debts," is a social confession of sin, in which our Lord may well have joined, just as He underwent John's baptism of repentance, though Himself sinless, in order to fulfil all righteousness. He regarded Himself as indebted; His work, His teaching, His suffering, His death, were not to Him a gift which He was at liberty to make or to withhold. In the "must" so often on His lips we cannot miss the sense of social obligation. He was (to borrow suggestive lines of Shelley's)
a nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of the earth.
They came home to His conscience, and He could not shake them off. They were so
many claims on Him; He felt He owed the world a life, and He was ready to pay the debt to the last drop of His blood. "The Son of man must suffer and be killed." To the end He cast about for some less awful way of meeting His obligations. "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from Me." But when no other alternative seemed conscientiously possible to Him, He went to Golgotha with a sense of moral satisfaction. "Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things?" Without any disturbing consciousness of having personally added to the world's evil, with no plea for pardon for His own sins on His lips but only for those of others, His conscience was burdened with the injustice and disloyalties, the brutalities and failures, of the family of God, in which He was a Son, and He bore His brothers' sins on His spirit, and gave Himself to the utmost to end them.
A third disclosure of the cross is the incomparable sympathy of the Victim. How shall we account for His recoil from the thought of dying, for His shrinking from this death as from something which sickened Him, for the darkness and anguish of His
soul in Gethsemane at the prospect, and for the abysmal sense of forsakenness on the cross? His sensitiveness of heart made Him feel the pain and shame of other men, a pain and shame they were frequently too stolid and obtuse to feel. He could not see able-bodied and willing workmen standing idle in the marketplace because no man had hired them, without sharing their discouragement and bitterness, nor prodigals making fools of themselves without feeling the disgrace of their unfilial folly. His parables are so vivid because He has Himself lived in the experiences of others. "Cor cordium" is the inscription placed upon Shelley's grave; and it is infinitely more appropriate for the Man of Nazareth. In His sensitive sympathy we are aware of
Desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish
Forc'd through the channels of a single heart.