Are not you the men? Who among you has not felt, at one time or another, the spark of a divine fire kindling within you? Who has not yearned with an intense, if momentary, yearning to do something worthy, to be something worthy? Youth is the hey-day of hope, of enthusiasm, of lofty aspiration. You have felt that there was within you a latent power, a heaven-born capacity, which ought to work miracles, if it were not clogged by self-indulgence, or cowed by timidity, or choked by sloth and indulgence.
Are not you the men? As I have said to such audiences before, so I say to you now. You do not know, you cannot know, with what reverence—a reverence approaching to awe—older men regard the glorious potentiality of youth, in all the freshness of its vigorous life, with all the promise of the coming years. Our habits are formed; our career is defined; our possibilities are limited. The wide sweep of moral victory, still open to you, is closed to us for ever. But what triumphs may you not achieve, if you are true to yourselves? What instruments may you not be in God's hands, if only you will yield yourselves to Him—not with a timid, passive, half-hearted acquiescence, but with the active concentration of all your powers of body and soul and spirit?
And again I ask, is not this the time? The first volume of your life's history is closed. A clean page lies open, and with what writing shall it be filled? This is the great crisis of your life. These earliest few weeks of your University career, with which perhaps you are trifling, which you are idling thoughtlessly away, are only too likely to determine for you what you shall be in time and in eternity. It is the great crisis, but it is also the signal opportunity. Thank God, this is so; for the two do not always coincide. As the great break in your lives, it is the great season for revision, for repentance, for amendment, for the strong resolve and the definite plan. The old base associations must be abandoned; the old loose habits must be cured; the old indolence shaken off; and the old sin cast out and trampled under foot. Never again will such a magnificent opportunity be given you of rectifying the past; for never again can you reckon on the leisure, the privacy, the aids and environments, needed by one who is taking stock of his moral and spiritual life.
Who would not shrink from the responsibility of addressing you at such a crisis? And yet I speak boldly to you. Do I not know that though the hand of the swordsman is feeble, yet the weapon itself is powerful—keener than any two-edged sword? Am I not assured that though the preacher's words may be feeble, faltering, desultory, without force and without point, yet God may barb the ill-fledged, ill-aimed shaft, and drive it home to the heart? It is possible that even now the live coal from the altar may be brought by the winged seraph's hand, and laid on the sinful lips. I have undertaken to glorify the power of God, and to hold it up to you as your truest goal. How can I hope for a hearing, if I begin by distrusting it where I myself am concerned?
It is here, then, that I bid you seek and find the true aim of your ambition—in realising, appropriating, absorbing into yourselves, identifying yourselves with this power of God. It alone is inexhaustible in its resources and infinite in its potency. There is no fear here lest the conqueror of a world should sigh and fret because nothing remains beyond to conquer. If the craving is infinite, the satisfaction is infinite also. Star beyond star, world beyond world, will start out into view as your vision grows clearer, spangling the moral heavens with their glows. Πάντα ἰσχύω, "I can do all things." Πάντα ὑμω̂ν, "All things are yours." Yes, but this promise of limitless strength has its condition attached—ἐν τῳ̂ ἐνδυναμου̂ντί με, "In Him that empowereth me;" yes, but this pledge of universal dominion is qualified by the sequel ὑμει̂ς δὲ Χριστου̂, "Ye are Christ's."
How can we better realise this power of God than by taking St. Paul's statement as our starting-point? The Cross of Christ is "the power of God." The Cross is the central revelation of God. The Cross has not unfrequently been preached as a narrow technicality which shocks the conscience and freezes the heart. It thus becomes a mere forensic subtlety. But the Cross of Christ, taught in all its length and breadth and height and depth—the Cross of Christ taught as St. Paul taught it—the Cross of Christ, starting from the Incarnation on the one side, and leading up to the Resurrection and Ascension on the other, contains all the elements of moral regeneration and of spiritual life.
(1) It is first of all a lesson of righteousness. It is the great rebuke of sin, the great assurance of judgment, the great call to repentance. Think—no, you cannot think, it defies all thinking—yet strive to think, what is implied in the human birth, the human life, the human suffering, the human death of the Eternal Word. Ask yourselves what condescension, what sacrifice, what humiliation is involved in this. Summon to your aid all analogies of self-renunciation which history records or imagination suggests. They will all fail you. No reiteration of the finite can compass the infinite. You are lost in awe at the contemplation. And while your brain is reeling with the effort, try and imagine the awe, the majesty, the glory of a righteousness which could only thus be vindicated. Then, after looking upward to God, look inward into your own heart, and see how heinous, how loathsome, how guilty your guilt must be, which has cost such a sacrifice as this. God's righteousness—your sin,—these are brought face to face in the Cross of Christ.
(2) But, secondly, while it is a denunciation of sin, it is likewise an assurance of pardon. If the infinity of the sacrifice has taught you the majesty of God's righteousness, it teaches you no less the glory of His mercy. What may you not look for, what may you not hope for from a Father who has vouchsafed to you this transcendent manifestation of His loving-kindness? "He that spared not His own Son ... how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" Is any one here burdened with the consciousness of a shameful past? Does the memory of some ugly school-boy sin dog your path, haunting and paralysing you with its importunity? You feel sometimes as if your whole life were poisoned by that one cruel retrospect. Brother, be bold, and dare to look up. I would not have you think your sins one whit less heinous. But if God's righteousness is infinite, so also is His mercy. The Cross is reared before your eyes in this moral wilderness, where you are dying, where all are dying around you. Dare to look up. The bite of the serpent's fang is healed; the venom coursing through your veins is quelled; and health returns to the poisoned soul. Yes, and by God's grace it may happen that through your very fall you will rise to a higher life; that the thanksgiving for the sin forgiven will consecrate you with fuller consecration; and that the acute moral agony through which you have passed will endow you with a more helpful, more sympathetic, more loving spirit, than if you had never fallen.
(3) But again, the Cross of Christ is not only a condemnation of sin, not only a pledge of forgiveness; it is likewise an obligation of self-sacrifice. "God forbid," says St. Paul, "that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." But what next? Not "whereby I am saved in spite of myself," not "whereby I am spared all personal exertion," but "whereby the world is crucified unto me, and I to the world." This conformity to Christ's death, this crucifixion of self with Christ, always forms part of the doctrine of the Cross in St. Paul's teaching. The dying with Christ, the being buried with Christ, is the absolute accompaniment of the atoning death of Christ. We cannot be at one with Christ unless we conform to Christ. The work done for us necessitates the work done by us. The potentiality of our salvation—of yours and mine—wrought through the Cross of Christ can only then become an actuality, when Christ's death is thus appropriated, realised, translated into action by us—by you and by me. But it remains still the work of God's grace. Human merit is absolutely excluded still, as absolutely as by the baldest and most unqualified doctrine of substitution.
(4) Fourthly and lastly, the Cross of Christ is a lesson of the regenerate and sanctified life. Dying and living, burial and resurrection, these in the Christian vocabulary are correlative ideas. The Crucifixion implies the Resurrection and the Ascension. The raising up on the cross demands the raising up from the grave, the raising up into heaven. The lifting up of the brazen serpent in the wilderness is a symbol alike of the one and the other. And as with Christ, so also with those who are Christ's. "If we died with Christ, we shall also live with him." Those only can be made conformable to Christ's resurrection who have been made conformable to His death. The power of His resurrection is the counterpart to the power of His cross.