Spirit of Him Who triumphed on the Cross. It only remains for us, by the deliberate act of our whole personal being, our will, our reason, our affections, to appropriate and make our own the deathless conquest won in and for our humanity on the Cross.
II
THE HISTORICAL AND SPIRITUAL CAUSES OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST
“Him, being by the determined will and foreknowledge of God given up, through the hand of lawless men, ye affixed to a cross and slew.”—Acts ii. 23.
St. Paul places this in the very forefront of that gospel which, as it had been delivered to him, so he in his turn had delivered to the Corinthians, that “Christ died for our sins.” Neglecting all, deeper interpretations of this, it is at least clear that in the apostle’s mind there was the closest and most intimate connexion between the death of Christ and the fact of human sin.
Now it is important to remember that that connexion was, in the first place, an historical one.
Christianity is a religion founded upon facts. In this is seen at once a sharp distinction between our religion and that which claims the allegiance of so many millions of our race—the religion, or better, perhaps, the philosophy of the Buddha. Certainly there is such a thing as a Christian philosophy. For we cannot handle facts without at the same time
seeking for some rational explanation of them. The plain man becomes a philosopher against his will. In its origin our Christian theology is no artificial, manufactured product. It is rather an inevitable, natural growth. Neither the minds of the earliest Christian thinkers, nor our own minds, are just sheets of blank paper on which facts may impress themselves. Scientists, some of them at least, while repudiating philosophy put forth metaphysical theories of the universe. Theology is simply the necessary result of human minds turned to the consideration of the Christian facts. But it makes all the difference which end you start from, the facts or the theory: whether your method is à posteriori or à priori; inductive or deductive; scientific or obscurantist. And Christianity follows the scientific method of starting with the facts. In this lies the justification of its claim to be a religion at once universal and life-giving. It is universal because facts are the common property of all, although the interpretation placed on those facts by individuals may be more or less adequate. It is life-giving, because men live by facts, not by theories about them; by the assimilation of food, not by the knowledge how food nourishes our bodies.
Following, then, the Christian, which is also the scientific method, we now set out in search of the facts, the historical causes which brought about the death of Christ.
Now these causes appear to have been, mainly, these three: prejudice, a dead religion, and the love of gain and political ambition.
1. Prejudice may, perhaps, be best defined as the resolution to hold fast to our belief, just because it is our belief; to adhere to an opinion, and close our eyes to all that has been said on the opposite side. Now nowhere and at no time has prejudice exerted a more absolute dominion over the minds of men, than it did in Judæa in the first century of our era. The people had inherited a traditional conception of the Messiah, from which they could not imagine any deviation possible. He was the Deliverer and the Restorer predestined of God. He would throw off the hated foreign yoke, and make the people of God supreme over all the nations of the earth. It was for a long time doubtful whether Jesus of Nazareth intended to claim the position, and to enact the part of the Messiah. “How long keepest thou our soul in suspense?” was the question put to Him as late as the Feast of Dedication, 28 a.d., the year before He suffered. But, finally, the people found themselves confronted with a type of Messiah differing toto caelo from the accepted traditional type. The kingdom of God, which meant the Divine rule over the souls of men, was at least not such a kingdom as they were looking for, as they had been taught to expect. There is a long history in the gospels of the gradual rise of a popular hope, more