to become our true selves.

For what are men better than sheep or goats,
Which nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer,
Both for themselves, and those that call them friend?
For so the whole round world is, every way,
Bound with gold chains about the feet of God.

VI
THE FIFTH WORD

"I thirst."--JOHN XIX. 28.

This is the only utterance of our Blessed Lord in which He gave
expression to His physical sufferings. Not least of these was that
intolerable thirst which is the invariable result of all serious wounds,
as those know well who have ever visited patients in a hospital after
they have undergone a surgical operation. In this case it must have been
aggravated beyond endurance by exposure to the burning heat of an Eastern
sun. This word, then, spoken under such circumstances, discloses the
Mind of the Son of God, perfect Man, in regard to physical pain.

1. Notice then, in the first place, the majestic calm of this word. It
was spoken in intensest agony, yet with deliberation, exhibiting the
restraint of the sovereign and victorious will of the Sufferer. "After
these things, knowing that all things had now been accomplished, He saith
[not 'cried'], I thirst." We cannot be wrong in reading this marvellous
word in the light of that strange passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
where the writer tells us that Christ, "although He was Son, yet learnt
He obedience by the things which He suffered." How are we to reconcile
this with the moral perfection of our Lord's humanity? We can only do
so, by applying the Aristotelian distinction between the potential and
the actual. The obedience of the Son of God, existing as it did in all
possible perfection from the first moment of His human consciousness, yet
existed, prior to His complete identification of Himself with all our
human experience, as a potentiality. It became actual, in the same way
as our obedience can alone become actual, as a result of that experience,
and, above all, in consequence of those sufferings which were part of
that experience. In this sense He "learnt obedience," where we too must
learn it, in God's school of pain.

Therein lies the answer, as complete an answer as we can at present
receive, to the problem of pain. While that problem is, beyond doubt,
the most perplexing of all the questions which confront us, the real
difficulty lies, not in the existence of p