.

The consummation of sacrifice, the union of the human will with the
Divine, leads to the perfect rest in God.

1. We have tried to deal with the Seven Words as constituting a
revelation of the Divine Sonship of humanity. From this point of view it
is significant that the first and the last begin, like the Lord's Prayer,
with a direct address to the Father.

The service of the Christian man is that of a son in his father's house,
of a free man, not of a slave. The Fatherhood of God is the very key-
note of the Christian view of life and of death. In both alike we are
the objects of the Father's individual care and love; in both we bear the
supreme dignity of "the sons of the Most High."

That dignity belongs inalienably to our human nature as such. Baptism
conveys no gift alien and extraneous to our manhood. Rather, that union
with the Only Begotten Son is not an addition to, but the restoration of
our nature by Him in Whose Image it was created. United thus to the
Eternal Son, we are placed in a position to realise the possibilities of
our being, to become that which we are constituted capable of becoming.
That is the true answer to the question, how can we be made children of
God by Baptism?

And through work, and prayer, and suffering, we are to grow into, and
perfectly realise, our Divine sonship.

2. These dying words of the Son of God breathe no spirit of mere passive
resignation. That is the spirit of the Oriental fatalist, not of the son
conscious of his sonship, of his heirship. Even the Lord's Death was not
the yielding to inexorable necessity, to the inevitable working of the
laws of nature. It was, if anything in His Life was, the deliberate act
of His conscious Will. "I commend," rather, "I commit My Spirit." "I
lay down My life . . . therefore the Father loveth Me."

Submission to the Will of God is not necessarily a Christian virtue at
all. What is Christian is the glad recognition of what manner of will
the Divine Will is, how altogether "good, perfect, and acceptable," how
infinitely righteous, and holy, and loving; the doing of that glorious
Will with mind, and heart, and will, and body; the praying with all
sincerity and intention that that Will, which is the happiness and joy
and life of all creatures, may increasingly "be done, as in heaven, so on
earth"; the free and glad surrender, in life and death, to that Will
which is the perfection and consummation of our manhood.

3.