terature, history, archaeology, and textual
criticism. But we are concerned to notice now, that this recovered truth
of the immanence of God in our humanity, affords the full and sufficient
explanation of that dark shadow which lies athwart all human lives. That
shadow has loomed large in the minds of poets, thinkers, and theologians.
The latter know it by the name of sin. But what is sin save the
conscious alienation and estrangement of man from the Divine Life which
is in him? And if this be true, we can now see clearly why sin, moral
transgression, always makes itself felt as a disintegrating force both
without and within the individual life. Without, it is for ever
separating nation from nation, class from class, man from man. Within,
it produces discord and confusion in our nature. And both results
follow, because sin is the alienation from the Divine Life, which is both
the common element in human nature which binds man to man by the tie of
spiritual kinship; and also the central point of the individual life, the
hidden and sacred source and fountain of our being, which unites all the
faculties and powers of our manhood in one harmonious whole.

Now the Cross of Jesus Christ is the overcoming of this disastrous
estrangement and alienation. It is the victory of the Divine life in
man. That is the most fruitful way in which we can regard it. The Cross
stands for conquest--the triumph of the Divine Life in us over all the
forces which are opposed to it. And in this lies the glory of the Cross;
that which made the symbol of the most degrading form of punishment--that
punishment which to the Jewish mind made him who suffered under it the
"accursed of God," and which to the Roman was the ignominious penalty
which the law inflicted on the slave--the subject of boasting to that
apostle who was both, to the very heart of him, a Jew and also a citizen
of the empire.

The object of these lectures is to show how this is indeed the meaning of
the Cross. There, in Him Who was the Son of man, the Representative and
the Ideal of the race, the Divine Life triumphed, in order that in us,
who are not separate from, but one with Him, it may win the like victory.

We fight against sin, and again and again succumb in the struggle. But
as often as with the opened eye of the soul we turn to the Cross of
Jesus, we behold there the victory, our victory, already won. Already,
indeed, it is ours, by the communication to us of