ught of the Christian world
ever since he did so. He told his disciples beforehand of what lay
before him, of what he was choosing, but it was long before they
realized that he meant any such thing. The cross was to them a
strange idea, and for a long time they did not seriously face the
matter. Once the cross was an accomplished fact, Christians could
not, and did not wish to, avoid thinking out what had meant so much
to their Master; but it has mostly been with a sense of facing a
mystery that in some measure eluded them, with a feeling that there
is more beyond, something always to be attained hereafter.

A very significant passage in St. Mark (10:32) gives us a glimpse of
a moment on Jesus' last journey to Jerusalem. It is a sentence which
one could hardly imagine being included in the Gospel, if it did not
represent some actual memory, and a memory of significance. It runs
something like this: "And they were in the way, going up to
Jerusalem, and Jesus was moving on before them; and they began to
wonder; and as they followed they began to be afraid." He is moving
to Jerusalem with a purpose. They do not understand it. He is
wrapped in thought; and, as happens when a man's mind is working
strongly, his pace quickens, and they find themselves at a distance
behind him. And then something comes over them--a sense that there
is something in the situation which they do not understand, a
strangeness in the mind. They realize, in fact, that they are not as
near Jesus as they had supposed. And, as they follow, the wonder
deepens into fear.

Anyone who will really try to grapple with this problem of the cross
will find very soon the same thing. The first thing that we need to
learn, if our criticism of Jesus is to be sound, is that we are not
at all so near him as we have imagined. He eludes us, goes far out
beyond what we grasp or conceive; and I think the education of the
Christian man or woman begins anew, when we realize how little we
know about Jesus. The discovery of our ignorance is the beginning of
knowledge. Plato long ago said that wonder is the mother of
philosophy, and he was right. John Donne, the English poet, went
farther, and said: "All divinity is love or wonder." When a man then
begins to wonder about Jesus Christ in earnest, Jesus comes to be
for him a new figure. Historical criticism has done this for us; it
has brought us to such a point that the story of these earliest
disciples repeats itself more c