reported, to make sure that we know exactly what he means.
Those who hold this view fail to relate the texts they emphasize
with others of a deeper significance, and they ignore the grandeur
and penetration and depth of the man whom they make out such a
dreamer. He never suggests himself that his death is to force the
hand of God.

He himself is to be the doer and achiever of something. We have been
apt to think of him as a great teacher, a teacher of charm and
insight, or as the great example of idealism, "who saw life steadily
and saw it whole." He lived, some hold, the rounded and well-poised
life, the rhythmic life. No, that was Sophocles. He is greater. Here
is one who penetrates far deeper into things. His treatment of the
psychology of sin itself shows how much more than an example was
needed. Here, as in the other chapters, but here above all we have
to remember the clearness of his insight, his swiftness of
penetration, his instinct for fact and reality. He means to do, to
achieve, something. It is no martyr's death that he incurs. His
death is a step to a purpose. "I have a baptism to be baptised
with," he says (Luke 12:50). "The Son of Man," he said, "is come to
seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10).

In discussing in the previous chapter what he meant by the term
"lost," our conclusion was that for Jesus sin was far more awful,
far more serious, than we commonly realize. We saw also that so
profound and true a psychology of sin must imply a view of
redemption at least as profound, a promise of a force more than
equal to the power of sin--that "violence of habit" of which St.
Augustine speaks. If the Son of Man is to save the lost, and if the
lost are in danger so real, it follows that he must think of a
thoroughly effective salvation, and that its achievement will be no
light or easy task. "To give one's life as a ransom for many," says
a modern teacher, "is of no avail, if the ransom is insufficient."
What, then, and how much, does he mean by "to save," and how does he
propose to do it? When the soul of man or woman has gone wrong in
any of the ways discussed by Jesus--in hardness or anger, in
impurity, in the refusal to treat God and his facts seriously--when
the consequences that Jesus recognized have followed--what can be
done to bring that soul back into effective relation with the God
whom it has discarded and abandoned? That is the problem that Jesus
had to face, and most of us have n