in every year of it, to what
salvation means, in Jesus' sense. Punishment, consequences, crippled
resources--no, he does not ask to escape them now; all as God
pleases; these are not the things that matter. Life is all to be
boundless love and gratitude and trust; and by and by the new man
wakes up to find sin taken away, its consequences undone, the lost
faculties restored, and life a fuller and richer thing than ever it
was before.

Somehow so, if we read the Gospels aright, does Jesus conceive of
Salvation. To achieve this for men is his purpose; and in order to
do it, as we said before, his first step is to induce men to
re-think God. Something must be done to touch the heart and to move
the will of men, effectively; and he must do it.

With this purpose in his mind--let us weigh our words here, and
reflect again upon the clearness of his insight into life and
character, into moral laws, the laws of human thought and feeling,
upon his profound intelligence and grasp of what moves and is real,
his knowledge (a strong word to use, but we may use it) of God--with
this purpose in his mind, thought out and understood, he
deliberately and quietly goes to Jerusalem. He "steadfastly set his
face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). "I must walk," he said,
"to-day and to-morrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a
prophet perish out of Jerusalem" (Luke 13:33). To Jerusalem he goes.

We may admit that with his view of the psychology of sin, he must
have a serious view of redemption. But why should that involve the
cross? That is our problem. But while we try to solve it, we must
also remember that behind a great choice there are always more
reasons than we can analyse. A man makes one of the great choices in
life. What has influenced him? Ten to one, if you ask him, he does
not know. Nothing else, he will say, seemed feasible; the thing was
borne in on me, it came to me: reasons? He cannot tabulate reasons;
the thing, he says, was so clear that I was a long way past reasons.
And yet he was right; he had reasons enough. What parent ever
analysed reasons for loving his children, or would tabulate them for
you? Jesus does not explain his reasons. We find, I think, that we
are apt to have far more reasons for doing what we know is wrong,
than we have for doing what we know is right. We do not want reasons
for doing what is right; we know it is right, and there is an end of
it. Once again, Jesus, with his clear eye for t