the garden that the cup may pass, his
thoughts range back to "Thy will" (Matt. 26:42). It is God's Will.
Even if he does not himself see all involved, still God knows the
reason; God will manage; God wishes it. "Have faith in God," he used
to say (Mark 11:22). This faith which he has in God is one of the
things that take him to the cross.

In the third place, we must not forget his sense of his own peculiar
relation to God. If it is safe to rely on St. Mark's chronological
date here, he does not speak of this until Peter has called him the
Messiah. He accepts the title (Mark 8:29). He also uses the
description, Son of Man, with its suggestions from the past. He
forgives sins. He speaks throughout the Gospels as one apart, as one
distinct from us, closely as he is identified with us--and all this
from a son of fact, who is not insane, who is not a quack, whose
eyes are wide open for the real; whose instinct for the ultimate
truth is so keen; who lives face to face with God. What does it
mean? This, for one thing, that most of us have not given attention
enough to this matter. I have confined myself in these chapters to
the Synoptic Gospels, with only two or three references to the
Fourth Gospel, and on the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels, taken by
themselves, it is clear that he means a great deal more than we have
cared to examine. He is the great interpreter of God, and it is
borne in upon him that only by the cross can he interpret God, make
God real to us, and bring us to the very heart of God. That is his
purpose.

The cross is the outcome of his deepest mind, of his prayer life. It
is more like him than anything else he ever did. It has in it more
of him. Whoever he was, whoever he is, whatever our Christology, one
fact stands out. It was his love of men and women and his faith in
God that took him there.

Was he justified? was he right? or was it a delusion?

First of all, let us go back to a historic event. The resurrection
is, to a historian, not very clear in its details. But is it the
detail or the central fact that matters? Take away the resurrection,
however it happened, whatever it was, and the history of the Church
is unintelligible. We live in a rational world--a world, that is,
where, however much remains as yet unexplained, everything has a
promise of being lucid, everything has reason in it. Great results
have great causes. We have to find, somewhere or other, between the
crucifixion and the fi