ordinarily called happiness does not represent
the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations;
and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised
and degraded. The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all
the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is
fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the
Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the
man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his
individual happiness--the so-called saving of his own soul--becomes the
aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no
individual as apart from a national existence. The secret sin of Achan,
the vaunting pride of David, call forth less individual than national
calamity.

At last in the fulness of time there came forth One--whence and how we do
not stop to inquire--who gathered up into Himself all these tangled,
broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far as one
very brief human life could give--at once its perfect and exhaustive
doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and exhaustive
practical exemplification, by life and by death. Endless controversies
have stormed and are still storming around that name which He so
significantly and emphatically appropriated--the "Son of Man." But from
amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear, sharp, and
unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of His human
greatness--"He pleased not Himself." By every act He did, every word He
spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him happiness as the aim
and end of man. He reduced it to its true position of a possible
accessory and issue of man's highest fulfilment of life--an issue, the
contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to
its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards
realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard.

Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth,
became a recognised power on the earth. Thenceforth every great teacher
of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever his apparent
tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true,
explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and
worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been the
practical embodiment of it.