for you. In the
background of all stands the cruel gibbet to which your own countrymen,
the people you have loved with an all-absorbing love, shall presently
commit you. Tell me what you would pray in like circumstances. Your
agony would be just as great as that of Jesus, though perhaps your
prayer would lack His magnificent faith and ungrudging self-surrender.
Jesus went to His death having nothing to rely upon except His inner
conviction that God and the cause of truth were one, and that somehow
or other in the end that would be made plain to Himself and all the
world. It would have been the same no matter what had been the
particular death that Jesus died. His murderers might have taken His
life in any one of a thousand ways and the ultimate result would have
been just as we see it now. They might have hanged, drowned, or burnt
Him, in which case the stake or the hangman's rope would have become
the symbol of the world's redemption, but, after the fashion of their
time, they crucified Him; it was the worst they could do, and they
wanted to do the worst. At Calvary perfect love joined issue with
perfect hate, perfect goodness with perfect wickedness, and became
victorious by enduring the worst and remaining pure and unchanged to
the last.

+The moral outcome.+--But it was not the last after all; the world had
still to reckon with God. That life and death have become a moral
force, a spiritual dynamic greater than any before or since, just
because of the completeness of the self-offering that culminated on
Calvary's cross. I must not anticipate what I have to say about the
resurrection further than to remark that more came out of the tomb of
Jesus than ever went into it. When all seemed lost this buried life
arose in power in other lives that up till then had never fully known
its divine greatness and spiritual beauty.

This is the truth about the death of Jesus, and nothing needs to be
added to show how great an event in the dealings of God with men it
must have been. It was both simple and sublime. Theological
word-spinning only serves to obscure its true significance. Show to
the world the real Jesus; tell men how it came about that He had to
die, and they cannot help but love Him.

CHAPTER IX

THE ATONEMENT

+II. Semitic Ideas of Atonement+

+Atonement in history.+--What, then, has this death to do with the
Atonement? A great deal; but the best way to answer the question will
be to obt