t he is innocent of
the blood of this just person, and then he delivers Jesus to the Jews
to take him away. It was a fine balancing of a judicial mind, and I
suppose he withdrew from the judgment hall saying to himself: "Whatever
may happen in this case, at least I am not responsible." But what does
history think {160} of this judicial Pilate? It holds him to be a
responsible agent in the death of Jesus. He was attempting a
neutrality which was impossible. The great wind was blowing across the
threshing floor of the nation, and the people were separated into two
distinct heaps, and must be counted forever as chaff or as wheat. He
that was not with Christ was against him, and Pilate's place, even in
spite of himself, was determined as among those who brought Jesus to
his cross that afternoon.

I was once talking with a cultivated gentleman who volunteered to tell
me his attitude toward religion. He wished me to understand that he
was in sympathy with the purposes and the administration of worship.
He desired that it should prevail. He welcomed its usefulness in the
university. But as for himself it appeared better that he should hold
a position of neutrality. His responsibility seemed to him better met
by standing neither for religion nor against it, but in a perfectly
judicial frame of mind. He did not take account, however, of the fact
that this neutrality was impossible; that it was just what Pilate
attempted, and just wherein he failed. If he {161} was not to be
counted among those who would by their presence encourage worship, then
he must be counted among those who by their absence hinder its effect.
On one side or other in these great issues of life every man's weight
is to be thrown, and the Pilates of to-day--as of that earlier time--in
their impossible neutrality are often the most insidious, although most
unconscious opponents of a generous cause.

And so to-day on this most solemn anniversary of religious history,
while it is, as the passage says of this interview with Pilate, "yet
early," let us set before ourselves, the issue just as it is now and
just as it was then. This morning demands of any honest-minded man an
answer to the question: "On which side do I propose to stand?" It is
not a demand for absoluteness of conviction or unwavering loyalty, but
it is a summons to recognize that Jesus Christ died on this day largely
at the hands of intellectual dilettanteism and indifferentism,--the