expressed by the participants in such scenes is ultimately a
sensual joy. These men who delighted in the torture of our Lord were
sensualists; and there are few of us who if we will watch our selves
closely will not find traces of the animal showing itself from time to
time. Of this crowd about the Cross relatively few could have known
anything about the case of our Lord; but they were fascinated by the
spectacle of a man's torture. If the executions of criminals were public
to-day there would undoubtedly be huge crowds to gaze upon them.

It is one of the lessons we learn from the study of sin that what we had
thought was the essence of the sin was in fact but one of the
manifestations of it, and that we have to carry our study far before we
arrive at the ideal, Know thyself. It is always dangerous to assume that
we know when we have not been at the pains to look at a subject on all
sides. Our sensual nature needs a very careful discipline, and the mere
freedom from certain forms of the sin of lust is not the equivalent of
that purity which is the medium of the Vision of God.

It is the sin of gluttony which is the least obvious in the Way of the
Cross. There are no doubt plenty of gluttons there, but that is not what
we are trying to find; we are trying to see how each sin contributed to
this final act in the drama of our Lord's life, how each sin contributed
to put men in opposition to our Lord. It is not the actual sin of
gluttony that we shall find in operation here but certain inevitable
effects of it, What is the effect of gluttony on the soul of man?
Absorption in the pursuit of the pleasures that spring from material
things; the indulgence of the appetite, and the natural result of such
indulgence which is to render the soul insensitive to the spiritual. The
man whose motto is, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," puts
himself out of touch with the spiritual realities of life. He is
materialistic, whatever may be his philosophy. He wants immediate
results from life. When he is confronted with our Lord, when he is told
that our Lord makes demands upon life for self-restraint and
self-discipline, that He demands that the appetites be curbed rather
than indulged, he declines allegiance. One can have no doubt that in our
Lord's time as to-day indifference to His teaching and failure even to
take in what the Gospel means or how it can be a possible rule of life
is largely due to the dull spiritual state, o