have I
suffered with a troubled mind" have been on the lips and in the thought
of the "Man of Sorrows" as the Cross cast its shadow over Him, perhaps
from His earliest years? "For not even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself,"
says _The Imitation_ in one of those chapters which sweeten the tears
of the world, "was ever one hour without the anguish of His Passion as
long as He lived" (_Imit._ ii. 12).

Both the 40th and the 54th suggest that inner secret of the Atonement
which the writer of the {62} Epistle to the Hebrews has fixed upon as
giving Christ's Passion its universal efficacy:

An offering of a free heart will I give Thee.
(liv. 6.)

I come--that I should fulfil Thy will, O my God.
(xl. 9, 10.)

"By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the
body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. x. 10). For the Passion is
the supreme oblation of the freewill of man, the re-direction into the
right attitude of that high faculty by which man had sinned and fallen
originally, the consecration of it to its true end, voluntary obedience
to God. "Not My will, but Thine be done"; that Christ as man should
bring the human will perfectly into conformity with the will of God is
what "in the volume of the book"--_i.e._ in the writings of all the
line of prophets--was written of Him; for this "the body was prepared"
for Him in the pure flesh of the Virgin-mother; for this His "ears were
opened," that as child and youth and man He might perfectly hear and
obey the word of the Father.

But the 15th verse of the 40th Psalm suggests {63} an obvious
difficulty in the application of the Psalms as a whole to Christ
personally:

My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am not
able to look up:
Yea, they are more in number than the hairs of my head,
and my heart hath failed me.

How can we ascribe these words, or any of the confessions of sin in the
Psalter, to the sinless Lamb of God? Are not these at least all our
own? And yet He Himself must on earth have repeated them. In their
original meaning they referred either to personal or national guilt.
In either sense the recitation of them, at first sight, would seem to
be alien and external to His pure conscience. But do they not take a
deeper and more solemn tone when we consider them in the light of the
prophet's great description of the Atoning Sufferer, "The Lord hath
laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Is. liii. 6