he Saviour took each successive step on the road from His native
Nazareth to the place called Calvary. Think of Him simply as the product
of a compelling Force, unable to act otherwise than He did, and at one
stroke all that moved us to gratitude, to admiration, all that appealed
to us most deeply, is gone. There can be no such thing as compulsory
heroism or non-voluntary self-sacrifice; moral judgments upon
"inevitable" conduct are merely absurd--we do not bestow moral approval
upon this kind of higher automatism.

Sometimes, indeed, in a connection like this, an attempt is made at some
sort of compromise: granted, it is said, that each separate action of
Christ's was voluntary, yet His life-purpose {169} as a whole was surely
pre-determined, and not left to Him to adopt or refuse. Yet how
impossible, upon closer reflection, is this species of semi-Determinism!
Every single act of Jesus was voluntary; but His whole life and character
and purpose--which is just the sum-total of these single, voluntary
acts--these, we are to believe, were strictly necessitated. He could
choose every step of a way which was yet absolutely chosen for Him, so
that He could tread no other! A tremendous decision like His going to
Jerusalem lay within His power; but the aim and meaning of His life,
viewed as a whole, He had no power of voluntarily determining. That, to
our mind, is a wholly irrational position; one might as reasonably say,
"Every link of this chain is golden; but the chain itself is iron."
Simple consistency requires the admission that if the chain is iron, so
must the links be, and if the links are golden, so must be the chain.

We say again--all that enshrines Jesus in our hearts, all that gives its
redemptive power to His love-prompted death, and its significance to
Calvary, rests upon the fact of His moral freedom. He had _power_ to lay
down His life; therein lay the glory of His self-surrender. He was,
indeed, God's instrument in effecting the reconciliation of sinners to
the Divine Love, but it rested with Him to decide whether He would be
that instrument or no, and the course He chose was not that of {170}
mechanical necessity, nor was the decision to which He came a following
in the line of least resistance. In accepting the pain and shame of the
Cross, Jesus worked His Father's will; but that will was not imposed upon
Him from without, but freely responded to from within. As the author of
the _Theologia Germ