odies was
nothing; that the only way of attaining power was to conquer men's
hearts and minds and wills, thus clasping them to us with hooks of
steel; that the will of God for His children was that they should love
their enemies and not pour upon them the vials of wrath, trampling them
under foot; but the arrogance of man answered with the hoarse cry,
"Crucify."

And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the
holocaust of war--ten millions of men consigned to the hell of reeking
trenches. In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before,
bearing its awful woe. In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal
Love is crucified. It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips
trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred
door of the House of God.

***

The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done
shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there
should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power. And yet there
must be some explanation of it. Why should a passion for righteousness
be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified
by a petty Roman official? There can be no explanation but this--that
that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which
wrought so evil a deed. That power was self-interest--selfishness.

The eyes of men turned to Jesus Christ, and they saw one holy,
harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, whose journeying was the
journeys of healing among the sons of men, whose words were words of
blessedness, declaring that God loved and pardoned His children, and
yet men reviled, scorned, scourged and at last crucified Him. The
power that moved men to this dread crime was sin, and thus the word sin
became a word of horror. (For the selfishness that crucified was only
one fruit of sin.) Out of that realisation of the horror of sin there
sprang an ethical passion--a passion which in the heart and in the
world waged ceaseless war on selfishness and all the devices of evil.
Thus humanity was lifted out of the mire. They girded themselves to
fight that dread and hateful power which crucified the Holy One.

Like the wind blowing in from the sea that sweeps before it the foul
miasma that lies over the valleys, so that men look up and see the
heavens and feel a new vigour moving in their blood, so a breath from
the living God came stirring the foul places of humanity, and t