nd through every child who opens
his life to Him with the willingness of Jesus; God in all--the
directing, empowering, sanctifying Spirit, producing in us characters
like Christ's, employing and equipping us for the work of His Kingdom,
and revealing Himself in a community more and more controlled by love:
this is our Christian thought of the Divine--"one God and Father of all,
who is over all and through all and in all."

CHAPTER V

THE CROSS

The human life in which succeeding generations have found their picture
of God ended in a bloody tragedy. It was a catastrophe which all but
wrecked the loyalty of Jesus' little group of followers; it was an event
which proved a stumbling block in their endeavor to win their countrymen
to their Lord, and which seemed folly to the great mass of outsiders in
the Roman world. It was a most baffling circumstance for them to explain
either to themselves or to others; but, as they lived on under the
control of their Lord's Spirit, this tragedy came gradually to be for
them the most richly significant occurrence in His entire history; and
ever since the cross has been the distinctive symbol of the Christian
faith. It had a variety of meanings for the men of the New Testament;
and it has had many more for their followers in subsequent centuries. We
are not limited to viewing it through the eyes of others, nor to
interpreting it with their thoughts. We are enriched as we try to share
their experiences of its power and light; but we must go to Calvary for
ourselves, and look at the Crucified with the eyes of our own hearts,
and ask ourselves of what that cross convinces us.

Its first and most obvious disclosure is the unchristlikeness, and that
means for us the ungodlikeness, of our world. We study the chief actors
in this event, and conclude that had we known personally Caiaphas, Annas
and Pilate, and even Herod and Judas Iscariot, we should have found them
very like men we meet every day, very like ourselves, with a great deal
in them to interest, admire and attract. And behind them we scan a crowd
of inconspicuous and unnamed persons whose collective feelings and
opinions and consciences were quite as responsible for this occurrence,
as were the men whose names are linked with it; and they impress us as
surprisingly like the public of our own day. It was by no means the
lowest elements in the society of that age who took Jesus to the cross;
they were among the most devout a