cription placed upon Shelley's grave; and it
is infinitely more appropriate for the Man of Nazareth. In His sensitive
sympathy we are aware of

Desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish
Forc'd through the channels of a single heart.

We cannot account for His recoil from the cross, save as we remember His
sense of kinship with those who were reddening their hands with the
blood of the Representative of their God. If we have ever stood beside a
devoted wife in the hour when her husband is disgraced, or been in a
home where sons and daughters are overwhelmed with a mother's shame, we
have some faint idea of how Jesus felt the guilt of His relatives when
they slew Him. He was the conscience of His less conscientious brethren:
"the reproaches of them that reproached Thee, fell on Me." He realized,
as they did not, the enormity of what they were doing. The utter and
hideous ungodlikeness of the world was expressed for Him in those who
would have none of Him, and cried: "Away with Him! Crucify, crucify
Him." His keenness of conscience and His acute sympathy brought to His
lips the final cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" The
sinless Sufferer on the cross, in His oneness with His brethren, felt
their wrongdoing His own; acknowledged in His forsakenness that God
could have nothing to do with it, for it was anti-God; confessed that it
inevitably separated from Him and He felt Himself in such kinship and
sympathy with sinning men that He was actually away from God. "That was
hell," said old Rabbi Duncan, "and He tasted it."

But our minds revolt. We do not believe that God deserted His Son; on
the contrary we are certain that He was never closer to Him. Shall we
question the correctness of Jesus' personal experience, and call Him
mistaken? We seem compelled either to do violence to His authority in
the life of the spirit with God, or to our conviction of God's
character. Perhaps there is another alternative. A century ago the
physicist, Thomas Young, discovered the principle of the interference of
light. Under certain conditions light added to light produces darkness;
the light waves interfere with and neutralize each other. Is there not
something analogous to this in the sphere of the spirit? Is not every
new unveiling of God accompanied by unsettlements and seeming darkenings
of the soul, temporary obscurations of the Divine Face? In all our
advances in religious knowledge are we not liable to un