not commit. There have been cases in which men have been
mysteriously excruciated with the thought of having committed the
unpardonable sin. But to represent the mental phenomena of the
Redeemer's mind as in any way resembling this--to say that His
conscience was oppressed with the responsibility of sins which He had
not committed--is to confound a state of sanity with the delusions of
a half lucid mind, and the workings of a healthy conscience with those
of one unnatural and morbid.

There is a way however, much more appalling and much more true, in
which this may be true, without resorting to any such fanciful
hypothesis. Sin has a great power in this world: it gives laws like
those of a sovereign, which bind us all, and to which we are all
submissive. There are current maxims in church and state, in society,
in trade, in law, to which we yield obedience. For this obedience
every one is responsible; for instance in trade, and in the profession
of law, every one is the servant of practices the rectitude of which
his heart can only half approve--every one complains of them, yet all
are involved in them. Now, when such sins reach their climax, as in
the case of national bankruptcy or an unjust acquittal, there may be
some who are in a special sense, the actors in the guilt; but
evidently, for the bankruptcy, each member of the community is
responsible in that degree and so far as he himself acquiesced in the
duplicities of public dealing; every careless juror, every unrighteous
judge, every false witness, has done his part in the reduction of
society to that state in which the monster injustice has been
perpetrated. In the riot of a tumultuous assembly by night, a house
may be burnt, or a murder committed; in the eye of the law, all who
are aiding and abetting there are each in his degree responsible for
that crime; there may be difference in guilt, from the degree in which
he is guilty who with his own hand perpetrated the deed, to that of
him who merely joined the rabble from mischievous
curiosity--degrees from that of wilful murder to that of more or less
excusable homicide.

The Pharisees were declared by the Saviour to be guilty of the blood
of Zacharias, the blood of righteous Abel, and of all the saints and
prophets who fell before He came. But how were the Pharisees guilty?
They built the sepulchres of the prophets, they honoured and admired
them; but they were guilty, in t