r standards, so far as I am able, to my own low level? Is
there a single soul now in the world who owes, under God, her conversion
to my efforts?

Why, as I watch my life and review it in His Presence it would seem as
if I had done nothing but disappoint Him all my days! He cried, like the
deacon of His own Sacrifice, Go! it is done! _Ite; missa est!_ The
Sacrifice is finished here; go out in its strength to live the life
which it makes possible!

Let me at least begin to-day, have done with my old compromises and
shifts and evasions. _Ite; missa est!_

THE SEVENTH WORD

_Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit._

He has cried with a loud voice, and the rocks have rent to its echo, and
the earth is shaken, and the Veil of the Old Testament is torn from top
to bottom as the Old Covenant passes into the New and the enclosed
sanctity of the Most Holy Place breaks out into the world. And now, as
the level sun shines out again beneath the pall of clouds, He whispers,
as at Mary's knee in Nazareth, the old childish prayer and yields up
His spirit into His Father's hands.

The last Paradox, then, is uttered. He Who saves others cannot save
Himself! The Shepherd of souls relinquishes His own. For, as we cannot
save our lives unless we lose them for His sake, so He too cannot save
them unless He loses His for our sake.

I. This, then, is merely the summary of all that has gone before; it is
the word _Finis_ written at the end of this new Book of Life which He
has written in His Blood. It is the silence of the white space at the
close of the last page. Yet it is, too, the final act that gives value
to all that have preceded it. If Christ had not died, our faith would be
vain.

Oh! these New Theologies that see in Christ's Death merely the end of
His Life! Why, it is the very point and climax of His Life that He
should lay it down! Like Samson himself, that strange prototype of the
Strong Man armed, he slew more of the enemies of our souls by His Death
than by all His gracious Life. _For this cause He came into the world_.
For Sacrifice, which is the very heart of man's instinctive worship of
God, was set there, imperishably, in order to witness to and be ratified
by His One Offering which alone could truly take away sins; and to deny
it or to obscure it is to deny or to obscure the whole history of the
human race, from the Death of Abel to the Death of Christ, to deny or
obscure the significance of every lamb