all his
vivid intensity, he calls it the terror of the Lord. Paul and Bunyan are
of the same school of moralists and stylists; Butler went to school to
the Stoics, to Aristotle, and to Plato.

Our Lord Himself came to be the express image He was and is by living and
acting under this same universal law of human life--acts, habits,
character. He was made perfect on this same principle. He learned
obedience both by the things that He did, and the things that He
suffered. Butler says in one deep place, that benevolence and justice
and veracity are the basis of all good character in God and in man, and
thus also in the God-man. And those three foundation stones of our
Lord's character settled deeper and grew stronger to bear and to suffer
as He went on practising acts and speaking words of justice, goodness,
and truth. And so of all the other elements of His moral character. Our
Lord left Gethsemane a much more submissive and a much more surrendered
man than He entered it. His forgiveness of injuries, and thus His
splendid benevolence, had not yet come to its climax and crown till He
said on the cross, 'Father, forgive them'. And, as He was, so are we in
this world. This world's evil and ill-desert made it but the better
arena and theatre for the development and the display of His moral
character; and the same instruments that fashioned Him into the perfect
and express image He was and is, are still, happily, in full operation.
Take that divinest and noblest of all instruments for the carving out and
refining of moral character, the will of God. How our Lord made His own
unselfish and unsinful will to bow to silence and to praise before the
holy will of His Father, till that gave the finishing touch to His always
sanctified will and heart! And, happily, that awful and blessed
instrument for the formation of moral character is still active and
available to those whose ambition rises to moral character, and who are
aiming at heaven in all they do and all they suffer upon the earth.
Gethsemane has gone out till it has covered all the earth. Its cup, if
not in all the depth and strength of its first mixture, still in quite
sufficient bitterness, is put many times in life into every man's hand.
There is not a day, there is not an hour of the day, that the disciple of
the submissive and all-surrendered Son has not the opportunity to say
with his Master, If it be possible, let this cup pass: nevertheless, not
as I wil