not suffer Peter to use his sword, in every way shows that His
surrender is voluntary. Still, had He not shown His power to escape,
onlookers might have thought this was only the prudent conduct of a
brave man who wished to preserve His dignity, and therefore preferred
delivering Himself up to being ignominiously dragged from a
hiding-place. Therefore it was made plain that if He yielded it was not
for want of power to resist. By a word He overthrew those who came to
bind Him, and made them feel ashamed of their preparations. He spoke
confidently of help that would have swept the cohort off the field.[21]
And thus it was brought out that, if He died, He laid down His life and
was not deprived of it solely by the hate and violence of men. The hate
and violence were there; but they were not the sole factors. He yielded
to these because they were ingredients in the cup His Father wished Him
to drink.

The reason of this is obvious. Christ's life was to be all sacrifice,
because self-sacrifice is the essence of holiness and of love. From
beginning to end the moving spring of all His actions was deliberate
self-devotement to the good of men or to the fulfilment of God's will;
for these are equivalents. And His death as the crowning act of this
career was to be conspicuously a death embodying and exhibiting the
spirit of self-sacrifice. He offered Himself on the cross through the
eternal Spirit. That death was not compulsory; it was not the outcome of
a sudden whim or generous impulse; it was the expression of a constant
uniform "eternal" Spirit, which on the cross, in the yielding of life
itself, rendered up for men all that was possible. Unwillingly no
sacrifice can be made. When a man is taxed to support the poor, we do
not call that a sacrifice. Sacrifice must be free, loving, uncompelled;
it must be the exhibition in act of love, the freest and most
spontaneous of all human emotions. "It is a true Christian instinct in
our language which has seized upon the word _sacrifice_ to express the
self-devotion prompted by an unselfish love for others: we speak of the
_sacrifices_ made by a loving wife or mother; and we test the sincerity
of a Christian by the _sacrifices_ he will make for the love of Christ
and the brethren.... The reason why Christianity has approved itself a
living principle of regeneration to the world is specially because a
Divine example and a Divine spirit of self-sacrifice have wrought
together in the hea