on, maintaining His
inalienable majesty, but submitting Himself to every test we care to
apply, claiming only to be the King of the truth by whom we are admitted
into that sole eternal kingdom. It has come to be our turn, as it came
to be Pilate's, to decide upon His claims and to act upon our
decision--to recognise that we men have to do, not merely with pleasure
and place, with earthly rewards and relations, but above all with the
truth, with that which gives eternal significance to all these present
things, with the truth about human life, with the truth embodied for us
in Christ's person and speaking intelligibly to us through His lips,
with God manifest in the flesh. Are we to take part with Him when He
calls us to glory and to virtue, to the truth and to eternal life, or
yielding to some present pressure the world puts upon us attempt some
futile compromise and so renounce our birthright?

Could Pilate really persuade himself he made everything right with a
basin of water and a theatrical transference of his responsibility to
the Jews? Could he persuade himself that by merely giving up the
contest he was playing the part of a judge and of a man? Could he
persuade himself that the mere words, "I am innocent of the blood of
this righteous man: see ye to it," altered his relation to the death of
Christ? No doubt he did. There is nothing commoner than for a man to
think himself forced when it is his own fear or wickedness that is his
only compulsion. Would every man in Pilate's circumstances have felt
himself forced to surrender Jesus to the Jews? Would even a Gallio or a
Claudius Lysias have done so? But Pilate's past history made him
powerless. Had he not feared exposure, he would have marched his cohort
across the square and cleared it of the mob and defied the Sanhedrim. It
was not because he thought the Jewish law had any true right to demand
Christ's death, but merely because the Jews threatened to report him as
conniving at rebellion, that he yielded Christ to them; and to seek to
lay the blame on those who made it difficult to do the right thing was
both unmanly and futile. The Jews were at least willing to take their
share of the blame, dreadful in its results as that proved to be.

Fairly to apportion blame where there are two consenting parties to a
wickedness is for us, in many cases, impossible; and what we have to do
is to beware of shifting blame from ourselves to our circumstances or to
other people.