However galling it is to find ourselves mixed up with
transactions which turn out to be shameful, or to discover that some
vacillation or imbecility on our part has made us partakers in sin, it
is idle and worse to wash our hands ostentatiously and try to persuade
ourselves we have no guilt in the matter. The fact that we have been
brought in contact with unjust, cruel, heartless, fraudulent,
unscrupulous, worldly, passionate people may explain many of our sins,
but it does not excuse them. Other people in our circumstances would not
have done what we have done; they would have acted a stronger, manlier,
more generous part. And if we have sinned, it only adds to our guilt and
encourages our weakness to profess innocence now and transfer to some
other party the disgrace that belongs to ourselves. Nothing short of
physical compulsion can excuse wrong-doing.

The calmness and dignity with which Jesus passed through this ordeal,
alone self-possessed, while all around Him were beside themselves, so
impressed Pilate that he not only felt guilty in giving Him up to the
Jews, but did not think it impossible that He might be the Son of God.
But what is perhaps even more striking in this scene is the directness
with which all these evil passions of men--fear, and self-interest, and
injustice, and hate--are guided to an end fraught with blessing.
Goodness finds in the most adverse circumstances material for its
purposes. We are apt in such circumstances to despair and act as if
there were never to be a triumph of goodness; but the little seed of
good that one individual can contribute even by hopeful and patient
submission is that which survives and produces good in perpetuity, while
the passion and the hate and the worldliness cease. In so wild a scene
what availed it, we might have said, that one Person kept His
steadfastness and rose superior to the surrounding wickedness? But the
event showed that it did avail. All the rest was scaffolding that fell
away out of sight, and this solitary integrity remains as the enduring
monument. In our measure we must pass through similar ordeals, times
when it seems vain to contend, useless to hope. When all we have done
seems to be lost, when our way is hid and no further step is visible,
when all the waves and billows of an ungodly world seem to threaten with
extinction the little good we have cherished, then must we remember this
calm, majestic Prisoner, bound in the midst of a frantic and