life and busy in his prime; but the one, if
fairly dealt with, will grow to be the other. And while we think very
little of stifling the scarcely breathed whisperings in our own heart
and mind, we should consider that it is only such whisperings that can
bring us to the loudly proclaimed truth. If we do not follow up
suggestions, if we do not push inquiry to discovery, if we do not value
the smallest grain of truth as a seed of unknown worth and count it
wicked to kill even the smallest truth in our souls, we can scarcely
hope at any time to stand in the full light of reality and rejoice in
it. To accept Christ as Divine may be at present beyond us; to
acknowledge Him as such would simply be to perjure ourselves; but can we
not acknowledge Him to be a true man, a good man, a teacher certainly
sent from God? If we do know Him to be all that and more, then have we
thought this out to its results? Knowing Him to be a unique figure among
men, have we perceived what this involves? Admitting Him to be the best
of men, do we love Him, imitate Him, ponder His words, long for His
company? Let us not treat Him as if He were non-existent because He is
not as yet to us all that He is to some. Let us beware of dismissing
_all_ conviction about Him because there are some convictions spoken of
by other people which we do not feel. It is better to deny Christ than
to deny our own convictions; for to do so is to extinguish the only
light we have, and to expose ourselves to all disaster. The man who has
put out his own eyes cannot plead blindness in extenuation of his not
seeing the lights and running the richly laden ship on the rocks.

Guided by the perfect taste which reverence gives, John says very little
about the actual crucifixion. He shows us indeed the soldiers sitting
down beside the little heap of clothes they had stripped off our Lord,
parcelling them out, perhaps already assuming them as their own wear.
For the clothes by which our Lord had been known these soldiers would
now carry into unknown haunts of drunkenness and sin, emblems of our
ruthless, thoughtless desecration of our Lord's name with which we
outwardly clothe ourselves and yet carry into scenes the most
uncongenial. John, writing long after the event, seems to have no heart
to record the poor taunts with which the crowd sought to increase the
suffering of the Crucified, and force home upon His spirit a sense of
the desolation and ignominy of the cross. Gradually