vious that such a Person would concern Himself not with art
or literature, not with inventions and discoveries, not even with
politics and government and social problems, but with that which
underlies all these and for which all these exist--with human character
and human conduct, with man's relation to God. It is with the very root
of human life He concerns Himself.

The sufferings of Christ, then, were mainly inward, and were the
necessary result of His perfect sympathy with men. That which has made
the cross the most significant of earthly symbols, and which has
invested it with so wonderful a power to subdue and purify the heart, is
not the fact that it involved the keenest physical pain, but that it
exhibits Christ's perfect and complete identification with sinful men.
It is this that humbles us and brings us to a right mind towards God and
towards sin, that here we see the innocent Son of God involved in
suffering and undergoing a shameful death through our sin. It was His
sympathy with men which brought Him into this world, and it was the same
sympathy which laid Him open to suffering throughout His life. The
mother suffers more in the illness of a child than in her own; the shame
of wrong-doing is often more keenly felt by a parent or friend than by
the perpetrator himself. If Paul's enthusiasm and devoted life for men
made him truly say, "Who is weak, and I am not weak?" who shall measure
the burden Christ bore from day to day in the midst of a sinning and
suffering world? With a burning zeal for God, He was plunged into an
arctic region where thick-ribbed ice of indifference met His warmth;
consumed with devotion to God's purposes, He saw everywhere around Him
ignorance, carelessness, self-seeking, total misunderstanding of what
the world is for; linked to men with a love which irrepressibly urged
Him to seek the highest good for all, He was on all hands thwarted;
dying to see men holy and pure and godly, He everywhere found them weak,
sinful, gross. It was this which made Him a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief--loving God and man with a love which was the
chief element in His being, He could not get man reconciled to God. The
mere sorrows of men doubtless affected Him more than they affect the
most tender-hearted of men; but these sorrows--poverty, failure,
sickness--would pass away and would even work for good, and so might
well be borne. But when He saw men disregarding that which would save
them fr