or
in His purity of life.

What is it, then, in the death of Christ which so far surpasses His life
in its power of attraction? The life was equally unselfish and devoted;
it was more prolonged; it was more directly useful,--why, then, would it
have been comparatively ineffective without the death? It may, in the
first place, be answered, Because His death presents in a dramatic and
compact form that very devotedness which is diffused through every part
of His life. Between the life and the death there is the same difference
as between sheet lightning and forked lightning, between the diffused
heat of the sun and the same heat focussed upon a point through a lens.
It discloses what was actually but latently there. The life and the
death of Christ are one and mutually explain each other. From the life
we learn that no motive can have prompted Christ to die but the one
motive which ruled Him always--the desire to do all God willed in men's
behalf. We cannot interpret the death as anything else than a consistent
part of a deliberate work undertaken for men's good. It was not an
accident; it was not an external necessity: it was, as the whole life
was, a willing acceptance of the uttermost that was required to set men
on a higher level and unite them to God. But as the life throws this
light upon the death of Christ, how that light is gathered up and thrown
abroad in world-wide reflection from the death of Christ! For here His
self-sacrifice shines completed and perfect; here it is exhibited in
that tragic and supreme form which in all cases arrests attention and
commands respect. Even when a man of wasted life sacrifices himself at
last, and in one heroic act saves another by his death, his past life is
forgotten or seems to be redeemed by his death, and at all events we own
the beauty and the pathos of the deed. A martyr to the faith may have
been but a poor creature, narrow, harsh and overbearing, vain and
vulgar in spirit; but all the past is blotted out, and our attention is
arrested on the blazing pile or the bloody scaffold. So the death of
Christ, though but a part of the self-sacrificing life, yet stands by
itself as the culmination and seal of that life; it catches the eye and
strikes the mind, and conveys at one view the main impression made by
the whole life and character of Him who gave Himself upon the cross.

But Christ is no mere hero or teacher sealing his truth with his blood;
nor is it enough to say tha