l as with the external consequences of our sin,
as to undergo this most terrible result of man's transgression.

(vii) And He felt the full agony of it as realising, what none but the
Sinless One could realise, the horror of sin as separation from God.

In a word, the Cry represents the culmination of our Lord's sufferings, a
real experience of His human consciousness.

The experience was "objective," as all states of consciousness are. Our
sensations are as objective as "material things." It was, as we have
just said, real: inasmuch as the only definition of reality is that which
is included in personal experience.

Thus understood, this fourth word teaches us at least two valuable
lessons.

1. It discloses to us the Mind of Christ, which is to be our own mind,
in its outlook upon human sin. We, if "the same mind" is to be in us
"which was also in Christ Jesus," must hate sin, and our sins, not
because of any results or penalties external to sin, but because sin
separates us from God, our true life. The worst punishment of sin, is
sin itself. Into depths which make us tremble as we strive to gaze into
them, Christ our Lord descended to deliver us from that deadly thing
which is destroying our life. That appalling Cry burst from His lips,
that we might learn to fear and dread sin worse than any pang of physical
pain.

2. This Word, again, discloses the Mind of Christ, true Man, in its
relation to God. He possessed fullest self-consciousness both as God and
as Man. Thus He Himself alone knew, in their absolute fulness, the joy
and the strength which come from the communion of man with God. That joy
and that strength, in the measure in which we can attain to their
realisation, are to be the goal of all our striving. Thus this Word has
for us more than a merely negative teaching. Not only are we to shrink
from that which destroys union with God. We must seek far more earnestly
to make that union a greater and a deeper reality. This end we can
achieve by making our prayers more deliberate acts of conscious communion
with that Person Who is not merely above us, but in us, and in Whom "we
live, and move, and have our being." We must all make the confession
that we have not yet nearly realised all that prayer might be to us, if
only we were more energetic, more strenuous, more utterly in earnest, in
our attempts to pray. It is by prayer that we are to attain to our
complete manhood, to "win our souls,"