than their own Maker? Shall we say this, and suppose that they, when
they attributed self-sacrifice to God, made indeed a God in their own
image, but a God of greater love, greater pity, greater graciousness
because of greater unselfishness, than Him who really exists?

Shall we say this, the very words whereof confute themselves and shock
alike our reason and our conscience? Or shall we say with St John and
with St Paul, that if men can be so good, God must be infinitely better;
that if man can love so much, God must love more; if man, by shaking off
the selfishness which is his bane, can do such deeds, then God, in whom
is no selfishness at all, may at least have done a deed as far above
theirs as the heavens are above the earth? Shall we not confess that
man's self-sacrifice is but a poor and dim reflection of the
self-sacrifice of God, and say with St John, "Herein is love, not that we
loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation
for our sins;" and with St Paul, "Scarcely for a righteous man would one
die, but God commendeth His love to us in this, that while we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us"? Shall we not say this: and find, as
thousands have found ere now, in the Cross of Calvary the perfect
satisfaction of our highest moral instincts, the realization in act and
fact of the highest idea which we can form of perfect condescension,
namely, self-sacrifice exercised by a Being of whom perfect
condescension, love and self-sacrifice were not required by aught in
heaven or earth, save by the necessity of His own perfect and
inconceivable goodness?

We reverence, and rightly, the majesty of God. How can that infinite
majesty be proved more perfectly than by condescension equally infinite?
We adore, and justly, the serenity of God, who has neither parts nor
passions. How can that serenity be proved more perfectly, than by
passing, still serene, through all the storm and crowd of circumstance
which disturb the weak serenity of man; by passing through poverty,
helplessness, temptation, desertion, shame, torture, death; and passing
through them all victorious and magnificent; with a moral calm as
undisturbed, a moral purity as unspotted, as it had been from all
eternity, as it will be to all eternity, in that abysmal source of being,
which we call the Bosom of the Father? It is the moral majesty of God,
as shewn on Calvary, which I uphold. Shew that Calvary was not
inconsistent wit