And is not that fresh goodness, which we have not defined
yet, the very kind of goodness which we prize most in human beings? The
very kind of goodness which makes us prize and admire love, because
without it there is no true love, no love worth calling by that sacred
and heavenly name? And what is that?

What--save self-sacrifice? For what is the love worth which does not
shew itself in action; and more, which does not shew itself in Passion,
in the true sense of that word, which this week teaches us: namely, in
suffering? Not merely in acting for, but in daring, in struggling, in
grieving, in agonizing, and, if need be, in dying for, the object of its
love?

Every mother in this church will give but one answer to that question;
for mothers give it among the very animals; and the deer who fights for
her fawn, the bird who toils for her nestlings, the spider who will
rather die than drop her bag of eggs, know at least that love is not
worth calling love, unless it can dare and suffer for the thing it loves.
The most gracious of all virtues, therefore, is self-sacrifice; and is
there no like grace in God, the fount of grace? Has God, whose name is
Love, never dared, never suffered, even to the death, in the mightiness
of a perfect Love?

We Christians say that He has. We say so, because it has been revealed
to us, not by flesh and blood, not by brain or nerves, not by logic or
emotions, but by the Spirit of God, to whom our inmost spirits and
highest reasons have made answer--A God who has suffered for man? That
is so beautiful, that it must be true.

For otherwise we should be left--as I have argued at length elsewhere--in
this strange paradox:--that man has fancied to himself for 1800 years a
more beautiful God, a nobler God, a better God than the God who actually
exists. It must be so, if God is not capable of that highest virtue of
self-sacrifice, while man has been believing that He is, and that upon
the first Good Friday He sacrificed Himself for man, out of the intensity
of a boundless Love. A better God imagined by man, than the actual God
who made man? We have only to state that absurdity, I trust, to laugh it
to scorn.

Let us confess, then, that the Passion of Christ, and the mystery of Good
Friday, is as reasonable a belief to the truly wise, as it is comfortable
to the weary and the suffering; let us agree that one of the wisest of
Englishmen, of late gone to his rest, spoke well when he sai