tle varies his expressions in this context; speaking of
Christ's death only by that grim name, and of the death of His servants
as being merely a slumber, we have for the first thought suggested in
reference to Christ's death, that it exhausted all the bitterness of
death. Physically, the sufferings of our Lord were not greater, they
were even less, than that of many a man. His voluntary acceptance of
them was peculiar to Himself. But His death stands alone in this, that
on His head was concentrated the whole awfulness of the thing. So far as
the mere external facts go, there is nothing special about it. But I
know not how the shrinking of Jesus Christ from the Cross can be
explained without impugning His character, unless we see in His death
something far more terrible than is the common lot of men. To me
Gethsemane is altogether mysterious, and that scene beneath the olives
shatters to pieces the perfectness of His character, unless we recognise
that there it was the burden of the world's sin, beneath which, though
His will never faltered, His human power tottered. Except we understand
that, it seems to me that many who derived from Jesus Christ all their
courage, bore their martyrdom better than He did; and that the servant
has many a time been greater than his Lord. But if we take the Scripture
point of view, and say, 'The Lord has made to meet upon Him the iniquity
of us all,' then we can understand the agony beneath the olives, and
the cry from the Cross, 'Why hast Thou forsaken Me?'

Further, I would notice that this death is by the Apostle set forth as
being the main factor in man's redemption. This is the first of Paul's
letters, dating long before the others with which we are familiar.
Whatever may have been the spiritual development of St. Paul in certain
directions after his conversion--and I do not for a moment deny that
there was such--it is very important to notice that the fundamentals of
his Christology and doctrine of salvation were the same from the
beginning to the end, and that in this, his first utterance, he lays
down, as emphatically and clearly as ever afterwards he did, the great
truth that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who died on the Cross, thereby
secured man's redemption. Here he isolates the death from the rest of
the history of Christ, and concentrates the whole light of his thought
upon the Cross, and says, There! that is the power by which men have
been redeemed. I beseech you to ask you