way, as the
scripture has it, by "the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of
God." Was it really so? Was the whole dreadful drama merely a
programme to be gone through in all its appointed stages, ending with
the cry of the victim, "It is finished"?

There is one sense, and only one, in which such a deed can be said to
have been by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and that
is that God did not interfere to save Jesus from the last dread ordeal.
He allowed wickedness to do its worst, and thereby made the
disinterested nobleness of the character of Jesus all the clearer. In
such a time as that in which Jesus lived such a life as His was sure to
end on a Calvary of some kind, unless He ran away from it, or God
supernaturally intervened to save Him. Neither event happened. If
Jesus had shrunk from the full consequences of His actions; if He had
temporised, concealed Himself, tried to gain time, or adopted any other
subterfuge or expedient in order to save His life--that life would not
have the moral power it possesses or shine with such glorious lustre in
the world to-day. Supernatural interference would have dimmed the
moral beauty of the faith, courage, and perfect self-devotion of Jesus.
The moral worth of any act of self-sacrifice, no matter on what scale
it is performed, is dependent upon the fact that it is done without
regard to consequences. If we could see with absolute clearness the
sure and certain result of any action, if we could know, as
unquestionably as that two and two make four, that it would always pay
to do the right thing, the very soul of goodness would have gone out of
it. It is just because we do not know, save with the deeper knowledge
that contradicts appearances,--the knowledge that is rightly termed
faith,--that an unselfish action is in accord with the general
rightness of the universe, and therefore must prevail in the end, that
there is anything praiseworthy in it. The determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God were that this should be fully demonstrated in the
experience of Jesus, as it has been in the experience of many a one of
His followers since. Once more therefore we come to the last word of
the cosmos, manifestation by sacrifice; and the experience of Jesus is
the sum and centre of it all. The reason why the name of Jesus has
such power in the world to-day is because a perfectly noble and
unselfish life was crowned by a perfectly sacrificial death. Both