e men, saying,
"This is my body which is given for you." Likewise after supper He
took the cup, and when He had blest it gave it to them, saying, "This
is my blood of the covenant which is shed for you and for many for the
remission of sins. Do this in remembrance of me." It would seem
from this that the one thing which Jesus was desirous that all His
followers should remember was the fact that He had laid down His life
for them. One can not read the gospels without feeling that he is
being borne steadily and irresistibly toward the cross.

When we get out of the gospels into the epistles we find ourselves
face to face with the same tragic and glorious fact. Peter's first
letter is not a theological treatise. He is not writing a dissertation
on the person of Christ, or attempting to give any interpretation of
the death of Jesus; he is dealing with very practical matters. He
exhorts the Christians who are discouraged and downhearted to hold up
their heads and to be brave. It is interesting to see how again
and again he puts the cross behind them in order to keep them from
slipping back. "Endure," he says, "because Christ suffered for us.
Who his own self bore our sins in his own body on the tree." The
Christians of that day had been overtaken by furious persecution.
They were suffering all sorts of hardships and disappointments. But
"suffer," he says, "because Christ has once suffered for sins, the
just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God." Certainly the
gospel, according to St. Peter, was: Christ died for our sins.

Read the first letter of St. John, and everywhere it breathes the
same spirit which we have found in the gospels and in St. Peter. John
punctuates almost every paragraph with some reference to the cross.
In the first chapter he is talking about sin. "The blood of Jesus
Christ," he says, "cleanses us from all sins." In the second chapter
he is talking about forgiveness, and this leads him to think at once
of Jesus Christ, the righteous, "who is the propitiation for our sins,
and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world." In the
third chapter he is talking about brotherly love. He is urging the
members of the Church to lay down their lives, one for another,
"Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for
us." In the fourth chapter he tells of the great mystery of Christ's
love: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us,
and sent his Son to be t