But just wherein does the dying of Christ become an example for us?  This final surrender to the Father of a will that had never been separate from the Father,—­what can we derive from all that?  There are many lines of approach and application.  I can only touch on one or two:—­

“I have glorified Thee on the earth,” our Lord said in the last wonderful prayer, “I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do.”  And here on the Cross He repeats, “It is finished.”  When we think of this we are impressed with the steadiness with which our Lord pursued His purpose, with the way He concentrated His whole life upon His work.  He declined to be drawn aside by anything irrelevant to it.  People came to Him with all sorts of requests, from the request that He will settle a disputed inheritance to the request that He will become their king; and He puts them all aside as having no pertinence to His mission.  It is interesting to go through the Gospel and note just what are the details of this winnowing process; mark what our Lord accepts as relevant to His mission and what not.  He is never too occupied or tired to attend to what belongs to His work.  An ill old woman or idiot child is important to Him and He attends to them; but He declines the sort of work that will involve Him and His mission in controversy and politics.  He is not a reformer of society but a reformer of men.  He knows that only by the reformation of men can society be reformed.

There is no doubt much to be learned from the study of our Lord’s method of the limits of the social and political activity of His Church.  It has constantly fallen a victim to the temptation to undertake the reform of the world by some other means than the conversion of it.  It has shown itself quite willing to be made “a judge and divider.”  It has not always declined the invitation it has received to assume the purple.  “Your business is to reform this miserable world which so sadly and so obviously needs you,” men say to it; “You are not living up to your principles and you are neglecting your duty by not supporting this great movement for the betterment of the race,” others say.  Still others urge, “You are losing great masses of men through your inexplicable failure to adopt their cause.”  And the Church in the whole course of its history has constantly yielded to this temptation, and has not seen until too late that in so doing it was making itself the tool or the cat’s-paw of one interest or another whose sole interest in religion was the possibility of exploiting the influence of the Church.  In the stupid hope of forwarding its spiritual interests the Church has entangled itself with the responsibilities of temporal power; it has made itself the backer of “the divine right of kings”; and it has found itself bound hand and foot in the character of a national or state Church; and with a curious incapacity to learn anything from experience is now enthusiastically cheering for democracy!  Poor Church, whose leaders are so constantly misleaders.