In contrast with all this, Christianity bids the Hindu ascetic cease from his self-mortification and become himself a herald of Glad Tidings.  It invites the hook-swinger to renounce his useless torture and accept the availing sacrifice of Him who hung upon the Cross.  It relieves woman from the power of Satan, as exercised in those cruel disabilities which false systems have imposed upon her, and assigns her a place of honor in the kingdom of God.  The world has not done scoffing at the idea of a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of men, and yet it has advanced so far that its best thinkers, even without any religious bias, are agreed that the principle of self-sacrifice is the very highest element of character that man can aspire to.  And this is tantamount to an acknowledgment that the great principle which the Cross illustrates, and on which the salvation of the race is made to rest, is the crowning glory of all ethics and must be therefore the germinal principle of all true religion.

Christianity with its doctrine of voluntary Divine Sacrifice was no after-thought.  Paul speaks of it as “the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations but now is made manifest.”  It was the one great mystery which angels had desired to look into and for which the whole world had waited in travail and expectation.  Christ was “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” and the entire world-history has proceeded under an economy of grace.  And I repeat, its fundamental principle of sacrifice, exemplified as it has been through the Christian centuries, has won the recognition even of those who were not themselves the followers of Christ.  “The history of self-sacrifice during the last eighteen hundred years,” says Lecky, “has been mainly the history of the action of Christianity upon the world.  Ignorance and error have no doubt often directed the heroic spirit into wrong channels, and sometimes even made it a cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and beauty, the enlarged conception and persuasive power of the Christian faith that have chiefly called it into being; and it is by their influence alone that it can be permanently maintained."[208] Speaking of the same principle Carlyle says:  “It is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin....  In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.”  And George Sand in still stronger terms has said, “There is but one sole virtue in the world—­the Eternal Sacrifice of self.”

While we ponder these testimonies coming from such witnesses we remember how the Great Apostle traces this wonder-working principle back to its Divine Source, and from that Source down into all the commonest walks of life when he says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation, and took on Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:  and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.”  Or when he reminds the Corinthians that, though Christ was rich, yet for their sake He became poor, that they through His poverty might be rich.