joined, just as He underwent John’s baptism of repentance, though Himself sinless, in order to fulfil all righteousness.  He regarded Himself as indebted; His work, His teaching, His suffering, His death, were not to Him a gift which He was at liberty to make or to withhold.  In the “must” so often on His lips we cannot miss the sense of social obligation.  He was (to borrow suggestive lines of Shelley’s)

      a nerve o’er which do creep
  The else unfelt oppressions of the earth.

They came home to His conscience, and He could not shake them off.  They were so many claims on Him; He felt He owed the world a life, and He was ready to pay the debt to the last drop of His blood.  “The Son of man must suffer and be killed.”  To the end He cast about for some less awful way of meeting His obligations.  “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from Me.”  But when no other alternative seemed conscientiously possible to Him, He went to Golgotha with a sense of moral satisfaction. “Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things?” Without any disturbing consciousness of having personally added to the world’s evil, with no plea for pardon for His own sins on His lips but only for those of others, His conscience was burdened with the injustice and disloyalties, the brutalities and failures, of the family of God, in which He was a Son, and He bore His brothers’ sins on His spirit, and gave Himself to the utmost to end them.

A third disclosure of the cross is the incomparable sympathy of the Victim.  How shall we account for His recoil from the thought of dying, for His shrinking from this death as from something which sickened Him, for the darkness and anguish of His soul in Gethsemane at the prospect, and for the abysmal sense of forsakenness on the cross?  His sensitiveness of heart made Him feel the pain and shame of other men, a pain and shame they were frequently too stolid and obtuse to feel.  He could not see able-bodied and willing workmen standing idle in the marketplace because no man had hired them, without sharing their discouragement and bitterness, nor prodigals making fools of themselves without feeling the disgrace of their unfilial folly.  His parables are so vivid because He has Himself lived in the experiences of others. “Cor cordium” is the inscription placed upon Shelley’s grave; and it is infinitely more appropriate for the Man of Nazareth.  In His sensitive sympathy we are aware of

  Desperate tides of the whole great world’s anguish
    Forc’d through the channels of a single heart.