And, as we stand facing the Crucified, we cannot escape a sense of personal connection with that tragedy.  The solidarity of the human family in all its generations has been brought home to us in countless ways by modern teachers; we are members one of another, and as we scan the cross this is a family catastrophe in which the actors are our kinsmen, and the blood of the Victim stains us as sharers of our brothers’ crime.  And, further, as we look into the motives of Christ’s murderers—­devout Pharisee and conservative Sadducee, Roman politician and false friend, bawling rabble and undiscriminating soldiery, the host of indifferent or approving faces of the public behind them—­they seem strangely familiar to us.  They have been, they are still, alive by turns in us.  The harmless spark of electricity that greets the touch of one’s hand on a metal knob on a winter’s day is one with the bolt of lightning that wrecks a giant oak.  The selfish impulse, the narrow prejudice, the ignorant suspicion, the callous indifference, the self-satisfied respectability, which frequently dominate us and determine our decisions, are one with that cruel combination of motives which drove the nails in the hands and feet of the Son of God.  Still further, the suffering of Jesus never seems to an acute conscience something that happened once, but is over now.  The Figure that hung and bled on the tree centuries ago becomes indissolubly joined in our thought with every life today that is the victim of similar misunderstanding and neglect, injustice and brutality; and, while our sense of social responsibility charges us with complicity in all the wrong and woe of our brethren, that haunting Form on Calvary hangs before our eyes, and

  Makes me feel it was my sin,
  As though no other sin there were,
  That was to Him who bears the world
  A load that He could scarcely bear.

We may say to ourselves that this is fanciful, that we were not the Sanhedrin who condemned Jesus, nor the Roman procurator who ordered His execution, nor the scoffing soldiers who carried out his command; but the conscience which the cross itself creates charges us with participation in the murder of the Son of God.  That cross becomes an inescapable fact in our moral world, an element in our outlook upon duty, a factor tingeing life with tragic somberness.  It forces upon us the conviction that it is all too possible for us to reenact Golgotha, and by doing or failing to do, directly or indirectly, for one of the least of Christ’s brethren to crucify Him afresh, and put Him to an open shame.

But if the cross seems to color life somberly, it also gilds it with glory.  As we follow Christ, we discover more and more clearly that all which we possess of greatest worth has come to us, and keeps coming to us, through Him.  What he endured centuries ago on that hill without the city wall is a wellspring of inspiration flowing up in the purest and finest motives in the life of today.  There is a direct