line of ancestry from the best principles in the lives of nations, and of men and women about us, running back to Calvary.  Day after day we find ourselves and the whole world made different because of that tragic occurrence of the past, shamed out of the motives that caused it, and lifted into the life of the Crucified.  A recent dramatist makes the centurion, in the darkness at the foot of the cross, say to Mary:  “I tell you, woman, this dead Son of yours, disfigured, shamed, spat upon, has built a Kingdom this day that can never die.  The living glory of Him rules it.  The earth is His and He made it.  He and His brothers have been molding and making it through the long ages; they are the only ones who ever really did possess it:  not the proud; not the idle; not the vaunting empires of the world.  Something has happened up here on this hill today to shake all our kingdoms of blood and fear to the dust.  The earth is His, the earth is theirs, and they made it.  The meek, the terrible meek, the fierce agonizing meek, are about to enter into their inheritance.”

Nor is this all of which that cross convinces us.  We find ourselves giving that crucified Man our supreme adoration; He is for us that which we cannot but worship.  Instinctively and irresistibly we yield Him our highest reverence, trust and devotion.  As we think out what is involved in the impression He makes upon us, we come to our conception of His deity; and through Him we discover ourselves in touch with the Highest there is in the universe, with the Most High.  Calvary becomes, for those who look trustingly at the Crucified, a window through which we see into the life of the Lord of heaven and earth.  Jesus’ sin-bearing is for us a revelation of the eternal sin-bearing of the God and Father of us all.  Behind the cross of wood outside the gate of Jerusalem we catch sight of a vast, age-enduring cross in the heart of the Eternal, forced on Him generation after generation by His children’s unlikeness to their Father—­forced, but borne by Him, in conscientious devotion to them, as willingly as Jesus went to Golgotha.  If at Calvary we find the rocky coast-line of human thought and feeling opposing the inflow of God, the incoming waters break into the silver spray of speech, and their one word is Love.

In this revelation of our Father is the assurance of our forgiveness.  Such a God is not one who may or may not be gracious, as He wills; it is “His property always to have mercy.”  He would not be just in His own eyes, were He unmerciful; He is just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  Like His Son, He owes us Himself; and His forgiveness is freely ours in the measure that we are able to receive it, that is, in the measure in which we have forgiven others.