For otherwise we should be left—­as I have argued at length elsewhere—­in this strange paradox:—­that man has fancied to himself for 1800 years a more beautiful God, a nobler God, a better God than the God who actually exists.  It must be so, if God is not capable of that highest virtue of self-sacrifice, while man has been believing that He is, and that upon the first Good Friday He sacrificed Himself for man, out of the intensity of a boundless Love.  A better God imagined by man, than the actual God who made man?  We have only to state that absurdity, I trust, to laugh it to scorn.

Let us confess, then, that the Passion of Christ, and the mystery of Good Friday, is as reasonable a belief to the truly wise, as it is comfortable to the weary and the suffering; let us agree that one of the wisest of Englishmen, of late gone to his rest, spoke well when he said, “As long as women and sorrow exist on earth, so long will the gospel of Christianity find an echo in the human heart.”  Let it find an echo in yours.  But it will only find one, in as far as you can enter into the mystery of Passion-week; in as far as you can learn from Passion-week the truest and highest theology; and see what God is like, and therefore what you must try to be like likewise.

Let us think, then, awhile of the mystery of Passion-week; the mystery of the Cross of Christ.  Christ Himself was looking on the coming Cross, during this Passion-week; ay, and for many a week before.  Nay rather, had He not looked on it from all eternity?  For is He not the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world?  Therefore we may well look on it with Him.  It may seem, at first, a painful bight.  But shall it cast over our minds only gloom and darkness?  Or shall we not see on the Cross the full revelation of Light; of the Light which lightens every man that comes into the world:  and find that painful, not because of its darkness, but as the blaze of full sunshine is painful, from unbearable intensity of warmth and light?  Let us see.

On the Cross of Calvary, then, God the Father shewed His own character and the character of His co-equal and co-eternal Son, and of The Spirit which proceeds from both.  For there He spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us.  On the Cross of Calvary, not by the will of man, but by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, was offered before God the one and only full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sin of the whole world.  God Himself did this.  It was not done by any other being to alter His will; it was done to fulfil His will.  It was not done to satisfy God’s anger; it was done to satisfy God’s love.  Therefore Good Friday was well and wisely called by our forefathers Good Friday; because it shews, as no other day can do, that God is good; that God’s will to men, in spite of all their sins, is a good will; that so boundless, so utterly unselfish and condescending, is the eternal love of God, that when an insignificant race in a small and remote planet fell, and went wrong, and was in danger of ruin, there was nothing that God would not dare, God would not suffer, for the sake of even such as us, vile earth and miserable sinners.