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which alone can redeem the world. that Christ asked of mankind wherewith to save it was a Cross on which to die.

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Let us try to think more worthily of the salvation thus accomplished; try to think of it far otherwise than as a magical performance or a judicial transaction. The efficacy of Christ's life cannot be assessed in forensic terms. It is by revealing itself as the world's most deeply-grounded and beneficent law, that the Cross saves the world. All that Christ asked of mankind wherewith to save it was an opportunity to reveal the name and nature of its God. The summit of that revelation was Calvary. the lesson of the sacrifice the anniversary of which approaches, if we fail to see it as a temporal and economic manifestation of an eternal and essential truth. The story of Calvary is not a symbolic tradition, which requires to be interpreted idealistically, but, nevertheless, the historical event does not exhaust the meaning of what is an eternal tragedy. The Cross is the expression and interpretation in time of what has been forever taking place; taking place in the

mystery of God's nature, in the Holy Trinity. God is, He exists by being, Love. From the foundation of the world, He also has found Himself in losing Himself. In an infinite process of Love, in an eternal act of Sacrifice, forever stream and have streamed, each into the bosoms of the others, Whom in our poor speech we name Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The revelation which the Son perfected on Calvary was the revelation of the Social Life of God.

These heights of thought we may not ascend. Closing our studies, it behooved us thus far to adventure, that we might gain view of the certainty of the world-victory prepared for Love. Because God is, we may reverently say, a Divine Society, the interests of human society are not foreign to Him, neither can they be by Him abandoned. God's very self is pledged to the triumph of that which is the constitution itself of His nature,-to the triumph of uncalculating Love,-to the success of the silly programme which Christ enjoined. What the operation of Love makes Him, it must be His will a like process should make

the world. As Mercy and Justice, Law and Liberty, and all the elements of the problems of the Absolute, are reconciled in the unity of His Love, His will must be that our contradictions shall be solved and set at rest by the confession that human society must be a society of Love.

What I am struggling to help you feel is that the plan which Jesus followed, and which He commends to us, is in correspondence with the most profound principles of the universe and the divine life. The conceit of the Fathers, that it is an infinite Cross imprinted on space which binds the heights and depths and breadths and sustains the universe, is a poetic statement of a stupendous truth. Therefore is it that the despised symbol has been able to lift itself above the centuries in a splendour that grows more glorious as time increasingly reveals the power in Sacrifice. The roods whereon Christ reigns from the Cross tell a truer story than those on which He hangs in agony. The words of the Christian Cicero are not extravagant: the hands extended in the Passion are to welcome a great host

coming to receive upon their foreheads the most august sign.29 The success of the Obedience of Christ is guaranteed not alone by the victory which already He has achieved, but by the invincibility of the Supreme Will Who has created the universe, and ordered it according to laws which flow from out the treasuries of His Nature of Love.

The New Obedience! here it is, then; I know not whether a vain imagining, or a proposal destined under God to be a movement for the hastening of the triumph of His Church, or, what at least it may be allowed to be, a phrase which is nothing and less than nothing, but which stands for an old conception and endeavour which must be undertaken with a new vigour. It is an expression of faith in Christ, pre-eminently. It stands in connection with that large thought of the illuminating power of Obedience, which in beginning I tried to open to you. It seeks the application and energizing of the New Learning. It has stern demands to make upon individuals, churches

and nations.

It is revolutionary-not violently so, but as education and all progressive movements are, quietly revolutionary. It does not break with the past; it carries on and completes it. It knows that the Kingdom of Heaven is not a fortress to be taken by storm, but a fair city which shall more perfectly appear as in the light of Truth increasing through Obedience the false, the ugly, the incomplete, fade away and disappear.

The New Obedience! it has come into the world with its proposal and its promise. God will raise up its preachers and it will win its disciples, or, once for all, our religion will have met its day and have failed. Do not fear. It will not fail. The divine folly of Love is the victory forever. It will triumph in the Church, and the Church in the world. During these weeks there has been before us the figure of One who rendered to the utmost the Obedience which He requires. His now is the power and the glory, and enthroned He assures us of the prevailing potency of submission to the Law of Love. "He became obedient unto death, even the death of