greatness--"He pleased not Himself." By every act He did, every word He
spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him happiness as the aim
and end of man. He reduced it to its true position of a possible
accessory and issue of man's highest fulfilment of life--an issue, the
contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to
its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards
realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard.

Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth,
became a recognised power on the earth. Thenceforth every great teacher
of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever his apparent
tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true,
explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and
worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been the
practical embodiment of it. "Endure hardness," said one of its greatest
apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of Christ." And to the endurance
of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we
ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the
abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of
Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and
trample on His cross.

In no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the
triumph of the Cross--and in it the practical redemption of humanity--will
be near at hand. Yet in no age--not the darkest and most corrupt
Christendom has yet seen--have God and His Christ been without their
witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine,
yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it,
arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it
turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose,