calmness, most pathetic from its perfect simplicity. But the passage of
St Paul which I have chosen for my text gives us an explanation of those
facts which is utterly amazing. That He who stooped to die upon the
Cross is Very God of Very God, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe,
is a thought so overwhelming, whenever we try to comprehend even a part
of it in our small imaginations, that it is no wonder if, in all ages,
many a pious soul, as it contemplated the Cross of Christ, has been rapt
itself into a passion of gratitude, an ecstasy of wonder and of love,
which is beautiful, honourable, just, and in the deepest sense most
rational, whenever it is spontaneous and natural.

But there have been thousands, as there may be many here to-day, of
colder temperament; who would distrust in themselves, even while they
respected in others, any violence of religious emotion: yet they too have
found, and you too may find, in contemplating the Passion of Christ, a
satisfaction deeper than that of any emotion; a satisfaction not to the
heart, still less to the brain, but to that far deeper and diviner
faculty within us all--our moral sense; that God-given instinct which
makes us discern and sympathise with all that is beautiful and true and
good.

And so it has befallen, for eighteen hundred years, that thousands who
have thought earnestly and carefully on God and on the character of God,
on man and on the universe, and on their relation to Him who made them
both, have found in the Incarnation and the Passion of the Son of God the
perfect satisfaction of their moral wants; the surest key to the facts of
the spiritual world; the complete assurance that, in spite of all seeming
difficulties and contradictions, the Maker of the world was a Righteous
Being, who had founded the world in righteousness; that the Father of
Spirits was a perfect Father, who in His only-begotten Son had shewn