there no like grace in God, the fount of grace? Has God, whose name is
Love, never dared, never suffered, even to the death, in the mightiness
of a perfect Love?

We Christians say that He has. We say so, because it has been revealed
to us, not by flesh and blood, not by brain or nerves, not by logic or
emotions, but by the Spirit of God, to whom our inmost spirits and
highest reasons have made answer--A God who has suffered for man? That
is so beautiful, that it must be true.

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.