I remember while this mood was on me, that I was much struck with the
absolute loneliness of Jesus, and with His horror of that death upon
the cross. He was young and full of enthusiastic hope, but when He
died He had found hardly anything but misunderstanding. He had written
nothing, so that He could not expect that His life would live after
Him. Nevertheless His confidence in His own errand had risen so high,
that He had not hesitated to proclaim Himself the Messiah: not the
Messiah the Jews were expecting, but still the Messiah. I dreamed over
His walks by the lake, over the deeper solitude of His last visit to
Jerusalem, and over the gloom of that awful Friday afternoon.

The hold which He has upon us is easily explained, apart from the
dignity of His recorded sayings and the purity of His life. There is
no Saviour for us like the hero who has passed triumphantly through the
distress which troubles US. Salvation is the spectacle of a victory by
another over foes like our own. The story of Jesus is the story of the
poor and forgotten. He is not the Saviour for the rich and prosperous,
for they want no Saviour. The healthy, active, and well-to-do need Him
not, and require nothing more than is given by their own health and
prosperity. But every one who has walked in sadness because his
destiny has not fitted his aspirations; every one who, having no
opportunity to lift himself out of his little narrow town or village
circle of acquaintances, has thirsted for something beyond what they
could give him; everybody who, with nothing but a dull, daily round of
mechanical routine before him, would welcome death, if it were
martyrdom for a cause; every humblest creature, in the obscurity of
great cities or remote hamlets, who silently does his or her duty
without recognition--all these turn to Jesus, and find themselves in
Him. He died, faithful to the end, with infinitely higher hopes,