And, above all, He is that revelation in the supreme act of love and sacrifice upon the Cross. "In this have we come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us." We have come to know love, in its supreme manifestation of itself, for ever the test, the standard of all true love; and in coming to know love, we have necessarily come to know God. The Cross is the perfect self-utterance and disclosure of the Mind of God, the crowning revelation of His Word. And in coming to know God, we have come to know ourselves. For the true self of man is the self conformed perfectly to the Divine Life within him. Thus the Cross of Jesus Christ is the crowning revelation of man, as well as of God. There, side by side with humanity marred and wrecked and spoilt by sin, which is selfishness, we see man as God made him, as God meant him to be, clothed with the Divine beauty and glory of self-sacrifice. In the Cross we see ourselves, our true selves, not as we have made ourselves, but our real and genuine selves, as we exist in the Mind of God. In the light of that wonderful revelation, we can recognise that which is Divine and Christ-like in us, that spirit which bids us seek not the things of self, but the things of others, "even as Christ pleased not Himself." All this may be summed up in one short phrase, which goes near, I believe, to express the innermost reality of the Christian religion. Christ, the Son of man, is the true self of every man. To follow Him, to be His disciple, in thought, and word, and deed, is to be oneself, to realise one's own personality. In no other way can I attain to be myself. Thus the Cross is the supreme revelation of the Divine Life in man. And now we shall go on to see how it brings to us, not merely the knowledge of the Ideal, but also, what is far more, the very means whereby the Ideal may be realised in and by each one of us. We have dealt with the Cross as illumination; we now approach its consideration as redemptive power. V THE GREAT RECONCILIATION "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." 2 COR. V. 19. Such considerations as we have had before us, are of far more than theoretical interest. They are of all questions the most practical. Sin is not a curious object which we examine from an aloof and external standpoint. However we regard it, to whatever view of its nature we are led, it is, alas, a fact within and not merely outside our experience. And so we are at length brought to this most personal and most urgent inquiry, What has been the result _to me_ of my past acts of sin? I have sinned; what have been, what are, what will be the consequences?