And so to-day on this most solemn anniversary of religious history, while it is, as the passage says of this interview with Pilate, "yet early," let us set before ourselves, the issue just as it is now and just as it was then. This morning demands of any honest-minded man an answer to the question: "On which side do I propose to stand?" It is not a demand for absoluteness of conviction or unwavering loyalty, but it is a summons to recognize that Jesus Christ died on this day largely at the hands of intellectual dilettanteism and indifferentism,--the peculiar and besetting sin of the cultivated and academic life. On which side, then, do I propose to stand; with the cultivated neutral and his skillful {162} questioning: What is truth? or with the prisoner who in this early morning says: "Every one who is of the truth heareth my voice;" with Pilate in his neutrality or with Jesus on his cross? {163} LXV THE FINISHED LIFE _John_ xix. 30. (PASSION WEEK--SATURDAY) The last word of Jesus as he gives up his spirit is: "It is finished." But was it what could be called a finished life? Was it not, on the contrary, a terribly unfinished life, prematurely cut short, without any visible effect of his work, and with everything left to live for? Surely, if some sympathetic friend of Jesus had been telling of his death, one of the first things he would be tempted to say would be this: "What a fearful pity it was that he died so soon! What a loss it was to us all that he left his life unfinished. Think what might have happened if he could only have lived to sixty and had had thirty years for his ministry instead of three!" And yet, as Jesus said, it was a finished life; for completeness in life is not a thing of quantity, but of quality. What seems to be a fragment may be in reality the most perfect thing on earth. You stand in {164} some museum before a Greek statue, imperfect, mutilated, a fragment of what it was meant to be. And yet, as you look at it, you say: "Here is perfect art. It is absolutely right; the ideal which modern art may imitate, but which it never hopes to attain." Or, what again shall we say of those young men of our civil war, dying at twenty-five at the head of their troops, pouring out all the promise of their life in one splendid instant? Did they then die prematurely? Was not their life a finished life? What more could they ever have done with it? Why do we write their names on our monuments so that our young men may read of these heroes, except that they may say to us that life may be completed, if one will, even at twenty? All of life that is worth living is sometimes offered to a man not in a lifetime, but in a day.