How can we better realise this power of God than by taking St. Paul's statement as our starting-point? The Cross of Christ is "the power of God." The Cross is the central revelation of God. The Cross has not unfrequently been preached as a narrow technicality which shocks the conscience and freezes the heart. It thus becomes a mere forensic subtlety. But the Cross of Christ, taught in all its length and breadth and height and depth--the Cross of Christ taught as St. Paul taught it--the Cross of Christ, starting from the Incarnation on the one side, and leading up to the Resurrection and Ascension on the other, contains all the elements of moral regeneration and of spiritual life. (1) It is first of all a lesson of _righteousness_. It is the great rebuke of sin, the great assurance of judgment, the great call to repentance. Think--no, you cannot think, it defies all thinking--yet strive to think, what is implied in the human birth, the human life, the human suffering, the human death of the Eternal Word. Ask yourselves what condescension, what sacrifice, what humiliation is involved in this. Summon to your aid all analogies of self-renunciation which history records or imagination suggests. They will all fail you. No reiteration of the finite can compass the infinite. You are lost in awe at the contemplation. And while your brain is reeling with the effort, try and imagine the awe, the majesty, the glory of a righteousness which could only thus be vindicated. Then, after looking upward to God, look inward into your own heart, and see how heinous, how loathsome, how guilty your guilt must be, which has cost such a sacrifice as this. God's righteousness--your sin,--these are brought face to face in the Cross of Christ.