Let the merciful, the wondrous forbearance of Christ be a lesson to ourselves in the endurance of the taunts of a scornful world and of the Father of lies. How easily might He have resented and answered the challenge by a descent from the cross, by having the pierced feet and hands set free,--the crown of thorns replaced by a diadem of glory, scattering the scoffing crew like chaff before the whirlwind! But in meek, majestic silence the Lamb of God suffers Himself to be bound, the Victim gives no struggle. Let them scoff on! He will save others, Himself he will not save! Nor did all their scoffing, their taunts and ridicule, tend for a solitary moment to shake His confidence in His heavenly Father. These fell like spent spray on the Rock of Ages. When the cup of trembling was in His hands, sinking humanity for the moment seemed to stagger. He breathed the prayer, "_Let it pass from me_." But immediately He added the condition of unswerving _filial trust, "Nevertheless, O my Father, not as_ I _will, but as_ THOU WILT." Even in the crisis of all, when He was mourning the eclipse of that Father's countenance--in that last gasp of superhuman agony, He proclaims, in answer to the taunts of earth and hell, His unshaken trust, "MY GOD, MY GOD!" Comforting surely to the reviled, the ridiculed, and persecuted, that, severe and poignant as their sorrow is, they are undergoing only what their Lord and Master, in an inconceivably more awful form, experienced before them! Yes! think how He had to encounter the ingratitude of faithless, the treachery of trusted friends. The limbs He healed brought no succour--the tongues He unloosed lisped no accents of compassion--the eyes He unsealed gave no looks of love. Those lips that spake as never man spake, dropping wherever they went balm-words of mercy, now in vain make the appeal to the scoffing crowd, "_Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends, for the hand of God hath touched me_!" Oh, when in deeper than the water-floods of Gilead, this wounded HART of Heaven lay panting and bleeding under the curse,--when arrow after arrow was poured upon Him from the shafts of men, and the bitter cry resounded in His dying ears, _Where is thy God?_--how did He answer? what was His response? Listen to the apostle's sublime comment on that scene of blended love and suffering--"_Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He_ THREATENED NOT; BUT COMMITTED HIMSELF TO HIM THAT JUDGETH RIGHTEOUSLY."