It thus appears that our Lord’s crucifixion was the culminating struggle in the never-ceasing battle between right and wrong, righteousness and sin, in which the history of mankind consists. Our Lord appeared as the representative of absolute righteousness, and He was put to death because men could not endure that righteousness. In His rejection by the Jews and His crucifixion by the Roman Governor, the highest official representatives of human righteousness at that time and place combined to condemn themselves. But they could not have consummated that sacrifice without the consent and even co-operation of our Lord Himself. He had power, if He had chosen to exert it, to destroy them and assert His Divine supremacy. “Thinkest thou,” He said, “that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently give Me more than twelve legions of angels? But how, then, shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” Instead of destroying His enemies, He submitted to be put to death Himself. He allowed the unrighteousness of human nature to break in full force upon His own head; He Himself became its victim, and a victim of such infinite greatness as to constitute an expiation for all the sin of mankind. Sin and evil can only be avenged by an adequate exhibition and endurance of their consequences. But that endurance and that manifestation were afforded, in the highest conceivable form, in the destruction, so far as men could effect it, of perfect goodness and holiness. That was what our Lord’s submission to the Cross involved. When that expiation had been made to God and God’s righteousness, our Lord assumed His full authority as a Saviour and a Judge, and, by His Resurrection and Ascension, established the Kingdom of Heaven in all its grace and power. Henceforth men have lived under that dispensation of love as well as of justice, and the Cross has been held aloft among them as the means and the assurance of forgiveness and of grace.