Jesus, according to the general declaration of Christian divines, came to die, and what does he teach by his death? The Rev. F.D. Maurice well said, “That he who kills for a faith must be weak, that he who dies for a faith must be strong.” How did Jesus die? Giordano Bruno and Julius Cæsar Vanini were burned, charged with heresy. They died calm, heroic, defiant of wrong. Jesus, who could not die courted death, that he, as God, might accept his own atonement, and might pardon man for a sin which the pardoned man had not committed, and in which he had no share. The death Jesus courted came, and when it came he could not face it, but prayed to himself that he might not die. And at last, when on the cross, if two gospels do him no injustice his last words were a bitter cry of deep despair. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The Rev. Enoch Mellor writing on the Atonement, says, “I seek not to fathom the profound mystery of these words. To understand their full import would require one to experience the agony of desertion they express.” Do the words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” express an “agony” caused by a consciousness of “desertion?” if this be not the meaning conveyed by the despairing death-cry then there is in it no meaning whatever. And if those words do express a “bitter agony of desertion” then they emphatically contradict the teachings of Jesus. “Before Abraham was, I am.” “I and my father are one.” “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” These were the words of Jesus—words conveying an impression that divinity was claimed by the one who uttered them. If Jesus had indeed been God, the words “My God, my God,” would have been a mockery most extreme. God could not have deemed himself forsaken by himself. The dying Jesus, in that despair, confessed himself either the dupe of some other teaching, a self-deluded enthusiast, or an arch-impostor, who in that bitter cry, with the wide-opening of the flood-gates through which life’s stream ran out, confessed aloud that he, at least, was no deity, and deemed himself a God-forsaken man. The garden scene of agony is fitting prelude to this most terrible act. Jesus, who is God, prays to himself: in “agony he prayed most earnestly” (Luke xxii, 44) He refuses to hear his own prayers, and he, the omnipotent, is forearmed against his coming trial by an angel from heaven, who “strengthened” the great Creator. Was Jesus the Son of God? Praying, he said “Father the hour is come, glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee.” (John xvii, 2) And was he glorified? His death and resurrection most strongly disbelieved in the very city where they are alleged to have happened. His doctrines rejected by the only people to whom he preached them. His miracles denied by the only nation amongst whom they are alleged to have been performed; and he himself thus on the cross crying out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”