HERALDS OF GOD
be because there is still a veil upon their hearts when they stand at Calvary. It is for you to show them the Cross as it truly is—Christ in action, victor over death, vanquisher of the demons, going forth conquering and to conquer.
Finally, your preaching of the Cross, having struck the notes of Revelation and Victory, will include the note of Challenge. Our own hearts bear witness that there is nothing like the Cross of Jesus to shame our selfishness, to abase our pride of intellect, to rebuke our false ambitions, and to bring to birth within us a passionate longing that our lives might reveal something of the spirit which shone so gloriously in His, No doubt, as Bernard Manning has argued, it is a weakness of Cardinal Newman's great hymn "Praise to the Holiest in the height" that after the strong, pungent theology of the earlier verses the penultimate stanza descends to anti-climax—"humanitarian tinkling," Manning calls it:
And in the garden secretly,
And on the Cross on high.
Should teach His brethren, and inspire
To suffer and to die.
The sacrifice of the God-Man was infinitely more, as we have seen, than an example of gallantry and fortitude, a lesson to humanity how to suffer and die. Nevertheless, the element of challenge persists: and in every soul out of which the sense of honour and chivalry has not died the Cross lets loose a cleansing tide of penitence and hope, and creates a motive
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