It has been truly said, there is nothing like the cross. It stands and shall stand for ever, in all its solitary greatness and grandeur, in the center of the circle of eternity, the wonder of every intelligent creature, and the pillar upon which is indelibly inscribed the evil and hatred of the fallen being, and the goodness and love of God. Out from amidst the dim shadows of the past it looms upon the vision, in all its brightness and blackness, truth and treachery, sunshine and shadow, faithfulness and falseness, righteousness and sin, judgment and mercy, compassion and cruelty, love and hatred. By its light the heart of heaven is revealed, and the deepest depths of the abyss of evil are discovered. The blessing and the curse there lift their voices together. There the inky sea of human guilt wallows in all its foulness, and there the unsullied ocean of divine grace swallows up everything with its swelling tide.

There appears the greatest sin the creature ever committed, and there is the mightiest display of infinite mercy on the part of God that ever came to light. It is the place where man was tested in every spring of his moral being, and it is where the compassions of God were sounded to their depths. It is where the hostile fallen creature lifted impious hand, and struck at his Creator with deadly intent, and it is where the answer of the Creator was given in unspeakable and infinite love. The volume of wrath, curse, judgment, and woe which encircled Golgotha, not the regions of the lost could enclose; and heaven itself shall not be vast enough to circumscribe the love, the grace, and the mercy which have been there expressed. There the whole question of good and evil has been gone into, solved, and settled for ever.

There all the forces of good and evil were gathered together. Satan was discovered as the prince and god of the world, and his power was for ever broken. The wisdom of the world was seen to be foolishness with God: it had never arrived at the knowledge of Him, and when he was revealed before its eyes it knew Him not. Man was seen to be incorrigibly wicked, and at heart a hater of God. God was declared in perfect goodness and love on behalf of man, in spite of the hostility with which it was met by those whom it had singled out as its objects. Jesus was there, the obedient One, glorifying God even when abandoned by Him. He had come to do the will of God, and let the cost be what it might to Himself, He would not be turned aside. To Him be everlasting praise!

—W.T.