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its triumph to the world. Adam was punished, because he had busied himself in the pursuit of good and evil, with the result that the Divine in him became buried below his lower nature. This was the truth that the heromartyr of the Place of Calvary preached to the world. The way to ascend to the right hand of Power lay in a complete overthrow of the 'man,' metaphorically, in his crucifixion, so that the God-end of the see-saw be released from the bondage of ignorance and rise up to the top. Jesus possessed the knowledge, knew the way, and pointed it out definitely, by his own example, to the world. One can understand this. But where is the sense in the sacrifice of the only begotten Son, if the lesson to be learnt by humanity was to be non-productive of any practical result? If there is a resurrection of the dead in the hereafter, men would have risen all the same, whether the Lord God sacrified the life of his son, or not. There is point in our explanation, but none in the orthodox view. Why could not the Lord God think of some other and less tragic way to save or inform his creatures? Are not all things possible with him? And, after all the ceremony comes to a childish farce, when we remember that there was no sort of danger incurred in the so-called sacrifice. It was positively certain that the Son of God was not to die altogether. Even assuming that he actually died on the cross, the sacrifice by God of the life of his Son, when stripped of all poetical clothing, amounts to a suspension of animation for the space of three days! Can we compare it with the heroic devotion of Abraham, who offered to sacrifice his son's life in real, deadly
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