A Baccalaureate Sermon 203
full Divine victory, the power permitted to man to bring
suffering to God, the willingness of God to sacrifice Him-
self for man in patience and pity, the conquest won by the
Creator by the power of His love over the human heart;
this is part, at least, of the teaching of the Cross of Christ.
Part, at least, of the truth of the Cross is the assertion
that God is Perfect and All-powerful, and yet is a Sufferer,
though not defeated; thus, through His very humility, He
enters into triumph, and in the Person of the Incarnate Son
draws humanity with Him into the life of the Cross. The
true relation to God is not that we are to be willful and
disloyal, and not that He has made us slaves, but that we
are to serve Him with loyalty and obedience and love ; that
we are exalted to represent Him in His earthly dominion,
and are called to stewardship and through Christ unto son-
ship. Service glorified into companionship, obedience devel-
oped and transfigured into freedom, dependence transmuted
into sonship, compulsion under the power of God changed
to glad and inspired cooperation—these transformations
disclose our true relationship.
The great commandment, as we have seen, is to love
God; and as one of the reasons of its priority stands the
duty of cooperation; cooperation as faithful servants who
are to be trained and uplifted into sons. If we ask what are
the goods which God distributes, and what the coopera-
tion He will accept, the answer is so manifold that only a
few of its particulars can be named. Our human spirits
are not finished; finished they are in the sense of being
indestructible, but not finished in the direction of growth
and conscious correspondence with God. Our spiritual his-
tory is not completed by a faith which accepts the mercy
of God as proclaimed in Christ, and then permits the life
to center on worldliness and wealth, even though claiming