of a good man to suffer for evil-doers — a crime! When foretelling his own crucifixion, he said, “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!”
Would Jesus thus have spoken of what was indispensable for the salvation of a world of sinners, or of the individual instrument in this holy (?) alliance for accomplishing such a monstrous work? or have said of him whom God foreordained and predestined to fulfil a divine decree, “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea”?
The divine order is the acme of mercy: it is neither questionable nor assailable: it is not evil producing good, nor good ultimating in evil. Such an inference were impious. Holy Writ denounces him that declares, “Let us do evil, that good may come! whose damnation is just.”
Good is not educed from its opposite: and Love divine spurned, lessens not the hater's hatred nor the criminal's crime; nor reconciles justice to injustice; nor substitutes the suffering of the Godlike for the suffering due to sin. Neither spiritual bankruptcy nor a religious chancery can win high heaven, or the “Well done, good and faithful servant, . . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
Divine Love knows no hate; for hate, or the hater, is nothing: God never made it, and He made all that was made. The hater's pleasures are unreal; his sufferings, self-imposed; his existence is a parody, and he ends — with suicide.
The murder of the just Nazarite was incited by the
