A second and equally clear disclosure is that of a marvellous conscience.  What takes Jesus Christ to that tragic death?  It is perfectly evident that He need not have come up to Jerusalem and hazarded this issue; He came of His own accord; and we can think of dozens of reasons that might have induced Him to remain in Galilee, going about quietly and accomplishing all manner of good.  Why did He give up the opportunities of a life that was so incalculably serviceable, and apparently court death?  Jesus was always conscientious in what He did; He felt Himself bound to the lives about Him by the firmest cords of obligation, and whatever He attempted He deemed He owed men.  If there was a Zacchaeus whose honesty and generosity had given way under the faulty system of revenue-collecting then in vogue, Jesus considered Himself involved in his moral ruin and obliged to do what He could to restore him:  “I must abide at thy house.”  If there were sick folk, their diseases were to Him, in part at least, morally wrong, devil-caused (to use His First Century way of explaining what we ascribe to inherited weakness or to blameworthy conditions); and demoniacal control over lives in God’s world was something for which He felt Himself socially accountable:  “Ought not this woman, whom Satan hath bound, to have been loosed?” If the Church of His day was unable to reach large sections of the population with its appeal, if it succeeded very imperfectly in making children of the Most High out of those whom it did reach, if with its narrowness and bigotry it made of its converts “children of hell,” as Jesus Himself put it, if it exaggerated trifles and laid too little stress on justice, mercy and fidelity, He, as a member of that Church, was chargeable with its failures, and must strive to put a new conscience into God’s people:  “I must preach the good tidings of the Kingdom of God.”  Ibsen, the dramatist, wrote to his German translator, Ludwig Passarge, “In every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification—­for a man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.”  Jesus felt implicated in all that was not as it should be among the children of men, and cleared Himself from complicity with it by setting Himself resolutely to change it.  He considered that the human brotherhood in its sinfulness exacted nothing less of Him.

It is commonly taught that the Lord’s Prayer is a form that was suggested by Jesus to His disciples, but that it could not have been a prayer which He Himself used with them, because of its plea for forgiveness.  It is true that it is introduced in our Gospels as provided by the Master for His followers, “When ye pray, say.”  But millions of Christians instinctively associate it with Jesus’ own utterances to the Father.  And may they not be correct?  “Forgive us our debts,” is a social confession of sin, in which our Lord may well have