And this Onlyness was to be realised in suffering. He said, _I must suffer_; or again, _It behoves the Christ to suffer_. Suffering is the experience in which men feel their oneness with their kind. Christ, too, by suffering felt His oneness with men; but largely in order to assert a singularity beyond. Through suffering He became like unto men, but only that He might effect through suffering a lonely and a singular service for them. For though He suffered in all points as men did, yet He shared none of their universal feelings about suffering. Pain never drew from Him either of those two voices of guilt or of doubt. Pain never reminded Christ of His own past, nor made Him question God.
Nor did He seek pain for any end in itself. There have been men who have done so; fanatics who have gloried in pain; superstitious minds that have fancied it to be meritorious; men whose wounds have been as mouths to feed their pride, or to publish their fidelity to their cause. But our Lord shrank from pain; if it had been possible He would have willed not to bear it: _Father, save Me from this hour; Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup pass from Me_. And when He submitted and was under the agony, it was not in the feeling of it, nor in the impression it made on others, nor in the manner in which it drew men's hearts to Him, nor in the seal it set on the truth, but in something beyond it, that He found His end and satisfaction. Jesus _looked out of the travail of His soul and was satisfied_.
For, _firstly_, He knew His pain to be God's will for an end outside Himself,--_I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished: Father, save Me from this hour, yet for this cause came I to this hour: Father, Thy will be done_,--and all opportunities to escape as temptations.
And, _secondly_, like the Servant, Jesus _dealt prudently, had insight_. The will of God in His suffering was no mystery to Him. He understood from the first why He was to suffer.[236]
The reasons He gave were the same two and in the same order as are given by our prophet for the sufferings of the Servant,--first, that fidelity to God's truth could bring with it no other fate in Israel;[237] then that His death was necessary for the sins of men, and as men's ransom from sin. In giving the first of these reasons for His death, Christ likened Himself to the prophets who had gone before Him in Jerusalem; but in the second He matched Himself with no other, and no other has ever been known in this to match himself with Jesus.