by Joseph Parker (1867)

“This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America. Within the U.S., you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.” 

— books.google.com

___

Ch. XVI: The Cross of Christ

The Cross is the culmination of the mystery. It is now proposed to view it not so much in its place in systematic theology as in its relation to Christ’s personal history. Pilate’s superscription is easily read, but there is another writing more difficult of interpretation. The one word which we have succeeded in deciphering is love, and we have ventured on the not improbable inference that such a word must have kindred words around it.

The death, and its attendant circumstances , was not an unexpected event to Jesus Christ; it was preceded by many demonstrations of ill-regulated excitement on the part of the people, plainly showing unsteadiness of aim on their side; but the heart of Jesus Christ was fixed by a great design. He had been living the kind of life which, viewed from the outside, seemed inevitably to lead to a violent death; yet his control of the element of time in the completion of his purposes is most significant. The baffled revolutionist, whose schemes have overweighted his resources, has no power over the apportionment of his time; but Jesus Christ spoke of his “hour” with the precision and calmness of conscious mastery. It seemed as though he would not allow history to be made immaturely—as if there was a law by which events come to a crisis, and which could not be accelerated by the wildest impatience or the most violent determination. Early in public life he began to talk of his “hour,” repeatedly he said that his hour was “not yet;” and not until he offered his intercessory prayer, which escaped from his breaking heart like a long sigh of sorrowing love, did he plainly say, “The hour is come.” There were two forces in operation; the force of a malign intent on the part of the Jews, and the force of a control which times all events to a moment. Passions cannot hasten the time of heaven. Every hour has its work, and every work its hour. There was no reader of the signs of the times so quick and so correct as Jesus Christ. He saw the fields “white unto the harvest,” sooner than his nearest followers did; and while superficial men were reading the skies he chided them for dullness in reading the more important tokens of the world’s condition. All this is in harmony with his anticipation of his “hour.” He knew the laws which regulate the tides; he was not misled by the foam with which the winds bespattered him; he knew that not the winds but the worlds touch the tidal springs. He foresaw the last swell of the great deep, and encountered it in an attitude of prayer.

This anticipation of his “hour” is noticeable as a side illustration of the purpose which ran through the life of Jesus Christ. The cross was not an accident. The cross was not an afterthought; its shadow came up from eternity, and was first visible to men in the manger of Bethlehem. The most cursory view of the powers which he wielded during his life is sufficient to show that Jesus Christ was perfectly able to repel the ruffians who undertook to compass his death. He was no weakened Samson who had given up the secret of his power; he was still the wonderful man whom the winds and the sea obeyed, yet he consented to be led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. He had been accustomed to the idea from before the foundation of the world. Even in his earthly course he was never separated from the cross;  it varied in form, never in nature; it was only less prominent, not less real, at Bethlehem than at Calvary. The cross was never dissociated from the life; he brought it with him; he carried it in his heart long before the mob laid it on his shoulder, and had suffered all its agonies before the nail was driven into his flesh. But the gross-minded world could never have known this apart from the sight; it measures the sorrow of the soul by the suffering of the flesh; it weighs the tears that it may know the weight of the woe, as if all woes could make their way through the eyes. The giving up of the flesh was nothing; external force could have overcome any mere bodily resistance; the concurrence of the spirit was essential to the value of the offering in the sight of God. The poverty which is caused by irresistible forces is one thing, the poverty which comes of self-sacrifice for the good of others is another.

The cross means love, but what does love mean? Can lexicography explain that word? We must go back to the life for hints of interpretation. Jesus Christ is the answer as well as the enigma. In no case did Jesus Christ work for himself. He only received that he might give; he only asked that he might distribute. As he did not live for himself, so he did not die for himself. That melancholy cross must bear other stains than those of murder; he who might have turned it into a throne, and waved from it the scepter of the world’s dominion, must have had some object in view worthy of the generous life which preceded it. The course of beneficence would not be broken off just before the end. Jesus Christ will be consistent throughout; for you, not me, will be his watchword to the end. How can a good man make death give the lie to his life?

The method, too, of leaving the world is consistent with his method of living in the world. The cross is a wonderful counterpart of the manger. There were no violent discrepancies in the life; only once, and that on the top of a mountain, did the Godhead visibly burn in the poor shrine of his flesh—a sight which Moses had seen prefigured at Horeb. From beginning to end there was one line of humiliation. The child of the manger is the man of the cross; the youth who was about his Father’s business in the Temple was doing his Father’s will on Calvary. There were other plans of leaving the world than that of crucifixion. Why not go up into the skies at midday, amid a great luster, welcomed by the voices of angels, and the peal of trumpets? Why not make a great demonstration of power rather than a saddening spectacle of weakness? Think of what might have been done! Yet he was numbered with the transgressors; his name was pronounced as a felon’s; and even they who knew him best left him as if he had wronged their souls. The very method of departure is fraught with deep significance. The suffering itself must have had meaning. When he could have taken the wings of the morning, or called around him the angels that excel in strength, or gone up from Calvary as he ascended from Olivet, and yet became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, the very manner of the dying must have interpretations which separate it from all other deaths.

Now, we may approach the cross without any light except that of natural reason, or we may avail ourselves of the suggestion of the sacred writings. Before we attempt to interpret, let us come to some understanding as to canons and standards. With regard, first of all, to natural reason, it may be enough to remind ourselves that the whole history of Jesus Christ removes itself as far as possible from the court in which natural reason presides. We have had occasion to point this out incidentally in former chapters; let us now stand and calmly look at it as a fact likely to help our further inquiries. Is there any point in the whole development of Christ’s person and ministry at which we can say, “This is just as we thought it would be?” Or is there not everywhere something like a studied upsetting of foregone conclusions and logically arranged anticipations? Given a world that has lost its moral standing, to know God would recover it; and we venture to say that the New Testament answer would never suggest itself to natural reason. That answer, then, stands by so much at a disadvantage; the whole stress of reason is against it; it has every inch of ground to make for itself, for reason will not allow it so much as a foothold. Reason, on being pressed for an answer, would probably betake itself to elaborate demonstration; its customary notions of the proportions which means should bear to ends would force it to set up a most imposing breastwork of superhuman appearances and interpositions. Probably some such plan as this would be accounted reasonable: The world having lost its moral standing, God himself in undisguised personality, must speak to it from the heavens with a voice of awful power; the guilty world must see him robed with fire, crowned with a diadem in which a thousand suns flash their commingling glories, and encircled by unnumbered squadrons of the seraphim; all men must hear him lamenting the apostasy, and offering instantaneous and universal pardon; the great Deceiver must be publicly destroyed, and his track obliterated from the face of the earth; and to prevent the possibility of further failing, the whole family of man must be translated to heaven. This would suit the reason that is fond to demonstrativeness. Other forms might be suggested that would suit the reason that is fond of demonstrativeness. Other forms might be suggested that would suit the reason that is prone to philosophical speculation. But among them all the New Testament idea would never come up. Pain, sorrow, humiliation, death, resurrection, stand off beyond the reach of natural reason. It is not saying too much to say that such a process is offensive; it is foolishness; it is a stumbling block. What we have to suggest is this: that by so much as the Gospel method is removed from the probabilities which natural reason would affirm, it is unlikely that natural reason conceived it. That method is not merely here and there contrary to expectation, but throughout, from end to end, there is not a solitary point which satisfies natural reason. Was ever reason so unreasoning? Did reason ever so far exceed the limit of probability? A partial excess might have been understood, and occasional obscurity might have been accounted for; but the mystery is unbroken, the lamp of reason closing the inquiry, this should quicken reverent investigation. Originality is not madness. What if God should be greater than man has thought him to be? What if the Infinite cannot be measured by the finite? We are thrown back upon analogous inquiry respecting God—his universe is around us; how does he work in that? History is at hand; how has he mingled with men? Man’s own personality is a witness. How has God created it, individualized it, kept it from absorption in the boundless ocean of contemporaneous life? Is God easily understood everywhere but at the cross? Is he a common riddle which any child can guess? Or is he still an unsolved problem—the problem of all problems? Is he an exhausted theme; or does he enlarge before our reverent and wondering vision? These collateral inquiries may help to set reason in its proper attitude before the cross. The sight which Moses saw at Horeb may be reversed at Calvary; Moses saw the God of Abraham in the God of  nature—what if we see the God of nature in the God of Abraham? Nature itself offers a thousand perplexities to reason; out of the whirlwind God has rebuked the complaining and dissatisfied Jobs of the race: “Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou has understanding. . . . has thou commanded the morning since thy days, and caused the dayspring to know his place? . . . Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea; or has thou walked in the search of the depth? . . .  Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks: or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?” With a peremptory voice God thus shuts out human wisdom and power from nature; what wonder if the same voice should chide self-sufficiency when it pronounces on “the mystery of godliness”? As the very impossibility of man making any one thing in nature is regarded as a proof of God’s power, why should the utter impossibility of man conceiving the New Testament idea of salvation not be regarded as a proof of God’s wisdom? There is a point at which reason leaves nature, unable to make a further way; it does not consequently deny the universe: why not treat with the same trust the greater mystery of which the most mysterious nature is but the background?

The Scriptures are not silent respecting the meaning of the cross. If we credit the Scriptures as to the fact of the cross, why doubt them as to its meaning? Do they tell the truth in history, and tell lies in doctrine? We put it thus frankly, because, if the professedly divine word is modified, he who modifies it must be wiser than God, or it bears itself a forged signature. What, then, do the Scriptures say respecting the cross? To the inquiry, Why was Jesus Christ given up? they answer, “He was delivered for our offenses.” To the inquiry, Why did he suffer? they reply, “Christ hath once suffered for our sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.” We inquire for what purpose he suffered, and they answer, “He gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.” If we ask what practical effect the offering of Jesus Christ should have upon us, the Scriptures reply, “Who his own self bare our sins in his body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.” When we ask, Did he die for himself or for others? we are told, with the utmost precision, that “Christ died for the ungodly.” This is the testimony of Scripture. We get the doctrine where we get the fact. Can we obtain better answers elsewhere? The responsibility of rejection lies with the reader. It is easier to blow out a light than to create one. Here is a great historic event which is to be explained; we may exercise the speculative faculty in balancing guess after guess, or accept the testimony which is avowedly of God. Let us see in which direction this testimony goes.

The Scriptures declare plainly that the cross stands in direct relation to sin. Sin necessitated a condition which love alone could meet. Holiness never caused death. All that comes within what may be called the sphere of death  (pain, misery, disappointment, tears) is due immediately to moral decay. Throughout the Scriptures this principle is constantly affirmed, but nowhere is it seen in full force of a demonstration but on the cross. It could not have been a trifle which started the great drops of blood from the body of Jesus Christ in Gethsemane, or that caused him his exceeding sorrow on the tree. Great natures cannot weep blood but on great occasions. There must, then, have been something terrible about this moral putrescence which is called sin. It was no speck on the surface; it was poison in the blood. The tones heard at Golgotha are not the harsh tones of vengeance; there is no scream of fury; no thunder of cursing: there is a wail of sorrow, deep, loud, long, as if the very heart of God had broken. It is the agony of love; it is the paroxysm of a lacerated and dying spirit. It was love that had failed in life, determined to succeed in death. It was dying innocence struggling with dead guilt. And does not every man repeat in his low degree the same great tragedy? Can any man forgive without suffering? Can a man take back even his own wicked son without first stretching his fatherly heart on the cross? When a father sheds tears over his rebellious child, he carries his anger to the sublimest point. God’s hatred of sin is best seen not in his frowns, but in his tears. Hell does not afford the most impressive view of God’s estimate of sin. When Christ said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,” he did more to show the horror in which he held sin than could have been shown in all the fire that glows and blazes throughout the universe. We best know the intensity of human anger when it settles into deep human sorrow; so we see God’s hatred of sin more in the storm of grief which Christ endured than if the angry heavens had shot lightning into every point of space. God suffered more than the sinner can ever suffer on account of sin. Does not the parent suffer more than the sinning child? The sinner by his very sinfulness lessens his own capacity of suffering, while virtue is shocked through every sensibility. 

–––

What, then, was the relation of the cross to sin? It meant more than condemnation. The mere condemnation of sin was not worth all this expenditure of the finest fiber of life. The thunder or the whirlwind might have sufficed for anathema, had that been all that the case required. There was, however, not only a curse to pronounce, but a blessing to offer—not only was the devouring beast that had committed such havoc in the flock of God to be destroyed, but that flock was to be protected, saved! This could not be done by mere power. The hand of the Lord is omnipotent, but omnipotence can work upon the heart only with the heart’s consent. We say reverently, but with deep conviction, that when omnipotence is weak, then it is strong; broken, if the armies of heaven had fought in his name. In the hour of its majesty omnipotence may strike terror into human hearts; but when omnipotence allows itself to be mocked, defied, wounded, and broken on the cross, it gets hold upon the heart deep as the roots of life. The cross, be it repeated, goes deeper than mere condemnation; it shows how the holiest suffer most, and how without suffering even the holiest cannot forgive. It shows the tenderness of God. He cannot look with indifference upon fallen humanity; he suffers with it, that through suffering he may renew his hold upon it, and recover it to himself. So the cross comes to have a great power in interpreting the essential dignity and value of human nature. In God’s suffering we see man’s worth. His erectness, faculty of speech, dominion over inferior life, and power of reasoning upon the future, have a strange light of divinity lingering even now. In his wildest talk there are accents and snatches of expression which must have come from heaven; his magistracy is a reprint of an ancient charter; his thinking is the dim light which struggles through an eclipsed genius. He does not know himself as a fallen member of the heavenly hierarchy: he gropes and flounders as though he had lost something; and now and again there come through his daily life gushes of tenderness and glitterings of mind which have a deep meaning, a meaning which makes the heart sore and sad as it vainly tries to piece itself into wholeness, and render the ciphers into intelligible language. The cross tells man what he is, and what he may be. It tells him what a sinner he is, and what a son of God he may become. All that — look at it! — to lift man up, a cleansed, pardoned rebel! Tears could not reach his case, only blood could; “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” Only life could reach death. Only God can sound the depths of the human fall. Christ said he would draw all men unto him when he was “lifted up from the earth”; they would see what he was, and what they are, and the revelation would have a resurrectional effect upon them. Not that they would escape suffering on that account, but rather that they would suffer more when they saw what he suffered for them. In the midst of his sin, man does not see the enormity of his own guilt; in the midnight revel, in the eager pursuit of forbidden pleasure, in the whirl and thunder of excitement, he does not see the case as it is; but, when he sees the agony of a holy woman as she pours her burning tears over the recollection of his misdeeds, he begins to feel how great must have been the sin which has wrought such sorrow, and learns from a broken heart how far he has gone astray. In some such manner, with infinite extension of the proportions, men see their history best at the cross; on the background of Christ’s innocence, as he hangs there in mortal pain, they see how black, how ulcerous, how deadly is their own sin. They never could have seen it otherwise. No man could have shown it to them. Only Jesus Christ could reveal the exceeding sinfulness of sin.

There is still more in the cross than God’s view of human guilt. There is all that is meant by a word which is almost over-familiarized—salvation. It shows not only what man is, but what man may be; not only the withered and decrepit rebel, but the robed and crowned saint. There are yet great possibilities in manhood. The sun was a finished creation, as large and bright on the first morning as he is today; but primal man was a germ—little as a grain of mustard seed, compared with a gigantic and overshadowing tree. The worm laid hold of the root, and all the juices were so poisoned that no summer dew or light can expel the corruption. Christ did what was required, and now every fiber feels the energy of his life. As out of the dead Christ upon the cross came the Mediator who is now in heaven, so out of all who died with him shall come a renewed and glorified manhood.

The cross was an expression of God’s love to the human family—not his justice, or vengeance, or wrath; these are but fractional words—the integral word is love. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” All love must give. Only one love rose to the highest point of sacrifice. The cross means justice, law, and satisfaction, only as elements or aspects of love. Yet sacrifice, in the sense of self-surrender, we have said, is in the very nature of love: it is the last expression of love; we only love any being in proportion as we are prepared to suffer for his sake—not one whit more; we may never be called upon to undergo the suffering, still the willingness to suffer is the precise measure of the love. If love be represented by a straight line, sacrifice is the last point of it—not something beyond it, but something in it, something of it. All love, then, is strictly sacrifice—counting nothing its own while its object is unattained. We thus get a glimpse of God’s love towards man; he loved him to the shedding of blood—not the blood of inferior life, but the blood of his only begotten Son. The point of sacrifice is indicated by the world only—a word which intimates that there was nothing left behind, no spared treasure—all was given; not the hand only, but the heart—not the heart’s sigh, but the heart’s blood. He who gave this might well say that he loved the world. To give one out of many would have been nothing; to have only one, and to give it, was as much as even God could do. Out of all this comes once more the idea of the value of human nature. The ideas of Christ’s life and man’s worth are inseparable; they so interpenetrate as to explain the apparent contradiction that Jesus Christ was alike Son of God and Son of man. What was to prevent God allowing the human family to fall into utter darkness, and to be forgotten forever? Nothing but love. He had made man in his own image: how could he withhold from him his own Son?

But is there not a great practical difficulty? Man’s relation to the cross is a different thing to the relation of the cross to man. In the latter we have God’s declaration: what have we in the former? Man has the power (necessary indeed to being a man) to treat the cross with indifference, to join those who wagged their heads and uttered taunting words, and to see in the cross nothing but an ignominious failure. God did not set up the cross merely that he might win a victory, but that he might express a sorrow. If not a man be moved by the display of affection and grief, the cross has not failed altogether of its purpose. The parent weeps even over the child that will not be recovered, and the weeping shows at once the agony and the love. It relieves him even to open the door which may never be entered by the wanderer, What if this be a hint of the feeling that is in God? What if his great sorrow must have an outlet, and if that outlet be the cross?

It is not uncommon to represent the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as being a satisfaction to divine justice, an appeasing of the divine anger, a quenching of the fire that is in God. There is a sense in which these terms are true, but the terms have been most foully abused and most disastrously applied. The cross was not a satisfaction to divine justice as if that were a special kind of justice; it was quite as much a satisfaction to what may be termed human justice—to justice itself, whether in God or in man. Human nature, quickened into perfect consciousness, would itself affirm the necessity of a basis upon which one attribute would not be upheld at the expense of another. If it was simply the penal side of justice that required to be satisfied, then the cross did not meet the case, and nothing could have met it but the instant and utter destruction of the human family. For God to take mere vengeance upon his Son on account of a race that had sinned, would have been entirely inconsistent with his nature. It is an unjust justice that is satisfied with the suffering of an innocent being: but a most holy and righteous justice that cannot pardon sin without the humiliation of confession and the sorrow of penitence on the part of the offender. Christ’s sacrifice, consequently, was a satisfaction to the spirit of justice alike in God and in man; it protested that the original law was right; it guarded the divine wisdom from the charge of having laid down a wrong law; it made the law honorable, and so preserved the consistency and majesty of God’s moral government. See what would have been the effect if no such sacrifice had been offered: let it be supposed that God could have indifferently regarded every violation of his law, and that he had virtually said, “If you don’t like this law, try another—if my requirements are too exacting, modify them.” In that case he would have simply surrendered his Godhead, for no moral law can be modified—to break a letter of it is to break it all; right can never be less than right, wrong can never be more than wrong; and the moral law was not a law superimposed upon moral beings without any regard to their own nature. On the contrary, it was in perfect harmony with man’s moral constitution; so that when man offended the justice of God he also offended his own, and no sacrifice could avail that did not satisfy the whole claim of abstract justice. This case could be met only by an uncorrupted Being, a Lamb without blemish and without spot; and such a Lamb was found in the only begotten Son of God. The mere affirmation of the sanctity of justice would not have been sufficient; it might have been enough for God himself to have thundered through the universe that he hated sin and still maintained his law; but it would have left man where he was, for no man can repair his yesterdays, or pay the arrears of his life. The crisis was met by the gift of the Son; so that not only may God be just, and yet the justifier of the ungodly, but man can receive the justification without feeling that his innate sense of justice is dishonored. He can truly say that the law was good and right; that from the beginning God was just, and that he alone was guilty and helpless before the Most High. He feels that God has not trifled with the law, but that mercy itself is an aspect of justice. The human is satisfied as well as the divine. Was, then, the punishment all Christ’s, and the favor all man’s? Certainly not. Man’s punishment is even now according to his sensitiveness; not only at the crisis which is popularly designated his repentance, but throughout his life he suffers on account of his sins. The good man’s life is one unbroken repentance; repentance is not the act of an hour—it is the constant experience of the soul. What, then, of joy? It is contemporaneous with repentance. It is inseparable from it. The joy that is born of sorrow is the only joy that is enduring; not a transient gleam, but a lifelong light.

We have not followed the analysis of the scientific theologian, but have rather come abruptly upon such points as have been thrown up by the biographers of Jesus Christ. Our purpose may not lose anything by this, as the plan of this work does not admit of much regard being paid to Polemical Divinity, to whose mischievous course we can never refer without a feeling of intense dissatisfaction. We have the Cross before us as the chief fact in all known history; and, as there is suspended upon it a Man with whose life we have now become reverently familiar, we wish to know the exact relation which subsists between the life as a whole and this its final and most melancholy act. Throughout the life we have constantly seen an endeavor to save men; never to destroy them. Is the cross in keeping with this noble aim? We have, too, seen the most perfect unselfishness. Does the cross sustain the impression which such unselfishness has made upon the heart? Does the cross start a new and unexpected chapter in Christ’s life, or is it of a piece with all that has gone before? By so much as it is accordant with the tenor of the antecedent course, it is a purpose, not an accident—by so much does it represent a sacrifice, not a martyrdom; an atonement, not a murder. If Jesus Christ had no power to resist the cross, then he was a mere martyr; but if he could have overturned the purpose of the Jews, he was entitled to say of his life, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” There is here the authority which was present in the working of miracles. What if all the other miracles were about to be eclipsed in the miracle which he wrought upon himself? Was not the Resurrection a gathering up and reproduction of the miraculous element which pervaded Christ’s whole life? Was it not a healing of the diseased, and opening of blind eyes, an unstopping of deaf ears, a strengthening of withered limbs—in short, a recapitulation of the eloquent argument of miracles?

So far as God the Father was concerned, what did the cross signify? It signified all that can be comprehended under the term love. So far as Jesus Christ was concerned, what did the cross signify? Its interpretation runs thus: I die that men may live; I encounter the storm of sin that man may live in the calm of holiness; I show how submission may be conquest; I show the utmost verge and boundary of love; I honor a broken law, and establish a basis of communication between God and man. He makes all other woes light. Men forget their miseries in the sob of his overwhelming sorrow. So far as man was concerned, what did the cross signify? It signified his guilt, his self-helplessness, his entire dependence upon God for pardon, purity, and all the blessings of salvation. It was the return-way to God; too strait for selfishness, but wide enough for penitence and trust.

Are sacrifice and atonement equivalent terms? Not necessarily. Atonement is the possible result of sacrifice, when looked at from the human side. The atonement, practically considered, may be regarded as the application which the sinner himself makes of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. This may be illustrated by a reference to the typical ritual: “Aaron shall bring the bullock of the sin-offering which is for himself and for his house, and shall kill the bullock of the sin-offering which is for himself. Then shall he kill the goat of the sin-offering that is for the people, and bring his blood within the vail, and do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy-seat and before the mercy-seat. And this shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year.” 

The sinner is not saved simply because Jesus Christ died upon the cross, but because he accepted the death as his own expression of the necessity of sacrifice for the pardon of guilt. He thus becomes, in a secondary though most practical sense, his own priest; so to speak, he offers Christ continually as his sacrifice; he confesses his poverty, and pleads the worthiness of the Lamb. This is not inconsistent with the scriptural doctrine of Christ’s priesthood, for we find that Jesus Christ was both priest and sacrifice—“Once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself,”—and thus the marvelous duality which we have traced through the whole argument is present at the very end of life. The sinner can only offer himself as a living sacrifice, after he has partaken of the benefits of Christ’s offering; but a living sacrifice does not meet the necessities of the case, for “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” A man might offer himself, but suicide is not sacrifice. He must go out of himself for help; and if he go elsewhere than to Jesus Christ, he incurs the responsibility of counting the blood of the covenant in an unholy thing. He impugns the wisdom of God. “He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under food the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing (a common thing, the blood of a common man), and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?” The Lamb of God has been offered for the sins of the world, and thus an atonement has been made; yet, unless every man accept that offering on his own account, and, as it were, present it in his own name, it will be no atonement for him—rather a witness against him, and a most sure ground of condemnation. If the sacrifice of Jesus Christ were to take saving effect without an appropriating action on the part of man, the moral constitution of the universe would be overridden; man would be saved apart from his own will, and his moral liberty would be mocked and set at nought. Jesus Christ distinctly proceeds on a different principle; in working out the basis of man’s salvation, he respects the fundamental conditions of manhood, leaving it perfectly possible for his cross to be misunderstood and despised. “If we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgement and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.”