ous cure of the sin and death then so awfully inaugurating their dominion (Heb. xii. 24). The first curse pronounced in the new world, was degradation of a race for irreverence to a father (Gen. ix. 25). That filial sin was a penal crime afterwards, under the divine government of Israel. Abraham's training to fallen man's faith in Jehovah, included the giving up to death for His will of his only promised son, the heir of all the promises made to him. Jacob's characteristic grief was bereavement of his well-beloved son by the hand of his brethren. David's was the loss of a fallen but yearned-over son by the punishment of rebellion, after dishonour of his father and murder of a guilty brother. The completing plague which made Egypt "know" the Jehovah of Israel and of man was the death of the first-born. The passing over of the selfsame misery to Israel when, in obedient faith, they sprinkled the blood of the innocent lamb on their door-posts, was their great national fact, preserved in the characteristic commemorative service of their faith; and it was expounded afterwards as only symbolical of man's deliverance by the substitutionary death of the Lamb of God, "Christ our passover sacrificed for us." Israel was to have the same thought of the sacrifice and redemption of a son kept in their minds in a merciful form. Every first-born son, throughout their generations, was to be Jehovah's, and had to be redeemed by a substitutionary death. We cannot put out of our sight, as having no connection with the so wide appearance in revealed religion of the association of this particular misery with sin, the other awful form in which the same association is presented to us in fallen faiths --viz., the fires of Moloch, and the question of the Mesopotamian Balaam, which was answered by him, but doubtless represented the oppressive sentiment of the peoples among whom he dwelt. "Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord ? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" (Micah vi. 6, 7). That is the dark, . despairing side of the same truth, whose awful burden is represented in the revelation of love, not as taken away, but as taken away from man to be borne by God Himself, while He lays on mankind the merciful part of it only, that "they shall look on Him whom they have pierced, and shall mourn and Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms. by others guilty, an 32. The woe that sin carries forth beyond the sphere of the Suffering sinner's own possible sufferings was also from the beginning a than the lesson of God's education of the world to faith. The ground historical cursed for Adam's sake, and bringing forth briers and thorns, teaching. starving the enjoyment, and burdening often the life, of all the innocent creatures around him, was a humiliating reminder continually to him of the change his sin had caused. In Israel's history, the clearest writing of the truth which we have, the lesson is emphatic. Why was the abhorrent work laid, E as their special task in the world, upon the Hebrews of destroying, woman and child as well as men, the corrupt tribes of Canaan? Why was an Israelite, a child of Abraham Jehovah's friend, a "little one" of Jacob His chosen, banished by Him without ruth from His presence, and from the bounds of the holy congregation, and from the communion of his own nearest relatives, whenever any even chance taint of typical uncleanness came to him; and for him there was no coming near to the tabernacle of Jehovah in thanksgiving or praise or supplication, and no intercourse with those who were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh for that lost day; but a washing of his flesh and of his garment had to blot out, as it were, that portion of time from his life? Such pain as accompanied these horrible duties of Israel in Canaan, and such domestic privation of happiness as burdened Israel's services of purification, guiltless sufferers universally meet in God's world—the penalty of the sins of those dear to them. Israel's worship contained a daily spectacle meant to teach man the same lesson. Why was the sad sight before the eyes of the congregation at the beginning and the end of every day, of the lamb slain for no special, no known, sin of the night or of the day, but for the impureness, always sinning, of even the beloved, the chosen people? The never-ending spectacle of the most guileless, lovable, and lifeful of living creatures put to a painful death, destroyed in blood and burning, because the people were sinful more than they thought of, was suited to beget, and continue, and intensify the thought of every sin as bringing pain to some one who should not suffer for it. Who had ever been in truth the sore sufferer by mankind's sins, was unveiled in the end of those daily sacrifices: a being of gentle goodness, of uncomplaining endurance, dumb as a sheep before her shearers, "the Lamb of God," His well-beloved Son; the maker of the human world; the bestower upon man of His original good and perfect life; who had rejoiced in the habitable parts of the earth, and had His delights with the sons of men, and looked to an eternal heritage of joy in them. The sight of Him, the inevitable sufferer by every sin of man's, yet yearning to suffer all and save him, and the sight of God giving up His only begotten Son for man, are revealed as meant to be to all the race who shall live for ever, the effectual motive to repentance and abhorrence of sin. With a congruous pain they shall look on Him whom they have pierced, wounded in the house of His friends; and they shall mourn and be in bitterness as they would for an only child, their own first-born. tion in suf fact of Christ's union with man. 33. It is an historical teaching, also, that the substitution of Identificathe sinless Adam for the sinful, as it was no metaphor merely, fering a was not an assumed substitution only. It was a voluntary laying down by the shepherd of His life for the sheep. But historical it was no purely forensic coming into man's place of one who wished to take upon Himself, by arbitrary choice, the punishment of man's sins. That would have been an act which not grief and shame, but only joy and exultation, might accompany. Man's redeemer was by historical union, a union never broken, the inevitable fellow-sufferer with, though He was also the willing substitute for, man in all his miseries; naturally suffering as well as willingly. The second Adam who came to be baptised in the consciousness of the first Adam's deserved agonies of spirit, was the giver to that first Adam of his moral and spiritual sensibilities- His own nature in which He had created him; and He was never separate from that first Adam and his race in actual as well as potential sympathy. So He had rejoiced in the habitable parts of the earth at its creation. So in its fallen state "He was afflicted in all man's afflictions;" and had it as His desirous "joy set before Him," to deliver from death that lost son of God, and bring him again into his first union; one with God for ever then, and with new-added effectual feelings of life in Him, because of the history of his salvation. And does not the union, in the perfect manhood of Jesus, of all the broken faculties and temperaments, all the perceptions and sensibilities which are but distributed over the fragmentary humanity of the race now, give faith a painful sight of how He did "taste death for every man," as every diversity of human kind should feel that spiritual death which he died daily the contradiction of sinners, the disappointments of holy desires and efforts, the wounds in the house of His friends, the shame of dishonour, the assaults of the enemy Identity of suffering revealed comfort. of man, the horror of sin's foul associate, death, and the completing, destroying, agony-the hiding of God's countenance? If man's death be essentially separation from God, as man's everlasting life is union unto oneness with Him, the thought of Jesus possessing in Himself in completeness all the sensibilities of the human life, gives a forcible human meaning to the cry of the mysterious part of His sufferings in the hour of His bodily death, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" That was the cry of death in the very person of man, as well as because of man's sin; and it gives also a clear view of death and Him in the foretold human contact of the seed of the woman with the Tempter-the first promise of salvation-he that had the power of death bruising His heel, inflicting agony on Him in the same hour in which He made an end of death -that is, of man's separation from the source of his nature's life of holy blessedness, his Father in heaven. It was the last, the "finishing," earthly manifestation of that identification of Himself with man to save him, in which, having died for him, He would rise again for him also, giving him the faith thereby, "Because I live, ye shall live also." 34. The divine suffering because of man; the self-sacrifice of God giving up His only-begotten Son, and the truly substitufor faith's tionary manner of the Son's endurances-the man's agony which God endured for man-both foreshadowed in the history of human affection, unavoidably suffering with a suffering child, like Jacob's death in Joseph's (Gen. xxxvii. 35), and desirous to suffer for a prodigal son, like David for Absalom, "Would God I had died for Thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"God's human suffering for His human children, thus foreshadowed in His guidance of their training life, but manifested in the fulness of times-was a profound identification of the heavenly Father with man's misery, the contemplation of which is to constrain man to see in Him a Father of mercies, a God of consolations, in Christ Jesus. Expiation of guilt necessary to 35. A writer of the school to which a punitive element in the sufferings of Christ is repulsive has remarked a difficulty, man's sub- in the way of excluding the substitutionary idea, that if manjective feelings and to kind are to be influenced by the thought of these sufferings, |