assert His humanity with such vehemence is an absolute demonstration that the Church had been taught to regard Him as being infinitely more than man. In our times the philosophical difficulties of the Incarnation are often solved by the denial of the superhuman dignity of our Lord; but this was impossible in the first century. His superhuman dignity had so filled the imagination of the Church, that the solution was sought in the denial of His humanity.

No catena of quotations can adequately represent the overwhelming evidence that the Apostles believed in the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. If all the "proof-texts" usually alleged from the apostolic epistles in support of this doctrine were cancelled, the proof would remain almost as strong as before. There is hardly a page in which it is not clear that to the founders of the Christian Church, Christ was infinitely more than an inspired teacher or an example of perfect holiness. He is never out of their thoughts. All their teaching centres in Him, and in Him they find the sanction of every duty and the foundation of every hope. To the saved He is wisdom and righteousness, sanctification and redemption; and when He is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, and in flaming fire, the lost are to be punished with eternal destruction. The history of the world before His Incarnation was a long and weary waiting for His coming, and with His second advent the history of the world is to come to a close. In Him all earthly relations are transfigured, and those who are one with Him have already

passed into the kingdom of heaven. He is the object of a reverence which cannot be distinguished from worship, and of a love as fervent as that which glows in the anthems of the cherubim and seraphim that surround the throne of God. In Him the Apostles "live and move and have their being." His will is their supreme law; His glory their supreme end; His approbation their supreme reward. To select a score of passages in which it is affirmed that Christ is God, or in which divine attributes, divine prerogatives, or divine works are ascribed to Him, and to treat these quotations as though they constituted the evidence that, to St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John, the Lord Jesus Christ was God manifest in the flesh, is to do injustice to the argument. The real proof lies in the absolute sovereignty in which Christ is enthroned over their moral and spiritual life; and the illustrations of this can hardly be subjected to logical analysis and arrangement.

What is true of the Divinity of our Lord is also true of His Atonement for human sin. That the Apostles regarded the Death of Christ as a Sacrifice and Propitiation for the sins of the world appears in many passages which yield no direct testimony to the doctrine. It sometimes determines the form and structure of an elaborate argument, which falls to pieces if this truth is denied. At other times it gives pathos and power to a practical appeal. It accounts for some of the misconceptions and misrepresentations of apostolic teaching. It explains the absence from the apostolic writings of very

much that we should certainly have found in them if the Apostles had not believed that for Christ's sake, and not merely because of the effect on our hearts of what Christ has revealed, God grants us remission of sins. It penetrates the whole substance of their theological and ethical teaching, and is the very root of their religious life. If, instead of selecting passages in which it is categorically affirmed that Christ died for us-died that we might have remission of sins, died as a Propitiation for sin-we selected those which would lose all their force and all their significance if this truth were rejected, it would be necessary to quote a large part of the New Testament. For reasons which I shall attempt to explain in the next Lecture, it is equally impossible to exhibit the testimony of the four Gospels to this truth by the mere enumeration of those passages in our Lord's teaching in which He speaks of the nature and purpose of His Death.

It may appear to some persons that the questions. which I propose to discuss have no longer any real interest to mankind. It can hardly be said indeed that the temper of our times is not favourable to theological investigation. But in this country, at least, the great race of dogmatic theologians has disappeared, and purely doctrinal controversies, which once created fierce excitement, and in which the noblest intellects of Christendom revealed the wealth of their learning and the splendour of their genius, have come to be regarded with indifference. But surely

the question whether the original teachers of the Christian Faith represented the Death of Christ as a Propitiation for the sins of mankind, is invested, at least, with the greatest historical interest by the vast and enduring influence which their writings have exerted, not only on the religious thought, but on the civilization and political fortunes of the foremost races of the modern world.

The questions we are to investigate have an interest of another kind; for in the whole range of problems which have exercised the genius of men from the very dawn of philosophy to our own times, there are none which transcend in majesty, in difficulty, or in speculative importance, the problems of which a true theory of the Atonement ought to contain a partial if not a complete solution.

But it is neither the historical nor the speculative interest of this subject that has induced me to undertake to discuss it. The Christian Faith, in the judgment both of its enemies and its friends, is at this moment threatened by dangers as formidable as any which it has ever had to confront during the whole course of its history. For myself I am unable to discover any signs that its power is decaying, much less that its glory is destined to early extinction. In our own days, and after the lapse of eighteen centuries, its influence is gradually extending among the civilised populations of Asia; it is redeeming the races of Central and Southern Africa from barbarism; it is giving intellectual culture and a higher morality, as

well as a purer faith, to the scattered tribes of the Pacific Ocean; and, notwithstanding all adverse appearances, it is, I believe, maintaining its power over the kindred nations of Europe and America. The very bitterness and vehemence, the anger and the scorn, the infinite variety of argument, and the inexhaustible energy of hostility with which Christianity is assailed, demonstrate how strongly it is entrenched in the common faith and common traditions of Christian nations, and demonstrate, too, the intensity of the devotion and the depth of the reverence with which it is cherished in the hearts of innumerable Christian men.

There were times, indeed, when the Christian priesthood exerted an authority in the States of Europe which they have happily lost. The science and learning of the West were in the hands of the doctors of the Church, and the priests of Rome inherited the great traditions and the principles of policy which had made the Eternal City the mistress of the world. They laid a strong hand on the vigorous but uncultivated and superstitious nations which overran the dislocated provinces of the fallen empire, and governed them by their sagacity, by their courage, by their knowledge of the science of legislation, by their general intellectual superiority, by the compactness of their organization, and by their lofty pretensions to be the representatives of the august authority of God and the channels of His infinite mercy. Those were the days when the wealth and power of princes were at the command of the Church; and majestic cathedrals and stately monasteries, en