same process of restoration is to extend itself, step by step, through each department of creation, until the outer circle of all is at last reached. For it

was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him all the fulness (of the Father's own power) should dwell; and through Him to reconcile all things (not simply man) to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him I say, whether things on earth or things in Heaven' (Col. i. 19, 20). According to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Him, unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times; to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth' (Eph. i. 10). And so His first work of creation is to find its counterpart and full complement in His still greater work, which is even now being carried on, of redemption.

CHAPTER III.

THE DEATH OF CHRIST.

THE effect of the Atonement is described in Scripture as consisting in the forgiveness of sins. 'I delivered unto you,' St. Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Cor. xv. 3), ' first of all that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.' 'Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree,' writes St. Peter (1 Peter ii. 24). The blood of Jesus Christ His Son,' writes St. John (1 John i. 7), cleanseth us from all sin.' And our Lord Himself said to His disciples on the eve of His crucifixion,' This is My blood of the New Testament (covenant), which is being shed for many for the remission of sins' (Matt. xxvi. 27).

Not but that Jesus Christ had already before His death exercised the power which as Son of Man He had received from the Father, of forgiving sins: Son, be of good cheer, thy sins are

forgiven thee' (Matt. ix. 2). 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much' (Luke vii. 47).

And this ought to be sufficient to prevent us from ascribing the blessings procured for us by Jesus Christ to any one event exclusively in His carthly history. It ought to teach us to regard His death as no mere isolated phenomenon to be viewed simply in itself, but as a link, and however important an one, yet only a link in the great chain of events which led up to it or followed after it, as the culmination and crown of a life given up from the first to self-denial and self-sacrifice for the sake of those whom He came to save.

Our Lord's death may be regarded by us in two different lights, as affecting first Himself, and secondly, the whole human race.

As regarded Himself, Scripture plainly intimates that His sufferings and death were essential to the full perfection of that human nature which He had assumed to Himself. For it became Him, for Whom are all things, and through Whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings' (Heb. ii. 10). Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the

6

things which He suffered; and having been made perfect,' &c. (Heb. v. 8, 9). As this, however, is a point only slightly touched on in Scripture, we will at once pass on to that view of our Lord's death with which we ourselves are most nearly concerned.

And first, then, we may look upon it in the light of a voluntary submission on His part to an universal law of our common nature. There was, indeed, no necessity imposed upon Him to die. The divine power which dwelt in Him would have enabled Him always to bid defiance to death. But though there was no necessity that He should die so far as He Himself was concerned, the great work which He came into the world to do would have been left incomplete in many respects if He had not died. Had He gone back into heaven without first dying He would, to say the least of it, have left the darkest and most distressing problem of our nature unsolved. Death would still to all appearance present itself to us as the end of all things; whereas by submitting to death, a death followed in turn by His resurrection from the dead, He has proved to us that death is not the end which it appears to be. By Himself passing through the grave and gate of death, He has left it open for us to follow Him.

But, again, Jesus Christ not only submitted Himself to death as the natural end of human life, but He also submitted Himself to a premature and violent death, and under the most humiliating circumstances by which it could be surrounded. He died at the very hands of those whom He had come into the world to save, and in doing so He brought out into the strongest possible relief their wickedness and hatred to all goodness as exemplified in His own person, and at the same time He exhibited the strongest possible proof of His own love for men by persisting in His self-sacrifice for them in spite of their behaviour towards Him. Thus much, then, may be said in explanation of our Lord's death, even on the most superficial view that can be taken of it. But Scripture not only bids us regard our Lord as submitting Himself to death viewed in the light of a condition and law of the nature which He had assumed to Himself, or in that again of a means of bringing out into the strongest possible relief man's wickedness and His own love for man in spite of it, but it also and most especially represents Him as submitting Himself to death in its character of the appointed wages and penalty of sin.

This, indeed, is the characteristic light in which