once for all, by His death on the cross. On the other hand, however, Scripture distinctly represents our Lord's sufferings as dependent for their efficacy on His resurrection, as though this final token of His victory over sin and death were needed in order to affix the divine seal and final ratification to the Atonement. For,' as St. Paul argues, 'if Christ be not raised, your faith in Him is in vain; ye are yet in your sins' (1 Cor. xv. 17), those very sins from which the Atonement was made to free us. Elsewhere again the same Apostle speaks of Christ as delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification' (Rom. iv. 25). Somewhat similarly he argues, 'if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life' (Rom. v. 10). From which passages we may see how impossible it is to fully estimate the value of Christ's death without at the same time taking into account the still greater blessings which resulted from His resurrection, when He entered upon an entirely new kind of life, with the body and soul in which He had been tempted and had suffered free henceforth and for ever from all liability to temptation and suffering, with His whole human nature raised into complete harmony

with the Divine nature which had all along dwelt in it. And not only so, but He also as Son of Man entered at His resurrection upon a far wider field of operation than had lain within His reach during His earthly ministry, henceforth drawing all men within the loving embrace of those arms which had been stretched out above them upon the

cross.

And as the crowning act of His earthly life, summed up and terminated in His death, had been the great work of Atonement, so now the principal work upon which He entered at His resurrection, was that of intercession on behalf of those for whom the Atonement had been made. 'It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather that is risen again, who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us' (Rom. viii. 34). Wherefore He is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him, seeing that He ever liveth to make intercession for them' (Heb. vii. 25). Not indeed that this office was for the first time exercised by Him upon His resurrection and ascension, as may be seen from the prayer offered up by Him for His disciples, as recorded in John xvii. But though it had been exercised by Him through the whole of His earthly ministry, His work of inter

cession may be said to have risen with Him, and to have become glorified with Him on His resurrection and ascension into Heaven.

Thus far, then, we have been engaged in contemplating our Lord working for us in our own nature indeed, and yet, so to speak, altogether outside of ourselves.

At His death He trod the winepress alone. And the very office of Intercessor requires the presence of one who, though clothed in our nature, and in all essential points like to ourselves, is yet unlike us in being holy and separate from us sinners on whose behalf He pleads. In addition, however, to His thus suffering and pleading for us externally to ourselves, Scripture also represents Him as making Himself actually one with us on whose behalf He once suffered and now pleads. Even in the days of His flesh He could describe Himself as the vine, with us for its branches, as not only the way to the Father, but also the life. At the same time it is with especial reference to that new and higher life upon which He entered at His resurrection that this language respecting Him is most especially made use of in Scripture. No longer I,' writes the Apostle, but Christ lives in me' (Gal. ii. 2c). 'Ye died, and your life is hid with

Christ in God' (Col. iii. 3). 'We are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ' (1 John v. 20). Similarly our Lord is spoken of as the second Adam, the true root and source of our spiritual life, even as our natural life is derived from the first Adam (1 Cor. xv. 45). In these passages, and many more might be quoted to the same effect, our salvation is spoken of as owing not so much to any external act performed by Jesus Christ on our behalf, as to an actual infusion of His life into ours, transforming us by degrees into the very image and likeness of Him by Whom we were first made and then redeemed and made over again, and Who now lives in us and takes us up, one by one, into Himself.

Again, besides being communicated to each one of us individually, this life of Christ, especially in its new and glorified form, is also represented as gathering us all together as so many members or limbs into one body with Jesus Christ Himself for its head. 'He is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead' (Col. i. 18; comp. ii. 10). As we have many members in one body, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another' (Rom. xii. 5). And still more distinctly

the Apostle speaks of the working of God's 'mighty power which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right

...

hand in the heavenly places . . . and gave Him to be the Head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all' (Eph. i. 20, 23).

And so the life through Christ, for which we are indebted to His death, attains its full growth and symmetry in that life of all true believers together in Him, for which we are chiefly indebted to His resurrection. Thus then let us learn to think of Him, not only as having once died for us, but also as now living in us and we in Him. Let us picture Him to ourselves as the head and the heart, at once human and divine, to the body of the whole human race, rejoicing with all, sorrowing with all, and caring for all; as drawing all the diseases of each separate part of the body into Himself and vanquishing them in the strength of His Divine power, and in the place of the impure blood which had been stagnating in us, infusing a fresh stream of His own warm, life-giving blood, and causing it to circulate through the whole body to its furthest extremities, 'till we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto