a Spirit; the one killed, the other gave life; the one condemned, the other made right; the one was transient, and the other permanent; the one was made glorious, the other was inherently glorious. Such being the facts, St. Paul spoke plainly. There had always been a veil on the face of the Jew, and there was so now; but just as Moses unveiled when he went in before the Lord, so would the Jew, when his heart accepted the Gospel. Christianity was Spirit, and Christ Jesus the Lord was its embodiment; and where the Spirit was, there was liberty. 'The glory of the Lord' is not strength, or knowledge, or mere rank, but goodness, divine goodness, akin to the goodness of God; which alone satisfies the wants of the human spirit, is enduring, and possible to all. We are permitted to behold this glory' with unveiled face,' and looking at it, this glory is reflected upon us, and the reflection changes, not our powers indeed, but the direction of their activities, a change which is going on continually, and which ends in our being, so to speak, transfigured; for we, after our measure and finitely, reflect back Christ, as Christ immeasureably and infinitely reflects back God. This change comes from 'the Lord the Spirit,' by whom I understand Christ Himself is intended, who is so called in ver. 17. change thus wrought is spiritual or internal, and fundamental, and is the test by which we may know whether we are Christians, or whether we are not. Now I do not know how these verses may strike others, but to me it is impossible to believe that such words as these are consistent with the theory of the simple humanity of Christ. The reference is to a process so radical, to a result so comprehensive and inexpressibly glorious, that I cannot bring myself to believe in St. Paul thinking of 'the Lord the Spirit' as only a great Jewish teacher, a great Jewish reformer, with a nature no higher than his own, however much greater his endowments may have been.

The

60. (2 Cor. iv. 6.) 'Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light (or illumination) of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.' In ver. 4, Christ is spoken of as

'the Image of God,' and, evidently, by way of pre-eminence, because there is a sense in which man as such is God's image. The glory of God' is His essential goodness, and the knowledge' of that glory is 'light,' or illumination, which we realize not so much through the intellect, as through the affections, and this knowledge is given to us 'in the face of Jesus Christ,' so that Jesus Christ reflects or reveals the essential glory of God. Of what mere creature dare any man use such words as these? They are practically parallel with those of the Lord Himself, when He said, 'He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.'

61. (2 Cor. v. 6, 8.) 'Being therefore always of good courage, and knowing that whilst we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord; .. we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.' To live the mortal life is to be at home in the body,' and be 'absent from the Lord;' to live the immortal life is to be 'absent from the body,' and to 'be at home with the Lord.' So that the Lord gives all the significance to the difference between the mortal life and the immortal one! Ought so much to be said of any mere creature?

62. (2 Cor. v. 14, 15.) For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they who live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes died and rose again.' If Christ were a man, and a man only, as to His essential nature, what was there especially in His love that should be a 'constraining' power upon the world; and in what sense can it be rightly said that 'He died for all,' and that His death for all is the great argument which should constrain all to live unto Him? Apply such language as this to any pre-eminently good man of whom you know, or of whom you have heard,—I care not who he may be,—and you will see at once that there is a speciality in the case of Christ which is absolutely unique.

63. (2 Cor. v. 18-21.) 'But all things are of God, who

reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave unto us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses, and having committed unto us (or placed in us) the word of reconciliation. We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were entreating us: we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God. Him who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.' The doctrine of atonement, or, more properly speaking, 'reconciliation' to God by Jesus Christ, is here clearly taught; but I have no intention of referring to any one merely theological form of the doctrine, whether it be Calvin's or Wesley's. This, however, is apparent, that God is seeking to reconcile His alienated world to Himself through the Lord Jesus Christ, that Christian ministers are Christ's ambassadors, that Christ Himself was a sinless Being, but that He was in some sense not here explained 'made to be sin' for us, that we in or through Him 'might become the righteousness of God.' The totality of the work here ascribed to Christ, which is nothing short of man's entire redemption, is not quite the work which one man can be called upon to undertake on behalf of another, or a work which any mere man could accomplish.

64. (2 Cor. ix. 15.) 'Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift.' I think the 'gift' here spoken of is not the charity which was shown by the Macedonians, or its moral effects, nor is it God's general bounty, but some one special gift. The text is an illustration of the laws of suggestion, as shown in such texts as Gal. ii. 20, 1 Tim. i. 1, Col. iii. 4, I Cor. ii. 2, 2 Cor. v. 14, and Phil. i. 21. It would be unspeakable' to the apostle, and ought to be more so to us, only that our familiarity with it as a fact deadens our senses. Christ is the unspeakable gift' of God because God alone could have given it, because it was an expression of the love of the Giver, because of its own intrinsic value, our need of it, its perpetuity, and its result to man and God. No doubt, speaking generally, but with an implied

measured meaning, the great men of the world are not only God's gifts, but, so to speak, 'unspeakable' ones. This does not do away, however, with the emphasis which St. Paul clearly intends to give to the Lord Jesus as being God's 'unspeakable gift,' in a sense in which no other being ever was or could be.

Spirit.

65. (2 Cor. xiii. 14.) 'The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.' The ordinary scriptural order in which these three divine names are mentioned, is that of God, Christ, and the Holy But this very fact gives a significance to this text. If St. Paul had thought of the Lord Jesus Christ as only a great human inspired servant of God, I do not think it at all likely that he would have put the reference to 'the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,' as the first member of his sentence. But when we take account of the experimental fact that 'the love of God' is, Christianly speaking, immeasurably realized through 'the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,'—that in fact 'the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ' comes first in the order of experience,-one can understand why St. Paul wrote as he did. To use these three names in one sentence, two of them admittedly referring to the Divine Being, or Divine Beings, and to use the name of a simple human being, and put it at the very front, would be a strange thing for a Jew to do, and equally so for a Christian.

The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, with which I now propose to deal, is not by any means the first in the order of time; but I suppose among the reasons for its being placed in the very fore-front were-first, that it was addressed to the Christians in the chief city of the world; secondly, that it was the longest of the apostle's letters; and thirdly, that it was in some respects the most important in doctrine and exhortation. It has always been very highly valued in the Church, and has been called the marrow of divinity, the key of the New Testament, the Christian Church's confession, the most divine Epistle of the most holy apostle, etc. I think the Epistle itself deals with

a twofold problem. Its author desired to win the Gentile portions of the then existing Church from their fondness for the Grecian philosophy, and to withdraw them for ever from their Pagan practices; but he desired also to lead Jewish converts to understand the exact relations in which the law of Moses and the faith and obedience of the gospel stood to each other. The thesis of the Epistle, at least so I understand it, is contained in vers. 16 and 17 of the first chapter, taken in connection with the paragraph in the third chapter which begins with ver. 19 and ends with ver. 31. It is not, however, to the great subject-matter of this Epistle that it forms any part of my duty to refer. Mine is a smaller task, that of referring to some, at least, of the ‘indirect evidences' which it supplies to the personal divinity of the Lord. And here, before I make any special references, let me say that the whole tone of the Epistle, its entire stress, seems to me to militate against the assumption that the Christ of the writer was 'human, human in birth, human in nature, human in passion, human in temptation, human in death, and that only.' Just consider the mighty problem which St. Paul here states, and attempts to solve—no less a problem than the question of how a man may be justified, that is to say, 'rightened' before God-and the part which the mission and work of the Lord Jesus takes in the solution. If Jesus Christ had Himself been simply one of the human race, I cannot understand the position which this Epistle assigns to Him as the all-sufficient Saviour of that race. Say that He was divinely commissioned, say that all His endowments were extremely exceptional, say that no such man had appeared before or since, say that just as we have but one Shakespeare so we have but one Jesus; and still you do not account for the position assigned in this Epistle to the personality of Christ, and the part He plays in man's redemption. But this by the way.

66. (Rom. i. 3, 4.) 'His Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was declared (or determined) to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead; even