Example. I want salvation, not rebuke. Do not say to me, See in Christ an instance of self-sacrifice and loving obedience, but say to me, Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. Bring down your gospel to the pit of my helplessness. Tell angels of examples, but to the sinner preach a Saviour. And that Saviour must have in his hands the print of the nails and in his side the wound of the spear. I must see them and feel them by faith. The redness of his apparel must proclaim his quality. He must not come to me in the snow of his holiness, but in the crimson of his sacrifice. The shame of my sin can bear the sight of his blood. This would be ecstasy but for the humiliation and the sorrow of my soul. My contrition takes it out of the rank of romance and sets it at the head of facts. As the cross is the one way to heaven, so conscious sin is the one way to the cross. To the intellect it is foolishness, to pride it is a stumblingblock, but to broken-heartedness and self-helplessness it is the very power and love and glory of God.

The heart has many moods, and the aspects of Christ and his work must be various enough to

meet them all. Science is for experts; the cross is for sinners. As the world is many, so the heart itself is many. It must be met in every experience, especially in its agony on account of sin. The temptation of the expert is to write for experts. He cannot easily change his apparatus. He talks to his peers, or to those who may become his peers, through long training and much acquisition. But the evangelist talks to the common heart, speaking to every man of the wonderful works of God in the tongue wherein the man was born. This is the great translation. This is the pentecostal miracle. Thus, instead of emptying the gospel message out of one language into another, God the Holy Ghost enables every man who has received the gift of life to tell the gospel story in the only truly original language of living and definite experience. Grammar is not

excluded; it is subordinated. The expert and the evangelist should work together. In this connection the point is that Christ's work should appeal to every mood of the heart, and that to exclude the evangelical view of that work is to leave the heart without comfort or hope in its bitterest desolation. It is not to be supposed that the world is full of experts who

are only waiting for a rectified record in order to become Christians. We must not imagine that the question of dates is standing between men and the forgiveness of their sins. Such questions are by no means unimportant, yet there are other questions which infinitely transcend them in urgency. Take this case: What must I do to be saved? I have sinned against heaven with an outstretched arm: by day I have no light and by night no rest because of the pain and shame of self-reproach: I dare not look toward God in his righteousness: I am hopeless, helpless, desolate.—What is the answer to the condition faintly indicated by these confessions? for be it always understood that such agony has no adequate speech. I have always found that the best answer is the cross, and that the reply of the cross is this:

1. Jesus Christ came expressly to

meet such cases.

2. That Jesus Christ did something for the sinner which the sinner could never do for himself. What that something is no words can fully tell.

3. That Jesus Christ tasted death

for every man.

4. That where sin abounded grace

did much more abound.

5. That Christ is able to save unto the uttermost.

These are the great evangelical replies, and by them the sincerity of the inquirer may be tested beyond doubt. Broken-heartedness on account of personal sin will never chafe under such gracious and healing counsel. These replies are greater than literal criticism. They are spiritual answers to a spiritual condition. They express the majesty and the pathos of the crucified Christ. There are moments in the soul's suffering when that word

CRUCIFIED

shines with the glory of an immediate revelation. It represents the tenderest love of God. It bruises the serpent's head.

Have we not some hints of deeper meanings in the case of common human suffering? Here is one mourning for his firstborn, and will not be comforted. The life so lonely, the grave so deep and cold, the farewell so long; the poor heart cannot bear it; faith totters under a mortal blow; the very

soul is almost turned into desperate blasphemy. Who amongst us can touch that agony-who dare speak to such sacred woe? Can the physiologist calm the heart by his science? Can the physician recall the vanished joy by some professional statement? Who, then, can find the door of the sanctuary? Only one who has suffered a kindred loss. One who has been crucified. One who knows the password of grief. Sorrow must speak to sorrow. Wound must speak to wound. So with the deeper agonies. We have not an high-priest that cannot be touched. He lays his wounds on ours-he heals

us with his blood.

This can hardly be explained in words. Perhaps we may find it convenient at this point-face to face as we are with such unfathomable words as Sin and Blood-to make up our minds to some working estimate of the limit and function of Explanation as applied to Christian mysteries. For my own guidance, personally and pastorally, I have laid down a few governing principles. Thus:

1. The human can never fully grasp or realize the whole meaning of the divine.