whole life, but an act finished or consummated in His death. He was manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. Which means that He put away the sin of the world by primarily putting away sin from Himself. He destroyed it, to begin with, by His own death to it, or by putting it to death in its encounter with Himself. He was manifested to take away sin. And this He does in two acts. The first is expressed in these words, And in Him there is no sin; it has been condemned and abolished in His own person. The second is, Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not; it is abolished in whosoever sincerely enters into Him by entering into His death to sin and making it his own. In view of this relation of the death or sacrifice of Jesus Christ to ourselves, there ought to be no hesitation from any Christian point of view about such words as the following: There is one God; one mediator also between God and man, Himself man, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all.

The point is that Jesus Christ did by Himself destroy sin. And now the question is, by what act or by what process did He do so? This involves the whole question of the personal relation of our Lord Himself to the universal human fact of sin. Let it be understood that in our present discussion we are not to take into account any theory of a higher than human personality of Jesus. He does not do so in His own discussions. In them all He is Son of man, and He takes His stand and rests His claims not upon any difference from men, but upon what He is as man. But Jesus Christ will forever stand for spiritual manhood, for man in the

perfection of his Godward relation. He embodies in His person the truth of the divine fatherhood realized upon earth by the attainment or accomplishment of human sonship. For our sonship to God is not a thing that simply is. We have to acquire the divine nature that constitutes or makes us children of God. And that nature is holiness. Holiness is in itself what God is; and in us it is participation in what God is. It is to share His spirit, and so His character and His life. Jesus Christ is to us not only the fact but the way of holiness - The Way, as well as The Truth and The Life. We have in Him the act as well as the fact of holiness. His holiness, if it was to be ours, had to be made like ours under the experiences of human life upon earth. It behooved God, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings. It was necessary that He should taste death for every man. Indeed, if Jesus were man at all, there is but one holiness and one way of holiness for man. Just as much as sin for man is the yielding of his spirit to his flesh, so only is his holiness to be acquired through the subduing of his flesh by his spirit. It is the very condition and nature of the human spirit that it can come about only through itself. And it can come about through itself only by an act of original, self-determined, and permanent, choice. If it is to be good or bad, right or wrong, holy or sinful, it must go through an act of free choice between these opposites, and its goodness or badness, its holiness or its sin, will be simply a name for the permanent and eternal choice it has made. This is what

we mean by formal freedom, in distinction from the real freedom which we acquire in the end through the permanent choice and possession of holiness. But there can be no real freedom in the end if there was no formal freedom at the beginning. A holiness or freedom not wrought out through the pangs and travail of our own free choice and self-determination is not our own, and is therefore, so far as we are concerned, no holiness or freedom at all. We cannot, therefore, begin to discuss the human holiness of Jesus at all, if we are not to ascribe to Him the formal freedom which is the condition and the essence of our own humanity.

But we need not discuss that question in a study of the New Testament. That, from beginning to end, is based upon the mighty issue for humanity, decided once for all in His person as its new head and representative. As humanity had fallen in Adam, and by his act or its own act in him, so humanity threw off its sin and death in Christ, and by His act or by its own act in His person. We need not concern ourselves, if we are disposed to do so, about the literal or historical truth of Adam. If man has sinned or is sinful, it can be only through himself that he has done or become so. There can be no sin except through personal responsibility. Now, just let us take Adam as standing for that self or selfhood of humanity, or of every man, through which it has become and is sinful before God, as indeed it has and is. The truth then simply amounts to this, that as man of or in himself (his natural estate, or Adam) is universally subject to sin and death, so in Christ has He been redeemed and raised, or has raised

himself, out of that natural condition of subjection to sin and death. The question is first, as we have stated it, how did Jesus Christ in Himself, or humanity in His person, accomplish that act? The answer which we will first give and then amplify is: that He accomplished it humanly through a perfect human attitude toward sin and toward holiness, sustained throughout His life and consummated in His death. But for the certainty of being misunderstood - against which I shall do my best to guard this discussion -I should say that Jesus Christ, or humanity in Him, accomplished salvation or holiness through a lifelong and death-completed act of perfect repentance and perfect faith. By a perfect repentance - in the larger sense in which we are now using it - I mean an attitude toward sin that is unto the putting away of it. And by a perfect faith I mean an attitude that is unto, that actually attains, the complete putting on of holiness. Such a repentance is necessarily unto death, either the death of sin in us or the death of ourselves to sin, or probably both. Such a faith is necessarily unto life, unto the limit of the completeness of the life of God in us and of our life in God. In other words, Jesus Christ accomplished that perfect human act which is in itself the only perfect human salvation, the perfect putting away of sin by the perfect putting on of holiness.

The more we consider the matter the more shall we be convinced, from the spiritual side of it, that for us there is no real and complete salvation except through a real death and resurrection. A negation of sin unto the extinction of it, an affirmation of holiness unto the

or

realization of it that is what our salvation means, and that is precisely what Jesus Christ accomplished. The death that He died, He died unto sin once once for all; because it was a complete and perfect death: the life that He liveth, He liveth unto God. But still the question remains: Why is the putting to death of sin in us likewise a death of ourselves unto sin? Especially why was it necessary that our sinless Lord should die to sin? The answer is that He was only humanly sinless in that He humanly died to sin. His lifelong death to sin created and constituted His sinlessness, or rather His holiness; because there is no negative sinlessness that is not an act of positive holiness. The completer answer to this question, however, will require a going over of the details of what call the formation or evolution of the human sinlessness of Jesus.

we may

Our Lord, because He was Son of man, and because He could not be so and be devoid of what is the essential constitution of humanity, entered upon life confronted by the one issue that meets us all and makes us all whatsoever we are. The one issue was that of sin or holiness. He could only be sinful by yielding to any of the numerous and ever-present occasions, opportunities, and solicitations of sin that come to us from without. Equally He could be holy only through resisting and denying these same universal and natural temptations. As we have said, the selfsame conditions or so-called causes that produce sin are necessary to the formation of holiness. We cannot say that temptation did not play a part, and a part that was as neces