THE prevalent theory of the redeeming sufferings affirms that God is impassible, and therefore, limits the sufferings of Christ to his manhood alone. This theory has pervaded Christendom, and stood the test of centuries; yet have we been forced, by scriptural proofs, to the conclusion that it is founded in error, and that the expiatory agonies of our Lord reached both his united natures. That our inquiry is of importance, no Christian will doubt. We have sought in vain for any satisfactory arguments to sustain the prevalent theory. The pulpit, so far as our personal experience extends, has been almost silent on the theme. We have looked into such theological treatises as have fallen within our reach. They abound in reiterations of the averment, AGod is impassible;@ but, with very few and scanty exceptions, they stop short at the threshold of that specious, yet unsupported dogma. We have betaken ourselves to our Bible. The result of our scriptural investigations will appear in these sheets. Perhaps our humble essay may elicit from abler minds more ample reasons in favour of this ancient and wide-spread theory. If such reasons are drawn fresh and pure from the great scriptural reservoir, we shall readily become their willing convert. We seek not polemic victory; our sole object is the development of TRUTH.

We affix not our name to our unaspiring volume. The omission is not from fear of responsibility. Amenable to the judgment of God, we have no unbecoming dread of the judgment of men; but, in very truth, we believe that our humble name could add nothing to what may possibly be thought the force of our reasoning. Our name is unknown to theological lore. Of the writer it may justly be said, AAlong the cool, sequestered vale of life,@ He Akept the noiseless tenour of@ his Away.@

THE Publishers having determined on the issue of another edition of AThe Sufferings of Christ by a Layman,@ the author has availed himself of the opportunity to revise the Work with some care. He has made additions equivalent in quantity to at least one fourth of the original volume; and, without waiving or substantially varying any of the positions assumed by his argument, he has softened some forms of expression which, upon deliberation, appeared to be more startling than the development of truth imperatively required. The author ventures to hope that the revision will render the second edition more worthy of public acceptance than the first.

The TrinityCFall of ManCPlan of RedemptionCChrist suffered in Divine as well as in Human Nature

Prevalent Hypothesis of God=s Impassibility consideredCSupported by Great NamesCCorrect when applied to Involuntary SufferingCIncorrect when applied to Voluntary SufferingCArgument of Bishop Pearson examinedCSinless Suffering if Voluntary does not imply imperfection or infirmity

Hypothesis of God=s Impassibility continuedCNot a SelfCevident PropositionCIncarnation itself implies SufferingCPrevalent Hypothesis Traced to its Source in early Antiquity Argument of Athanasius examined

Prevalent Theory of Christ=s Sufferings limits them to his HumanityCNecessary Result of Hypothesis of Divine ImpassibilityCTheory of the same Antiquity and Prevalence as HypothesisCObject of our Argument statedCRemarks of Dr. ChalmersCRemarks of Dr. HarrisCRemarks of Professor VinetCWho and what Christ wasCHis SynonymesCDefinite Article should have been prefixed to Name by TranslatorsCScriptural passages declarative of Sufferings of Christ

Name of ChristCIts Compass and PowerCScriptural Language, how to be construedCName includes both his Natures Any Exceptions are created and explained by the BibleCNo such Exception intimated in Case of his SufferingsCChrist=s own Declarations, Luke 24, 26, 46CHis name denotes Totality of his united Being, not one of its PartsCUnion of his two Natures constituted holy Partnership, to which his Name was givenCName not applicable to the exclusive Suffering of the human Partner

Phrase, the Person of ChristCMeans nothing more than simple Name, the ChristCNo Analogy between Person of Christ suffering from Pains of Human Nature and Person of ordinary Man suffering from corporeal PainsCBishop Pearson again consideredCBishop Beveridge consideredCDivinity of Christ suffered actually, not merely by constructionCIf Christ suffered only in Humanity, his Sufferings, taken in reference to his Divine Beatitude, were inconceivably small

Natures of Christ concurred and participated in all his Sayings and DoingsCSo in Heaven and on EarthCAll his Sayings and Doings were in his Mediatorial Character, requiring Concurrence and Participation of United NaturesCNo Exception in Article of SufferingCExamples of Concurrence and ParticipationCFarther Examples in case of MiraclesCMoanings on Cross in United NaturesCMediation a Suffering MediationCEternal Son Aemptied himself@ of his Beatitude as well as Glory on becoming incarnate

Had there been any Distinction between the two natures of Christ in the Article of Suffering, it would have been indicated in the BibleCIntellectual Character of PaulCTwo passages from 1 Peter, declaring that Christ suffered in the Flesh, considered and explainedCBishop Pearson again examinedCTerm Flesh, when applied to Christ, designates his whole united BeingCTerm Body, when applied to Christ, has the same comprehensive MeaningCSo has the term ManCTerms Crucified and Cross

Blood and Death of ChristCBlood, when applied to Christ, has a Meaning more comprehensive than its ordinary ImportCIt means Totality of Expiatory SufferingsCChrist really diedCDeath reached both his NaturesCScene at Patmos

Death of the Eternal SonCScriptural Passages proving itCHis ExaltationCWhat was meant by his DeathCNot mere Physical DeathCWhy his Sufferings called DeathCVisible Expiration on Cross, but Representative of his viewless DeathCPhysical Death and Spiritual Death

Second Chapter of HebrewsCTaster of DeathCCaptain of our SalvationCTaker on him the Seed of AbrahamCTerm Death when affirmed of the Eternal Son more fully explainedCBoth Natures of Christ Tempted

Death of Eternal Son continuedCActs, 3. 15: Ye Akilled the Prince of life.@ I Corinthians, 2. 8: They Acrucified the Lord of glory.@ John, 10. 14, 15: AI am the good shepherd;@ AI lay down my life for the sheep@CThe Lamb of the fifth chapter of RevelationCJohn, 3. 16, 17: AFor God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.@ AFor God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world.@ Romans, 8.32: AHe that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all@CFather=s love in death of ChristCSon=s loveCSelfCdenial of eternal Son

Dismay and Perturbation of Christ before and during last PassionCHis Apprehensions and Conduct contrasted with Human Martyrs, and Persons not MartyrsCPhenomenon not explicable on Supposition that Humanity alone sufferedCReasons commonly assigned for his Dismay and Perturbation, and Fallacy of such Reasons

CalvaryCContrast between Christ and penitent ThiefCGethsemaneCSpeaker and Actor was Christ in both NaturesCSufferings there those of AnticipationCIndications of DismayCIt was the Anticipation of Spiritual, not Physical AgoniesCThriceCrepeated PrayerCAppearance of AngelC@My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death@CWhat the dreaded Cup was

Humanity of Christ had not Physical Capacities to endure all his SufferingsCBody and Human Soul of Christ differed in nothing but Holiness from those of ordinary MenCBody can suffer only to limited ExtentCSo of Human SoulCSufferings of Christ Infinite, or, at least, beyond Mortal EnduranceCChrist=s Physical Capacities not expanded at last PassionCIf so, he would not have Suffered in our NatureCShifts to which Prevalent Theory is put to reconcile Extent of Christ=s sufferings with limited Capacities of Humanity to suffer

Christ=s Anticipations of last Passion previous to Night of GethsemaneCLuke, 12. 49-51: AI have a baptism to be baptized with@CJohn. 12. 27; 28: ANow is my soul troubled@CJohn, 13. 21: AHe was troubled in spirit@CHeb. 5. 7, 8: AWhen he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears@CObjection answered arising from Divine PrescienceCProgress of Christ=s Anticipations

Proofs of divinity of Christ=s Sufferings derived from Old TestamentCFiftyCthird Chapter of IsaiahCIsaiah, 63. 3: AI have trodden the wine press alone@CIsaiah 63. 9: AIn all their affliction he was afflicted@CZechariah, 13. 7: AAwake, 0 sword, against my shepherd@CZechariah 12.10 AAnd they shall look upon me whom they have pierced@

Scriptural Passages ascribing Blessedness to the DeityCIf they are more than Doxologies, they imply no Incapacity to sustain Voluntary SufferingCDivine Beatitude progressiveCAJoy set before@ Athe Author and Finisher of our Faith@CHoliness and happiness though twin sisters, may be severed for a time

Immutability of GodCNot Impugned by our ArgumentCAffected by Suffering no more than by IncarnationCImplies only Identity of Essence and Primary AttributesCIf God was Inflexible as Fate, Prayer would be Useless, perhaps ImpiousCImmutability allows Mutation of Emotion and ActionCAffirmed of ChristCAnd yet Christ Suffered

Incarnation no Proof that God the Son had not Capacity to suffer without itCProbable Reasons of IncarnationCIt presented Example of perfect ManCBrought Proofs of Gospel home to Senses of MenCRendered Triumph over Satan completeCAffords abiding Memorial of God=s Justice and LoveCIncarnate God, in both his Natures, obeyed the Law

Objections to Prevalent TheoryCVenerable for its Age and PrevalenceCMiniature of its outlinesCDerogates from Simplicity and Fulness of AtonementCNot founded on ScriptureCImparts to Bible Figurative MeaningCLowers affection from Godhead of Christ to ManhoodCStrengthens Unitarian Error

Early History of Truth that Divinity of Christ Participated in SufferingCEarly History of Prevalent TheoryCIts InconsistenciesCHas Theology for Closet and Theology for SanctuaryCIts Hymns and Prayers and SermonsCEffects upon Devotion from unmasked and universal Development of Theory

Practical Effects of Doctrine of Divinity of Christ=s SufferingsCDeepens Views of SinCExalts Justice of GodCHis LoveCMagnifies Value of SoulCAffords sure Foundation of Christian ConfidenceCElevates Views of Atonement

APPENDIX.

No. l.CThe Argument of Athanasius 341

No. 2.CThe Bloody Sweat. 352

No. 3.CExtracts from the Hymns of the Churches 358

No. 4.CExtracts from Sermons and other Writings by

THE prevalent theory of the redeeming sufferings affirms that God is impassible, and therefore, limits the sufferings of Christ to his manhood alone. This theory has pervaded Christendom, and stood the test of centuries; yet have we been forced, by scriptural proofs, to the conclusion that it is founded in error, and that the expiatory agonies of our Lord reached both his united natures. That our inquiry is of importance, no Christian will doubt. We have sought in vain for any satisfactory arguments to sustain the prevalent theory. The pulpit, so far as our personal experience extends, has been almost silent on the theme. We have looked into such theological treatises as have fallen within our reach. They abound in reiterations of the averment, AGod is impassible;" but, with very few and scanty exceptions, they stop short at the threshold of that specious, yet unsupported dogma. We have betaken ourselves to our Bible. The result of our scriptural investigations will appear in these sheets. Perhaps our humble essay may elicit from abler minds more ample reasons in favour of this ancient and wide-spread theory. If such reasons are drawn fresh and pure from the great scriptural reservoir, we shall readily become their willing convert. We seek not polemic victory; our sole object is the development of TRUTH.

We affix not our name to our unaspiring volume. The omission is not from fear of responsi-bility. Amenable to the judgment of God, we have no unbecoming dread of the judgment of men; but, in very truth, we believe that our humble name could add nothing to what may possibly be thought the force of our reasoning. Our name is unknown to theological lore. Of the writer it may justly be said, "Along the cool, sequestered vale of life,@ He Akept the noiseless tenour of" his Away.@

THE Publishers having determined on the issue of another edition of "The Sufferings of Christ by a Layman," the author has availed himself of the opportunity to revise the Work with some care. He has made additions equivalent in quantity to at least one fourth of the original volume; and, without waiving or substantially varying any of the positions assumed by his argument, he has softened some forms of expression which, upon deliberation, appeared to be more startling than the development of truth imperatively required. The author ventures to hope that the revision will render the second edition more worthy of public acceptance than the first.

Prevalent Hypothesis of God=s Impassibility consideredCSupported by Great NamesCCorrect when applied to Involuntary SufferingCIncorrect when applied to Voluntary Suffering-Argument of Bishop Pearson examinedCSinless Suffering if Voluntary does not imply imperfection or infirmity

Prevalent Theory of Christ=s Sufferings limits them to his HumanityCNecessary Result of Hypothesis of Divine Impassibility-Theory of the same Antiquity and Prevalence as Hypothesis-Object of our Argument statedCRemarks of Dr. Chalmers-Remarks of Dr. HarrisCRemarks of Professor Vinet-Who and what Christ wasCHis Synonymes-Definite Article should have been prefixed to Name by TranslatorsCScriptural passages declarative of Sufferings of Christ

Name of ChristCIts Compass and PowerCScriptural Language, how to be construedCName includes both his Natures Any Exceptions are created and explained by the BibleCNo such Exception intimated in Case of his SufferingsCChrist=s own Declarations, Luke 24. 26, 46CHis name denotes Totality of his united Being, not one of its PartsCUnion of his two Natures constituted holy Partnership, to which his Name was givenCName not applicable to the exclusive Suffering of the human Partner

Phrase, the Person of ChristCMeans nothing more than simple Name, the ChristCNo Analogy between Person of Christ suffering from Pains of Human Nature and Person of ordinary Man suffering from corporeal PainsCBishop Pearson again consideredCBishop Beveridge considered-Divinity of Christ suffered actually, not merely by constructionCIf Christ suffered only in Humanity, his Sufferings, taken in reference to his Divine Beatitude, were inconceivably small

Natures of Christ concurred and participated in all his Sayings and DoingsCSo in Heaven and on EarthCAll his Sayings and Doings were in his Mediatorial Character, requiring Concurrence and Participation of United NaturesCNo Exception in Article of SufferingCExamples of Concurrence and ParticipationCFarther Examples in case of MiraclesCMoanings on Cross in United NaturesCMediation a Suffering MediationCEternal Son Aemptied himself== of his Beatitude as well as Glory on becoming incarnate

Had there been any Distinction between the two natures of Christ in the Article of Suffering, it would have been indicated in the BibleCIntellectual Character of PaulCTwo passages from 1 Peter, declaring that Christ suffered in the Flesh, considered and explainedCBishop Pearson again examinedCTerm Flesh, when applied to Christ, designates his whole united BeingCTerm Body, when applied to Christ, has the same comprehensive MeaningCSo has the term ManCTerms Crucified and Cross

Blood and Death of ChristCBlood, when applied to Christ, has a Meaning more comprehensive than its ordinary ImportCIt means Totality of Expiatory SufferingsCChrist really diedCDeath reached both his NaturesCScene at Patmos

Death of the Eternal SonCScriptural Passages proving itCHis ExaltationCWhat was meant by his DeathCNot mere Physical DeathCWhy his Sufferings called DeathCVisible Expiration on Cross, but Representative of his viewless DeathCPhysical Death and Spiritual Death

Second Chapter of HebrewsCTaster of DeathCCaptain of our SalvationCTaker on him the Seed of AbrahamCTerm Death when affirmed of the Eternal Son more fully explainedCBoth Natures of Christ Tempted

Death of Eternal Son continuedCActs, 3. 15: Ye "killed the Prince of life.@ I Corinthians, 2. 8: They "crucified the Lord of glory.@ John, 10. 14, 15: "I am the good shepherd;@ AI lay down my life for the sheep"CThe Lamb of the fifth chapter of RevelationCJohn, 3. 16, 17: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.@ AFor God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world." Romans, 8.32: AHe that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all@CFather@s love in death of ChristCSon=s love-Self-denial of eternal Son

Dismay and Perturbation of Christ before and during last PassionCHis Apprehensions and Conduct contrasted with Human Martyrs, and Persons not MartyrsCPhenomenon not explicable on Supposition that Humanity alone sufferedCReasons commonly assigned for his Dismay and Perturbation, and Fallacy of such Reasons

CalvaryCContrast between Christ and penitent ThiefCGethsemane-Speaker and Actor was Christ in both NaturesCSufferings there those of AnticipationCIndications of Dismay-It was the Anticipation of Spiritual, not Physical AgoniesCThriceCrepeated PrayerCAppearance of AngelC"My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death"CWhat the dreaded Cup was

Humanity of Christ had not Physical Capacities to endure all his SufferingsCBody and Human Soul of Christ differed in nothing but Holiness from those of ordinary MenCBody can suffer only to limited ExtentCSo of Human SoulCSufferings of Christ Infinite, or, at least, beyond Mortal EnduranceCChrist=s Physical Capacities not expanded at last PassionCIf so, he would not have Suffered in our NatureCShifts to which Prevalent Theory is put to reconcile Extent of Christ=s sufferings with limited Capacities of Humanity to suffer

Christ=s Anticipations of last Passion previous to Night of GethsemaneCLuke, 12. 49-51: AI have a baptism to be baptized with"CJohn. 12. 27; 28: "Now is my soul troubled"CJohn, 13. 21: "He was troubled in spirit@CHeb. 5. 7, 8: "When he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears@CObjection answered arising from Divine PrescienceCProgress of Christ=s Anticipations

Proofs of divinity of Christ=s Sufferings derived from Old TestamentCFifty-third Chapter of IsaiahCIsaiah, 63. 3: AI have trodden the wine press alone@CIsaiah 63. 9: "In all their affliction he was afflicted@CZechariah, 13. 7: "Awake, 0 sword, against my shepherd@CZechariah 12.10 AAnd they shall look upon me whom they have pierced@

Scriptural Passages ascribing Blessedness to the DeityCIf they are more than Doxologies, they imply no Incapacity to sustain Voluntary SufferingCDivine Beatitude progressiveC"Joy set before@ Athe Author and Finisher of our Faith"CHoliness and happiness though twin sisters, may be severed for a time

Immutability of GodCNot Impugned by our ArgumentCAffected by Suffering no more than by IncarnationCImplies only Identity of Essence and Primary AttributesCIf God was Inflexible as Fate, Prayer would be Useless, perhaps ImpiousCImmutability allows Mutation of Emotion and ActionCAffirmed of ChristCAnd yet Christ Suffered

Incarnation no Proof that God the Son had not Capacity to suffer without itCProbable Reasons of IncarnationCIt presented Example of perfect ManCBrought Proofs of Gospel home to Senses of MenCRendered Triumph over Satan complete-Affords abiding Memorial of God=s Justice and LoveCIncarnate God, in both his Natures, obeyed the Law

Objections to Prevalent Theory-Venerable for its Age and PrevalenceCMiniature of its outlines-Derogates from Simplicity and Fulness of AtonmentCNot founded on ScriptureCImparts to Bible Figurative MeaningCLowers affection from Godhead of Christ to ManhoodCStrengthens Unitarian Error

Early History of Truth that Divinity of Christ Participated in Suffering-Early History of Prevalent TheoryCIts InconsistenciesCHas Theology for Closet and Theology for SanctuaryCIts Hymns and Prayers and SermonsCEffects upon Devotion from unmasked and universal Development of Theory

Practical Effects of Doctrine of Divinity of Christ=s SufferingsCDeepens Views of SinCExalts Justice of GodCHis LoveCMagnifies Value of SoulCAffords sure Foundation of Christian ConfidenceCElevates Views of Atonement

No. l.CThe Argument of Athanasius . . 341

No. 2.CThe Bloody Sweat. 352

No. 3.CExtracts from the Hymns of the Churches 358

No. 4.CExtracts from Sermons and other Writings by

THAT there is a God above us, Aall Nature cries aloud through all her works."A To this voice of Nature, Revelation adds her imperative voice from heaven, proclaiming the existence and government of a wise, gracious, and universal Sovereign. The Bible informs us, too, that the Deity whom we worship is a triune God. AThere are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.@ "-l John, 5. 7. We quote this passage from the beloved disciple with the knowledge that its genuineness has been questioned; but, if expunged from the Bible, it would subtract only a single grain, from the overflowing measure of scriptural proof that there are three persons in the Godhead. The Bible also teaches us that the Trinity consists of three distinct persons; united, not commingled, Three in One, and One in Three.

A celebrated Unitarian preacher now deceased, whose simplicity, pathos, and eloquence have seldom been surpassed, has laid it down as a fundamental objection to the doctrine of the Trinity, that the plurality of its persons tends to divide and distract devotional love and worship.* But had this distinguished man, with feelings so true to nature, forgotten, when he uttered the sentiment just stated, the blissful days of youth, when his gladdened eyes beheld, and his bounding heart leaped forth to greet, at the domestic altar, two distinct, yet united personages, who both claimed and received his undivided and undiminished reverence, and gratitude, and love? Was his filial piety distracted by the plurality of its objects? Did his heart yield a less true and fervent homage to his father, because the angel form of his mother was hovering around him, arrayed in the lovely habiliments of her own meekness, and gentleness, and grace? Did he find it needful, for the full concentration and development of filial devotion, that one Aof his parents should be forever banished from the domestic hearth, leaving the other in cheerless solitude? Did his youthful heart yearn for an amendment of the laws of Nature, so that each family of earth should have, instead of two, but one solitary, lonely progenitor?

regenerated, sanctified, and imbued with the balm of comfort his persecuted and earth-wounded soul. The three who Abear record in heaven"A are a triple cord of divine texture, to bind the believing soul faster, and yet more fast to the footstool of its triune God.

"ABorn to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air,@

is yet encompassed by sister flowers. Even the weed of the deserted field is not alone. When our attention is recalled to man, we shall find the social principle an elemental law of his being. Even of him in paradise it was said, by unerring lips, AIt is not good that man should be alone.@" If we ascend to the next highest grade in the scale of being, we may confidently presume that the social principle pervades angelic natures. Heaven would cease to be heaven to the angels if each was secluded in his solitary cell. The strains of the lonely harp would become feeble and plaintive, though stricken by the hand of a seraph.

May we not, then, without irreverence, venture to presume that the social principle reaches even to the Godhead; that he who made man in his own image, and after his own likeness, Aand breathed into his nostrils the breath of life@" from the redundant fountain of his own ethereal essence, retained in himself, in infinite fulness, that social element, with whose infusion he has so copiously imbued the rational tenants of this lower world, and whose sprinklings have pervaded every part of its animal and vegetable provinces? If we may, indeed, regard this as a great truth of heaven, which mortality may contemplate without profanation; if

A"Those thoughts that wander through eternity@

In that temple of the highest heavens, consecrated as the abode of the Godhead, each of its divine persons enjoys blissful and untiring communion with his two other glorious selves. Into this holiest of temples no discrepancy of views, no collision of sentiment ever enters. To the most perfect unity of action, thought, and feeling, the infinite persons who make it their dwelling -place, are impelled by the elemental and immutable laws of their own being. Thus flow on, in high and incommunicable blessedness, the successive and cloyless ages of the triune God. It must be an iron-hearted theory which would seek to. banish from the dwelling -place of the Highest the delights of social and equal intercourse, and to consign to lonely solitude the eternity of the Sovereign of the universe. The doctrine of the Trinity is, doubtless, above the reach of reason; but, when revealed, reason perceives and approves its fitness. The infinite Father can find no companion among the children of men; they are worms of the dust. Even the hierarchies of heaven are but his ministering spirits. He must have dwelt in solitary grandeur, but for his holy and rapturous communion with his august brethren of the Trinity. What desolation would pervade the courts of heaven, reaching even to the sanctuary of Him A"that sitteth upon the throne,@" could a ruthless arm of flesh pluck from his right hand and his left the beloved fellows of his eternal reign!

On the contrary, the very first chapter in our Bible intimates such high and holy communion. A"And God said, Let us make man in our image, and after our likeness.@C-Genesis 1. 26. This passage, coeval with creation, not only proves the plurality of the persons in the Godhead, but also implies their joint resolution, resulting from deliberative consultation. And if such consultation between the Sacred Three attended the formation of man, how much profounder must have been their reciprocated deliberation when his redemption was the absorbing theme! What holy transports must have pervaded the pavilion of the Godhead at the triumphant return of its second glorious person from terrestrial humiliation and suffering, crowned with the laurels of a world redeemed!

Nor are the following passages less indicative of the plurality of the persons in the Godhead, and of their social and sacred converse with each other. A"And the Lord God said, Behold the man has become as one of us.@" Genesis 3. 22. A"Go to, let us go down and there confound their language.@" Genesis 11. 7. AAnd I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us.@"C-Isaiah 6. 8. The plural number is thus used, not in anticipated conformity to the style of modern royalty, but as suited to shadow forth the co-existence and holy fellowship of the Sacred Three in One. The learned and pious Emmons affirmed that the plural number is used to express the Deity more than one hundred times in Scripture.*

*Emmons= Sermons, p. 90.

It is not however, our object to demonstrate, by a regular argument, the doctrine of the Trinity. Not that we should think its demonstration difficult, with the Bible open before us. But those into whose hands these sheets will be likely to fill need no confirmation of their faith in this fundamental article of our holy religion. We may, then, for the purposes of our argument, adopt it as a settled truth, that there are three distinct persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and that these three persons are equal in all their infinite attributes and perfections; forming by their blessed union the only true God. The fall of man was an astounding event in the history of the universe. A world, just created in all the freshness and loveliness of innocence, and pronounced by its Creator to have been Avery good,@" was seduced from its allegiance by the prince of the powers of the air. The forgiveness of this apostacy without satisfaction would have violated the fundamental laws of the empire of the Godhead. The A"angels who kept not their first estate,@" though their voices had so long helped to swell the harmony of the heavens; though they had been ministering spirits around the throne of the Most High; though, ere this world sprang out of chaos, they had shone as morning stars; though they had been foremost among the shouting sons of God, had yet been cast out, and were confined in everlasting chains of darkness. Had rebel man been forgiven without satisfaction, the purity of divine justice must have been tarnished forever more.

But how was rebel man, poor and utterly destitute, to yield satisfaction? The title to his new dominion had been cancelled by sin. If burnt offerings would have sufficed, A"the cattle upon a thousand hills@" were no longer his. He stood polluted, confounded, seemingly abandoned and lost. But pity had entered the heart of One, whose divine compassion was infinite as his omnipotence. A voice issued forth from the innermost sanctuary of the Godhead: ADeliver him from going down to the pit; I have found a ransom.@C-Job 33. 24. The ransom for delinquents, justly doomed to eternal suffering, was to be paid, in the suffering of their great Deliverer. The development of this plan of grace, so surprising to the heavens, must needs overwhelm with astonishment the dwellers upon the earth. It was the mighty movement of a God, and all its mysterious and progressive footsteps were to be the footsteps of a God.

*Emmons= Sermons, p. 90.

WE are met at the very threshold of our argument with the preliminary objection that the divine nature is impassible, or, in other words, that God cannot suffer. This objection, if true to its unlimited extent, is doubtless insuperable; for if the divine nature of Christ is incapable of suffering, he must necessarily have suffered in his human nature alone. We must, therefore, pause at once in our argument until we have explored the foundations of this startling objection, lest we should come, unwittingly, into collision with the awful attributes of Jehovah. The hypothesis that God is impassible is stated broadly by its advocates without restriction, qualification, or exception. It applies, therefore, as well to voluntary as to involuntary suffering by any one of the persons of the glorious Trinity.

The other distinguished fathers, whose revered names we have recorded, have generally dismissed the hypothesis with a mere passing sentence. AGod is impassible,@ or some other expression, of almost equal brevity, is the only notice they have bestowed on a proposition high as heaven, and vast as infinity. So far as we may judge from their writings, they received the hypothesis as a consecrated relic of antiquity, without pausing to inquire whether its materials were celestial or earthy. It passed from their hands, bearing no marks of ever having been tested - by the touchstone of the Bible.

To the prevalent hypothesis, so far as it relates to involuntary or coerced suffering by the Being of beings to whom it is applied, we make no objection. It would be both irrational and irreverent to imagineimgine that the Omnipotent could be forced to suffer against his own volition. No hostile darts can pierce the thick Abosses of his bucklers.@"C-Job 15. 26. Once, in the history of the universe, has the futile experiment been made. The malcontents of heaven, a mighty host, aspired to shake the throne of the Highest. Their catastrophe has engraved on the walls of the celestial city and on the vaults of hell a lesson lasting as eternity. God=s impassibility to coerced suffering is a plain and palpable principle of natural religion, resulting inevitably from his attributes of infinite knowledge, infinite wisdom, and infinite power.

But as we enter the sphere of voluntary suffering, the question assumes a new and very different aspect. We are, indeed, still met at the threshold with the ever-present hypothesis, AGod is impassible.@" But upon what authority do its adherents apply their standing axiom to the suffering of one of the persons of the Trinity, emanating from his own free volition and sovereign choice? They hold the affirmative of their hypothesis. The rules of evidence, matured and sanctioned by the wisdom of ages, devolve on them the burden of proof. To the living alone can we appeal; and from them we solemnly invoke the proof of an hypothesis gratuitously advanced, and which commingles itself with the vital elements of Christian faith. We affectionately point them to the Bible as the only true foundation of a theory seeking to limit the omnipotence of the Godhead. The Bible gives them no favourable response. From Genesis to Revelation, both inclusive, there is not, to our knowledge or belief a passage which intimates, directly or indirectly that persons of the Trinity has not physical and moral ability to suffer, if his suffering is prompted by infinite love and infinite wisdom.

Do the advocates of the hypothesis of the divine impassibility appeal to the Areopagus of human reason, that proud tribunal, to which even the heathen gods were said to have referred their controversies? We respectfully, yet confidently, meet them there. From none of the physical attributes of the Deity can human reason legitimately draw her bold inference, that one of the persons of the Trinity, to whom Aall things are possible,@" may not, in the plenitude of his omnipotence, become the recipient of voluntary suffering. God indeed is a Spirit; but that a spirit can suffer is fearfully demonstrated in the history of the universe.

God is not mere Intellect. He has a heart as well as understanding; he has volitions, desires, sympathies, emotions. AGod is love.@" To sinful passions his bosom is, indeed, inaccessible; but it overflows to infinitude with all those holy sensibilities which he breathed into innocent man with the breath of life. How can reason contemplate such a Being, and yet, without scriptural authority, deny to him the capacity of suffering, even from his own free and almighty choice? Perhaps it might be laid down as a self-evident truism, that the capacity to suffer necessarily results from the capacity to enjoy. The ability of a person of the Trinity to become the voluntary recipient of short-lived suffering may, for aught that speculative pride can urge to the contrary, have been, in the history of eternity, an element not less conducive than his omnipotence, to the prosperity of the universe and the glory of the Godhead.

On the abstract question of the capacity of the divine nature to suffer of its own free volition, we would not, for ourselves, have ventured gratuitously to speculate. Upon a theme so lofty and so holy, we should have chosen to preserve a profound and reverent silence. But when we find it, as we suppose, recorded in the Sacred Oracles, that the second person of the Godhead actually suffered for the redemption of our fallen race; when our credence to that august truth is interdicted by the hypothesis, A"God is impassible,@" with a voice of power heard, and echoed, and reverberated along the track of ages; when that hypothesis, to retain its own claim to infallibility, must change into figures of speech some of the plainest declarations of Holy Writ, it becomes the right and the duty even of a private Christian to explore respectfully, yet fearlessly, the foundations of a dogma deeply fortified, it is true, in human authority, and hallowed by the lapse of hoary-headed Time, yet scarcely claiming to repose itself on the basis of Revelation.

That the Son of God should have suffered in his divine nature for the redemption of man is not more startling to human reason than the stupendous fact of his incarnation. If, at the time of the first manifestation of divinity in the flesh, the angel of the Lord, instead of announcing the event to the humble shepherds of Bethlehem, had appeared in the midst of an assemblage of Athenian philosophers, made up from the schools of Zeno, Aristotle, and Epicurus, proclaiming to them the A"good tidings of great joy,@" and benignly expounding the spirituality, the ethereal nature, and all the infinite attributes of him who had formed the worlds and was now cradled in a manger, the incarnation of such a being for the remission of mortal sins must have seemed A"unto the Greeks foolishness.@" The heavenly envoy would have been held Ato be a setter forth of strange gods.@"C-Acts, 17. 18. Philosophic incredulity would have treated as a fable of mythology the mysterious message of grace. Peripatetic subtilty might boldly have sought to scan the spiritual anatomy of the revealed God, and dared to pronounce its vain decree, that the holy enigma of his incarnation was a physical or moral impossibility. Yet, if there is demonstration on earth, or truth in heaven, the Son of God, the second person of the glorious Trinity, did, in very fact, become incarnate for the redemption of man.

It will be perceived that Bishop Pearson=s first ground of argument is, that the divine nature of the Son of God being common to the Father and the Holy Spirit, if the Son suffered in his divine nature, then the Father and the Spirit must have suffered. It is an inflexible rule in the science of logic than if an argument proves too much, it proves nothing. Its proving too much is an

infallible sign that it is intrinsically and radically erroneous. The whole argument is condemned. Now the fatal disease of the argument under consideration is, that it proves too much. It touches even the holy incarnation itself. Test the argument, by applying it to the incarnation instead of the suffering of the Son. The argument, thus applied, would stand thus: The divine nature of the Son is common to the Father and the Spirit. If, therefore, the divine nature of the Son had become incarnate, then must the Father and Spirit have become incarnate also. But we learn from the Bible that neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit became incarnate. The argument, if it proves anything, would, therefore, prove that the incarnation of the blessed Son was but a fiction. Thus the corner-stone of our faith would be removed from its place. Samson pulled down the temple of the Philistines. The learned and pious prelate would unwittingly demolish, if his lever was indeed the resistless lever of truth, that holy temple Anot made with hands,@" whose glorious walls are founded on the incarnation of the Son of God, and cemented by his most precious blood.

The second ground of argument adopted by Bishop Pearson is, that the imputation of possibility to the divine nature would imply its Aimperfection@" and Ainfirmity.@" This would indeed be true, if it sought to expose the divine nature to involuntary or coerced suffering. But the supposition that one of the persons of the Trinity can suffer voluntarily, and for an adequate cause, argues no Aimperfection@ or Ainfirmity@ in the divine nature; on the contrary, it relieves the divine nature from the Aimperfection@ and Ainfirmity@ which the hypothesis of our opponents would cast upon it. Their hypothesis says that neither of the persons of the Trinity can in any case suffer. He cannot suffer even from his own spontaneous choice and free volition. He cannot suffer, however strongly infinite wisdom and infinite love might urge his suffering. If the universe was threatened with ruin, he could not suffer to save it, for his suffering would be interdicted by the fixed and unbending laws of his being. And would not such an incapacity to suffer imply A"imperfection@" and A"infirmity@" in the divine nature? It is our opponents, then, and not we, who would attach to the divine nature this A"imperfection@" and A"infirmity.@" It is they, and not we, who would thus hamper Omnipotence by fetters made in the forges of earth.

The supposition that the imputation of voluntary possibility to the divine nature would imply its Aperfection@ and Ainfirmity@ rests not on the eternal granite of the Bible. If its living advocates claim for it a foundation there, let them point to the sustaining verse or chapter. If they rely for its sole support on human argument, we would remind them, in all respect and kindness, that reason in its speculations on the unrevealed attributes of the Godhead, but

ALeads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.@

It is true that suffering, when predicated of fallen man, implies Aimperfection@ and Ainfirmity;@ because in him it is the progeny of transgression, personal or ancestral. Man suffers because man has sinned. Sin is a compound of imperfections and infirmities; and the character of the parent descends to the unhappy offspring. Hence has originated the supposition, so deeply and widely rooted, that suffering implies Aimperfection@ and Ainfirmity.@

But no such implication can attach to the vicarious suffering of a sinless being. Should Gabriel become the recipient of voluntary pangs for some object of benevolent and high import, approved and commended by the Sacred Three, would reason, in all her arrogance, presume to draw, and record as an axiom in her faith, the bold conclusion that the magnanimous endurance implied Aimperfection@ and, Ainfirmity@ in the angelic nature? Would not the devoted act of celestial piety afford a new development of the holiness and elevation of heaven=s ministering spirits, and exalt to a higher point our affectionate admiration of him who, perhaps more immediately than his fellows, stands Ain the presence of God?@" That innocence pure as that of the angels has capacity to suffer, is demonstrated by the sinless wailings heard from Gethsemane and from Calvary.

THE hypothesis of God=s impassibility to voluntary sufferings is not a self-evident proposition. It carries not demonstration on its face; it proves not itself; it requires extraneous confirmation. Whence is such confirmation to be derived? It is yielded neither by the Bible nor by the deliberative process of sound reasoning. The prevalent hypothesis, then, rests on opinion alone. But unsupported opinion, though emanating from the wisest and the best, is incompetent, however long continued or widely diffused, to sustain a dogma claiming the place of a corner-stone in the structure of Christian faith. The opinion of one man, or of millions, of one age, or of successive ages, is not the test of theological truth. Christianity should be the last to recognise such test. She repudiated it by her own example. Her first achievement on earth was her unsparing invasion of the empire of ancient and almost unanimous opinion. Should she admit that the force of opinion can impart to religious belief the stamp of truth, she must, to be consistent, spare the deep-seated, and wide-spread, and time-consecrated superstitions of Africa and of India. An insulated opinion on theological tenets, without support, is but a cipher. Such unsupported opinion, however multiplied, cannot form a unit.

The incarnation itself is a death-blow to the hypothesis of God=s impassibility. If the Godhead is of necessity impassible, one of its august persons could not have become incarnate. The mighty Being who, in the fifth verse of the seventeenth chapter of John, uttered the prayer, AAnd now, 0 Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was,@" could have been none other than the second person of the Trinity, clothed, indeed, in flesh. The prayer itself demonstrates that the Supplicant was not of earth, that he had come down from heaven, that he had existed there, and enjoyed the intimate fellowship of the Father before the world was created. It contains intrinsic evidence that, at the time of the prayer, the divine Supplicant was sustaining the temporary privation of his glorious fellowship with the infinite Father, and that he longed to have it restored. His prayer breathed forth his deep consciousness of the severity of the bereavement. It evinced a bereavement which had marred for a time his infinite beatitude. His eclipsed beatitude was not, for the moment, like the ineffable beatitude which he had enjoyed before incarnation. This very bereavement is but another name for suffering.

There is a passage in the epistles german to that upon which we have been commenting: AWho, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.@"C-Philippians, 2. 6, 7, 8. The words in this passage translated A"made himself of no reputation," should, in justice, have been rendered, Aemptied himself.@" That is their literal meaning. By the substitution of their own language, the translators may have gained something in elegance; they have lost much in strength. Our argument prefers the plain Doric of Paul to the more fastidious style of his translators.

The illustrious personage who had Aemptied himself@ was he Awho, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.@ He was, beyond peradventure, the second person of the Trinity. Of what had he Aemptied himself?@ He had Aemptied himself@ of the Aform of God@ for the A"form of a servant.@ He had Aemptied himself@ of his celestial mansion to become a houseless wanderer upon the earth. He had Aemptied himself@ of the ministration of angels to wash the feet of his betraying and deserting disciples. He had Aemptied himself@ of the glory which he had with the Father before the world was created. He had Aemptied himself@ of his beatific communion with his august companions of the Trinity. And has privation no suffering? Say, ye exiled princes, is there no suffering in privation? Say, ye fallen families, whose fortunes have taken to themselves wings and flown away, is there no suffering in privation? Declare, ye lately bereaved widows, ye newly smitten parents, from the depths of your breaking hearts declare, is there no suffering in privation? The very incarnation, then, should have strangled in its cradle the earthborn hypothesis, AGod is impassible.@

We have taken some little pains to trace the prevalent hypothesis to its source in early antiquity. Not that we bow to the authority of the judicatory of tradition, verbal or written. We recognise but one Caesar in this terrestrial province of the great empire of spiritual truth. That imperial, sovereign, infallible arbiter is the Bible. To this most august of potentates we reserve the privilege of appealing. It is an unalienable privilege; it is the sacred birthright of the Christian, guarantied to him by the last will of the AAlpha and Omega,@ who was dead and is alive again.

He of the fourth century, who gave Aa local habitation and a name@ to the prevalent hypothesis, was this same Bishop of Alexandria That Athanasius was a great man, the intelligent reader has not to learn from these humble sheets. Though then young, he was the master spirit of the Nicene Council. He is the man whose name was borrowed to clothe with immortality that summary of faith afterward compiled, and baptized by the appellation of Athe Athanasian Creed.@ His spiritual domination has almost equalled, in its extent and permanence, the intellectual empire of the illustrious Stagyrite. It was he of whom the great Hooker exclaimed, AThe world against Athanasius, and Athanasius against the world!@ This distinguished theologian wrote a regular and elaborate argument in favour of the hypothesis of God=s impassibility and the kindred theory of the exclusive humanity of Christ=s sufferings.

p.41

elsewhere in the whole compass of sacred literature, ancient and modern, if gleaned and compacted together. The first ingredient that we justly look for in a theological argument is scriptural authority. The argument of Athanasius scarcely claims such authority for its support; on the contrary, he seemingly wishes to have removed out of his way a mass of scriptural verbality, to afford an appropriate site for the erection of his reasoning edifice. He objects to a literal construction of Scripture; from thence we infer his deep conviction that the language of Holy Writ, if taken according to its plain import, must needs have excluded him from access to his building site. With more point than courtesy, he significantly intimates that the literal readers of the Bible are like, Abrutes;@ nor does he allow them the rank even of Aclean beasts@ that Aruminate,@ because they chew not the meditative cud of subtle philosophy. The very corner-stone of the Athanasian

the rank even of Aclean beasts@ that Aruminate,@ because they chew not the meditative cud of subtle philosophy. The very corner-stone of the Athanasian hypothesis is thus founded on bold aberration from the ostensible signification of scriptural language.

This assumed right of man to amend the declarations of the Holy Ghost, Athanasius had been taught by at least one of his venerated predecessors. The celebrated Origen, in the tenth book of his Stromata, dared to utter the following startling sentiments which, if uttered by us, would be held impious; he says, Athe source of many evils lies in adhering to the carnal or external part of Scripture. Those who do so shall not attain to the kingdom of God. Let us, therefore, seek after the spirit and the substantial fruits of the Word, which are hidden and mysterious.@ And again he says, AThe Scriptures are of little use to those who understand them as they are written.@

These sentiments of Origen seem to have been adopted by Athanasius. They are fully developed in his renowned argument. They form the basis of that bold hypothesis which by its confident pretensions and its author=s brilliant name, seems, for near fifteen centuries, to have dazzled the mental vision of the wisest and the best. Nothing can be more dangerous to the vital elements of Christian faith than this latitudinarian construction of the Holy Oracles. It commingles with the inspiration of heaven a controlling infusion of the philosophy of earth. It substitutes for the Word of the infallible God the fallible word of frail and presumptuous man. This latitudinarian interpretation of the Bible was the great moral disease of the first five centuries of the Christian era. It converted what should have been its Ahigh and palmy state@ into one vast receptacle of schisms and heresies. We would not do injustice to the primitive ages of the Church; their persecutions and martyrdoms, so patiently and so nobly borne, are deeply engraven on our memory; the roll of impartial history unfolds, also, the imperishable record of their wild phantasies, their bitter intestine divisions, their frequent shipwrecks of the faith -the legitimate offspring of their reckless constructions of the Oracles of Truth.

Athanasius says that the Bible is to be construed with special reference to what human reason deems Afitting to God.@ We hence. conclude that the supposed unfitness of suffering to the dignity of the Godhead is the prime element of the Athanasian hypothesis. The syllogism of Athanasius, then, stands thus: It is not Afitting to God@ to suffer. The God incarnate did suffer: therefore the incarnate God suffered not in his divine nature. The correctness of the syllogism turns on the truth of its major proposition, viz., the supposed unfitness of the divine nature for suffering. But that was a point for the decision of the conclave of the Trinity. In that august tribunal it must have been decided before the holy incarnation. We purpose to show, by scriptural proofs, that it was there decided adversely to the decision of the author of the prevalent hypothesis. From his philosophical syllogism to the Inspired Volume we bring our writ of review. We appeal from Athanasius to God.

In the course of our future argument, we shall accumulate scriptural passages denoting that, besides the privations incident to his incarnation, the second person of the Trinity did, in very truth, suffer in his ethereal essence infinitely, or, at least, unimaginably, for the salvation of the world. To insert those passages here would be reversing the order of our argument. When they come to be introduced, if understood by others as we understand them, we must beg the kind reader to transplant them, in thought, to this identical place. When they shall have been thus transplanted, they will carry home to that time-consecrated, yet fallacious hypothesis, AGod is impassible,@ the work of demolition more surely and demonstratively than could volumes of argument drawn from the storehouse of reason. Will not plenary proof from Scripture, that the divine nature of Christ actually participated in his mediatorial sufferings, convince even reasoning skepticism that his divinity had physical and moral capacity to suffer?

The dogma of divine impassibility precludes the supposition that the redeeming God suffered even by sympathy. Impassibility excludes suffering in all its forms, whether caused by sympathy or direct personal infliction. Sympathy may induce pangs intense as any corporeal agonies. The anguish of the suffering child is often surpassed by that of the sympathizing mother. The redeeming God was united to the redeeming man by ties closer than ever bound a mother to the child of her affections. But if the prevalent hypothesis be true, how could the throes and spasms of the suffering man have moved any emotion of sympathy in the heart of the impassive God? How could he have pitied the sufferer Alike as a father pitieth his children?@CPsalms 103. 13. Impassibility would be just as inaccessible to the pangs of sympathy as to any other modification of pain.

The prevalent theory of Christ=s@s sufferings limits them to his human nature. This theory was the sure result of the prevalent hypothesis, that God is impassible. If the divine nature was held incapable of suffering, then the conclusion must have been inevitable that his sufferings were confined to his manhood. The prevalent theory, like its parent was born in early antiquity. It has followed the footsteps of its progenitor, as the shadow pursues its substance, along the track of near fifteen hundred years. Like its parent, it has stretched its shade over continents and pervaded Christendom.

That Christ suffered in both his natures we believe to be a revealed truth of our holy religion. Nor is it the least interesting department of inspired lore. It opens a celestial paradise, rich in more choice and lasting fruits than bloomed in the terrestrial Eden. A"Search the Scriptures@" is the passport of God to its tree of knowledge. Yet has an earth-formed apparition, clothed in the as-sumed vesture of an angel of truth, seemed to stand for centuries at its entrance, and, with its phantom sword, to interdict all ingress.

If the question between our opponents and ourselves was to be tested by the mere reasonableness of our respective positions, we should confidently expect a decision adverse to the prevalent theory. Divine justice could not pardon mortal sin without aqequate satisfaction. Nor could it receive satisfaction in any coin save that of suffering. Without adequate suffering not a soul could be saved. The second person of the Trinity voluntarily became the vicarious Sufferer for the redeemed. The substitution was not to depress the awful standard of retributive justice. The Glory of the Godhead was to be maintained; heaven must be satisfied, hell silenced. The substituted coin was to bear the scrutiny of eternity. The redeeming God lacked not capacity to suffer. Did he in Godlike grandeur, most condescendingly and graciously suffer in his own ethereal essence? or did he, himself untouched by pain, form a redeeming man, destined from his birth to bear, in his frail human nature, the expiatory anguish required at the exchequer of heaven as the price of a world=s@s salvation? To borrow the terms wrought into the major proposition of the Athanasian syllogism, was it most A"fitting to God@" that the redeeming Son should save our fallen race by suffering in his own divine essence, or that he should devolve the whole burden of the vicarious suffering on his created proxy? Was the coin formed of divine, or that composed of human suffering, most acceptable at the celestial treasury, in satisfaction of the lofty requisitions of outraged and inflexible justice?

We have expressed our belief that our opponents have left the questions of divine impassibility and the exclusive humanity of the mediatorial sufferings substantially where the Athanasian argument left them. We may have been mistaken. Chapters, and even volumes on the subject may possibly have appeared in some of the languages of earth, dead or living, and yet escaped our circumscribed knowledge. But if we are mistaken, the error, though it must doubtless impeach our theological scholarship, will derogate nothing from the strength of our scriptural argument. The increase of books is almost infinite, multiplying libraries to an extent which casts into the shade the Saracen devastation at Alexandria. With all the A"multitudinous@" volumes of theological lore, the countless progeny of the unceasing travail of eighteen centuries, there is but one created being that can claim universal familiarity. That being is the worm. It alone, of finite things, has bibliothecal ubiquity. The hugest tomes appal it not. To fastidiousness of taste it is a stranger. It feeds not on the ambrosia of genius alone. Its never -satiated appetite loathes not even the offals of polemical dulness. To rivalship with the worm, in compass of research, we dare not aspire.

Our argument seeks not shelter under the wing of human authority; yet it is satisfactory to find that some few of the best and the wisest have thought as we think. It will readily be perceived that the remarks we are about to quote, and which first reached our knowledge after these sheets were prepared for the press, stand seemingly opposed to the hypothesis of God=s@s impassibility, and to the theory that Christ=s@s sufferings were confined to his manhood.

A"It is with great satisfaction that I now clear my way to a topic the most salutary, and, I will add, the most sacramental within the whole compass of revealed faith; even to the love wherewith God so loved the world as to send his Son into it to be the propitiation for our sins. I fear, my brethren, that there is a certain metaphysical notion of the Godheand which blunts our feelings of obligation for all the kindness of his good-will for all the tenderness of his mercies. There is an academic theology, which would divest him of all sensibility; which would make of him a Being devoid of all emotion and all tenderness; which concedes to him power, and wisdom, and a sort of cold and clear, and faultless morality, but which would denude him of all those fond and fatherly regards that so endear an earthly parent to the children who have sprung from him. It is thus that God hath been presented to the eye of our imagination as a sort of cheerless and abstract Divinity, who has no sympathy with his creatures, and who, therefore, can have no responding sympathy to him back again. I fear that such representations as these have done mischief in Christianity; that they have had a congealing property in them towards that affection which is represented the most important, and, indeed, the chief attribute of a religious character, even love to God; and that just because of the unloveliness which they throw over the aspect of our Father who is in heaven, whereby men are led to conceive of him as they would of some physical yet tremendous energy, that sitteth aloft in a kind of ungainly and unsocial remoteness from all the felt and familiar humanities of our species. And so it is, we apprehend, that the theism of nature and of science has taken unwarrantable freedoms with the theism of the Bible; attaching a mere figurative sense to all that is spoken there of the various affections of the Deity, and thus despoiling all the exhibitions which it makes of him to our world of the warmth and power to move and to engage, that properly belong to them. It represents God as altogether impassive; as made up of little more than of understanding and of power; as having no part in that system of emotions which occupies so wide a space in the constitution of man, made after his own image and according to his own likeness.@"

A"The Father sent his Son, for our sake, to the humiliation and the agony of a painful sacrifice, There is evident stress laid in the Bible on Jesus Christ being his only Son, and his only beloved Son. This is conceived to enhance the surrender; to aggravate, as it were, the cost of having given up unto the death so near and so dear a relative. In that memorable verse where it is represented that God so loved the world as to send his only begotten Son into it, I bid you mark well the emphasis that lies in the so. There was a difference, in respect of painful surrender, between his giving up another, more distantly, as it were, connected with him, and his giving up one who stood to him in such close and affecting relationship. The kin that he hath to Christ is the measure of the love that he manifested to the world, in giving up Christ as the propitiation for the world=s@s sins. What is this to say but that, in this great and solemn mystery, the Parent was put to the trial of his firmness? that, in the act of doing so, there was a soreness, and a suffering, and a struggle in the bosom of the Divinity? that a something was felt like that which an earthly father feels when he devotes the best and the dearest of his family to some high object of patriotism? God, in sparing him not, but in giving him up unto the death for us all, sustained a conflict between pity for his child and love for that world for whom he bowed down his head unto the sacrifice. In pouring out the vials of his wrath on the head of his only beloved Son, in awaking the sword of offended justice against his fellow; in laying upon him the whole burden of that propitiation, by which the law could be magnified and its transgressors could be saved; in holding forth on the cross of Christ this blended demonstration of his love and his holiness, and thus enduring the spectacle of his tears and of his agonies and cries till the full atonement was rendered; and not till it was finished did the meek and gentle sufferer give up the ghost. At that time, when angels, looking down from the high battlements of heaven, would have flown to rescue the Son of God from the hands of persecutors, think you that God himself was the only unconcerned and unfeeling spectator? or that, in consenting to these cruel sufferings of his Son for the world, he did not make his love to that world its strongest and most substantial testimony.@"*

A"The love of God, then, invites our adoration not only as it at first sent his only begotten Son; during every moment of the Saviour=s@s sojourn on earth that love was repeating its gift, was making an infinite sacrifice for sinners; while every pang he endured in the prosecution of his work was the infliction of a wound in the very heart of paternal love. Who, then, shall venture to speak of the appeal which was made to that love, of the trial to which that love was put when the blessed Jesus took into his hand the cup of suffering, when his capacity for suffering was the only limitation his sufferings knew? If it be true that God is always in vital sympathetic communication with every part of the suffering creation; that as the sensorium of the universe, he apprehends every emotion, and commiserates every thrill of anguish, how exquisitely must he have felt the filial appeal, when in the extremity of pain; in the very crisis of his agonizing task, the Saviour cried, A"My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?@"

A"What a new and amazing insight, then, does it give us into his love for sinners, that it was able to bear the stress of that crisis, that it did not yield and give way to the incalculable power of that appeal! This is a circumstance which, if I may say so, puts into our hands a line, enabling us to fathom his love to an infinite depth; but we find it immeasurably deeper still. It invests the attractions of the cross with augmented power; for in the sufferingssuffeiings of that scene we behold moreC-if more we are capable of seeingC-more even than the love of Christ. In every pang which is there endured we behold the throes of paternal love, the pulsations and tears of infinite compassion; more than the creation in travail, the divine Creator himself travailing in the greatness of infinite love.:@"*

The last quotation is from the celebrated Professor Vinet, justly styled A"the Chalmers of Switzerland.@" He says:

A"Either the human heart is incapable, from its nature, of feeling love, or that man will feel it, who, enveloped in ignorance as a garment, has seen the God of glory descending even to him, to seek him in the depths of his disgrace; who, from the gloom and sorrow in which his conscience kept him plunged, has seen himself transported into a region of light and happiness; who, in respect to himself, has seen verified that amazing language of the prophet, AIn all their afflictions he was afflicted;@C-who has seen, C-0 mystery, 0 miracle!C-his God travelling by his side, in the rugged path of life; nay, voluntarily assuming the burden which was crushing him; a God humbled, a God weeping, a God anguished, a God dying! That long contest, if I may dare to say it, that agony of God for generations, that painful birth by which humanity was brought forth to the life of heaven, has been re-vealed to him in the ancient dispensation; he has been shown the very steps of God impressed upon the dust of ages, and mingled with the foot-prints of the human race; but at the trace which that God has left on the rock of Calvary, the rock of his heart is broken, the veil of his understanding torn away.@"*

The Christ of the Bible was that A"Holy. Thing,@" born of the virgin, and conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost. He who begat him imparted to the infant Saviour the distinctive appellation of the Christ. The elements composing this unique and august Being were the human nature of his virgin mother, corporeal and intellectual, and the ethereal essence of the second person of the Trinity. His divine and human natures remained distinct, notwithstanding their union. They were united, not commingled. The name, the Christ, was not an unmeaning appellative; it was at once comprehensive and descriptive; pointing significantly to its absorbing centre, the mysterious and awful union of his manhood and his Godhead. To this illustrious personage other names are given in

* Vinet@s Vital Christianity, by Turnbull, p. 293.

* Vinet=s Vital Christianity, by Turnbull, p. 293.

Note.CIn referring to the translation of this distinguished author by the Rev. Robert Turnbull, of the American Baptist Church, we cannot but express our admiration, not only of the original work, but also of the fidelity and elegance of the translation. We know of the few foreign productions, ancient or modern, that have been rendered into our language with more faithfulness, spirit, and eloquence.

From the numerous scriptural passages declarative of the sufferings of Christ, we have selected the following: A"Before I@" (Christ) A"suffer.@"C-Luke, 22. 15. A"Ought not Christ to have suffered?@" Luke, 24. 26. A"Thus it behooved Christ to suffer.@" C-Luke, 24. 46. God before showed , A"that Christ should suffer.@" C-Acts, 3. 18. A"Opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered.@" C-Acts, 17. 3. A"That Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead.@"C-Acts, 26. 23. A"If so be that we suffer with him@" (Christ).C-Romans, 8. 17. A"For even Christ our passover is Asacrificed for us.@"C-l Corinthians, 5. 7. A"For as the sufferings of Christ

abound in us.@"C-2 Corinthians, 1i. 5. A For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin.@"C-2 Corinthians, 5. 21. A"And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.@"C-Galatians, 2. 20. A"Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.@"C-Galatians, 3. 13. A"As Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God.@"C-Ephesians, 5. 2. A"Even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave himself for it.@"C-Ephesians, 5. 25. A"That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.C-Philippians, 3. 10. A"To make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.@"C-Hebrews, 2. 10. A"For in that he himself@" (Christ) A"hath suffered, being tempted.@"C-Hebrews, 2. 18. A"Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.@"C-Hebrews, 5. 8. A"For then must he@" (Christ) A"often have suffered since the foundation of the world.@"C-Hebrews, 9. 26. A"Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate.@"C-Hebrews, 13. 12. A"When it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ.@"C-l Peter, 1. 11II. AChrist also suffered for us, leaving us an example.@"C-1l Peter, 2. 21. A"When he@" (Christ) A"suffered, he threatened not.@"C-1l Peter, 2. 23. A"Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.@"C-1l Peter, 2. 24. A"For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust.@"C-1l Peter,. 3. 18. A"For-asmuch, then, as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh.@"C1- Peter, 4. 1. A"As ye are partakers of Christ=s@s sufferings.@"C-1l Peter, 4. 13. A"Who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ.@"C-1l Peter, 5. 1.

THE, abounding scriptural declarations of the sufferings of Christ, just presented to the reader, are general and unqualified, without limit or exception. They cover all the consecrated ground covered by the name of the Christ. The reader has already learned that the name, the Christ, was imparted by the Holy Ghost to the infant Jesus, to designate his mysterious union of humanity with the Godhead. The name was commensurate with the infinitude of his united being. The limits and power of that redeeming, yet awful name, will be the theme of the present chapter. We shall attempt to show that, when applied by Scripture to the mediatorial sacrifice, the name itself, in its distinctive and wideC-reaching signification, necessarily imports, ex vi ter--mini, or from its own intrinsic compass and potency, the participation of both Christ=s@s natures in his expiatory sufferings.

The words of Scripture should be understood by us in the same manner as they were calculated to be understood by those to whom they were originally addressed. We are to receive them according to their apparent signification, not to hunt after some occult meaning. If they startle us by their loftiness of import, we must remember that they are the words of the unsearchable God. If they are A"as high as heaven,@" we have no right to drag them rudely down to earth. To pursue the imagined spirit of a passage, in opposition to its plain letter, is an experiment that man should make with fear and trembling. He may, unwittingly, A"add unto,@" or A"take away from@" that holy book which came down from above. Let him beware of the penalties denounced at the close of the last chapter of the New Testament -Revelation, 22. 18, 19.

If the scriptural passages declarative of the sufferings of Christ are taken in their plain, obvious, and ordinary sense, they include, beyond peradventure, his divine nature as well as his humanity. The name of Christ is used by the inspired writers to indicate the recipient of the mediatorial sufferings; and that name, in its ordinary import, has no limits narrower than the whole compass of his united natures. Let a man of ordinary understanding, candid and intelligent, untinged by the unfounded hypothesis of God=s@s impassibility, open his Bible; let him read there the oft-repeated, general, and unqualified declarations that Christ suffered; let him call to mind the peculiarity of Christ=s@s being, uniting in himself the God and the man, and that this union, in all the elements of both its natures, is pervaded and represented by his distinctive appellation, and the inference seems to be inevitable, that he would come to the conclusion that the sufferings of Christ were as extensive as the import of his holy name. It doubtless would not occur to this plain and unbiassed reader of the Bible that he was at liberty to narrow down, by his own fiat, to a particular and contracted meaning, declarations and words which the Holy Ghost left general and unlimited.

These insulated cases are so rare in their occurrence, and so uncertain in their import, as scarcely to amount to an exception to the general scriptural rule, that the name of Christ denotes both of his united natures. And in all these insulated cases the limitation of his name to his human nature is rendered inevitable by intrinsic marks on the passages themselves, or by contiguous portions of Holy Writ. Take, as a sample, the following passage: A"Jesus increased in wisdom and stature,@" Luke 2. 52. Inspiration limits this passage to his humanity, by assuring us that as God he was perfect in wisdom ere the worlds were formed, and, that as an infinite Spirit he was without corporeal stature. Take, as another sample, the declaration of Christ, A"My Father is greater than I.,@"C-John 14. 28. The declaration was restricted to his manhood by our Lord himself, when he said, a few chapters before, A"I and my Father are one.@" Take yet another sample, A"But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.@"C-Mark 12. 32. This lack of prescience is necessarily confined to the human nature of the Son by numerous other passages of the New Testament, which imply that, as the second person of the Trinity, his omniscient eye scans at a glance the illimitable expanse of the future. So, that in

So, in a very few cases, scriptural terms expressive of Christ have exclusive reference to his Godhead. Take the following as an example, A"Before Abraham was I am.@"C-John 8. 58. Sacred history states that the man Christ Jesus was then only about thirty years old. The Bible itself, therefore, necessarily limits the declaration of ex-istence before the birth of Abraham to the in-dwelling God. But where the Bible interposes no restrictive qualification, the name, the Christ, and its equivalents, whenever occurring in Sacred Writ, stand forth in all the amplitude of meaning originally imparted to them by the Holy Ghost. They are never to be restricted within narrower limits merely because reason deems such restriction most Afitting to God.@"

The name, the Christ, when mingled in the ever-recurring declarations of his sufferings, is not limited. to his humanity, directly or by implication, anywhere in the Word of God. The limitation sought to be engrafted on the declarations of his sufferings rests on human, not on divine authority. It is the begotten of the unfounded hypothesis, A"God is impassible.@" Had that hypothesis never been adopted, it is not likely that the prevalent theory, confining the sufferings of Christ to his human nature, would have found a place in Christian theology.

It is the radical error of the prevalent theory, that it seeks to contract, without scriptural authority, to the manhood of Mary=s@s son the declarations of the Holy Ghost applicable, in their terms, to the whole incarnate God, and crippled by a more limited application. Human reason has no authority delegated from above to restrict, by its own volition, what the Bible has left general. The Word of God must not be bent to what human reason somewhat arrogantly terms, when applied to divine things, its own sound discretion. The sound discretion of one theorist differs from the sound discretion of another theorist. If the Bible is to shape itself to the ever-varying phases of what claims to be the sound discretion of reason, it must assume more forms than the fabled Proteus of heathen mythology ever assumed. The self styled sound discretion of human reason has done the Bible more harm than it ever suffered from the prince of darkness. It has brought Christians into collision with Christians; it has broken into fragments what should have been the one and indivisible Church of the Son of God; it has rent asunder what the Roman soldiery spared, even the seamless vestment of Christ.

The impropriety of limiting to his mere humanity the unlimited declarations of Scripture indicattive of Christ=s@s sufferings will be more obvious if we consider the relative proportions which his two natures bore to each other. The one was finite, the other was infinite; the one akin to the dust of the earth, the other thinking it A"not robbery to be equal with God.@" Would the inspired writers, would our Lord himself, then, if intending to have it believed that the divinity of Christ had not suffered, have used, to express the sufferings of his mere terrestrial adjunct, terms applicable to the whole infinitude of his united natures; and terms, too, which are crippled and distorted by a more limited application? They best knew the natures and agonies of the Mediator: and when they used the significant term, the Christ, to designate the recipient of the expiatory sufferings, they must have meant that the Christ, the whole Christ of the Bible had suffered.

When our Lord, after his resurrection, asserted his sufferings interrogatively, A"Ought not Christ to have suffered?@" when, in a subsequent verse of the same chapter, he repeated the assertion positively, A"Thus it behooved Christ to suffer;@" when he thus, without restriction, used the very name which he had himself adopted to designate his, united natures, can erring man venture to say that by that name he intended to designate one of his natures only as the recipient of his suffering, and that, too, the inferior one?C-Luke, 24. 26, 46. The Son of God did not say, interrogatively or positively, that Christ ought to have suffered, or that it behooved him to suffer in his human nature only. It is reasoning pride which seeks virtually to interpolate into the sacred texts the omitted words, Ai"in his human nature only,@" by its own uninspired interpretation.

God formed the first Adam A"of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.@" The creature thus formed was compounded of body and soul. To this complex being, and to his posterity, the appellation of man was given by his almighty Creator. The name pertains not exclusively to his soul or to his body, but to their mysterious union. It would be an unintelligible abuse of the name to apply it separately either to his corporeal or to his spiritual nature. It belongs to the united totality of the man.

It is believed that the phrase, the person of Christ, is found but once in the translation of the New Testament, 2 Corinthians, 2. 10. The verse in the translation reads thus: A"To whom ye forgive anything, I forgive also; for if I forgave anything, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ.@" The best commentators think that this passage is incorrectly translated, and that the original Greek words rendered A"in the person of Christ@" should have been rendered A"in the name and by the authority of Christ.@" So thought Macknight, and other commentators agree with him.

It has been urged, that as the union of his two natures forms the person of Christ in the same way as the union of the soul, and body of an ordinary man forms the person of that man, so the numerous passages of Scripture declarative of Christ=s@s sufferings are all satisfied by his having suffered in his humanity, in the same manner as an ordinary person is said to suffer, though his pains are corporeal. It is not within our province to complain of the comparison between the person of Christ, composed of his two natures, and the person of an ordinary man, composed of his body and soul, when used for purposes of general illustration; but when applied to Christ=s@s expiatory agonies, and urged to satisfy, by the suffering of his mere manhood, the oft-repeated declarations of Scripture, averring his sufferings in terms which, according to their natural and plain import, would make them pervade every recess of his united being, nothing can be more fallacious and misleading than this very comparison.

If we are at liberty to suppose that, by the laws of his united being, the agonies of Christ=s@s human nature pervaded and affected his divine essence also, then, and then only, would any similitude exist between the person of Christ suffering from his human anguish, and the persona of an ordinary man suffering from corporeal pain. But the very corner-stone of the prevalent theory rests on the supposition that. the anguish of Christ=s@s human nature did not affect the divine; that while the man Christ Jesus was writhing under agonies unparalleled in the annals of profane or sacred story, the God Christ Jesus was untouched by pain; that his beatitude was as perfect at Gethsemane, and on the cross, as it had been when, in his presence, A"the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,@" to celebrate the birth of the new world which he had just brought into being. Job, 38. 7.

municable pains of that insulated atom would have been termed the sufferings of the person of Christ, no more than the rippling of some small and sequestered bay would be denominated the commotion of the mighty ocean to which it is joined. The Godhead of Christ was the infinite constituent of his person. While his divinity retained in full perfection its primeval and ineffable beatitude, suffering would not have been predicated of the person of Christ. The insulated pangs of his manhood would rather have been denominated the sufferings of his terrestrial adjunct, than the sufferings of the august person of the incarnate Deity. Upon the prevalent theory, the little rivulet of human wo, bitter indeed, and dark, as it could not have ruffled or discoloured, so it would not have given its melancholy name to the peaceful, illimitable, and heavenly sea of divine felicity which formed the predominating, the almost absorbing element of the person of the God, A"manifest in the flesh.@"

I John, 3., 16. Strange expressions! Yet not so strange as true, as being uttered by truth itself. Neither will they seem strange unto us, if we truly believe, and consider that he who suffered all this was and is both God and man; not in two distinct persons, as if he was one person as God, and another person as man, according to the Nestorian heresy; for if so, then his sufferings as man would have been of no value for us, nor have stood us in any stead, as being the sufferings only of a finite person; but he is both God and man in one and the same person, as the third general council declared out of the Holy Scriptures, and the Catholic Church always believed. From whence it comes to pass, that, although his sufferings affected only the manhood, yet that, being at the same time united to the Godhead in one and the same person, they therefore were, and may be properly called the sufferings of God himself; the person that suffered them being really and truly God.@"*

*Beveridge=s@s Sermons, vol. 1i. p. 128

With profound respect for these learned and pious prelates, we cannot but regard their distinctions as too subtile, too involved, too metaphysical for gospel simplicity. We must humbly protest against the startling dogmas, that, by virtue of the union of the two natures in the person of Christ, A"those attributes which properly belong to the one are given to the oother,@" and A"that it is true to say, AGod is man, and as true, a man is God.@" Where are the attributes of almightiness, and omniscience, and eternal pre-existence, and creative potency A"given@" to his human nature? Or, where is it affirmed of his divine nature that it lacked infinite goodness, or prescience, or power, or that it was formed out of nothing in the days of Herod? The Bible=s@s great Mediator himself taught the infinite distinction between his manhood and his Godhead, notwithstanding their union. A"My Father is greater than I.@"C-John, 14. 28. A"Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one; that is God.@"C-Matthew, 19. 17. A"But to sit on my right hand and on my left is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.@"C-Matthew, 20. 23. A"But of that day and that hour knoweth no man; no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.@"C-Mark, 13. 32. Thus it appears, from the highest authority in the universe, that, notwithstanding the union of the two natures in the person of Christ, the man did not become God, or assume the divine attributes. Nor did the God sink into the man. Christ recognised, in his divine capacity, no inferiority to the Father, either in power, or goodness, or prescience.

Upon the prevalent theory and its parent hypothesis, the beloved disciple could no more have been taught by Inspiration to say as he did in truth say in the passage quoted from one of his epistles by Bishop Beveridge himself, A"Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us,@" than he would have been taught by Inspiration to say, that the infinitely holy God committed some flagrant sin for the redemptions of the world. He might have declared that the man united to the God, or the man whose body was the shrine of the God, had A"laid down his life for us.@" But the inspired writer could not, if the prevalent theory and its parent hypothesis are true, have declared that the eternally impassible God had A"laid down his life for us;@" for that would have been declaring that the eternally impassible God had violated the immutable laws of his own infinite being. It would have been the assertion of a moral, perhaps physical impossibility, and the presumptuous application of such assertion to the awful majesty of the Godhead.

The supposition that St. John, and his inspired brethren of the New Testament, when they so often declared that God the Son suffered to save our sinking race, meant only to indicate the sufferings of the man, and to affirm that the human suffering became the suffering of the God by construction, is a gratuitous assumption of the advocates of the prevalent theory. The inspired declarations are numerous and unequivocal. They are couched in simple and plain terms. They include, AWithin their fair purport and compass, the divine as well as the human nature of the person of Christ. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that the Holy Ghost meant differently from what he has graciously said. It is the prevalent theory, and not the Bible, which affirms that the man suffered actually, and the God only constructively.

We have thus followed, through several of its varying aspects, the argument of our learned and pious opponents, derived from the phrase, the person of Christ; a phrase deemed by them competent to satisfy not only the abounding averments of the Bible that Christ suffered, but also the affirmation that God : A"laid down his life for us,@" and various other like scriptural declarations, indicating that the second person of the Trinity actually suffered for the redemption of the world. We now propose to bring this far-reaching and high soaring argument of the prevalent theory to another test.

Suffering consists in the diminution of what would otherwise have been the happiness of the sufferer. The amount of the suffering is tested by the amount of such diminution. In the case under consideration, the person of Christ was the sufferer. What, then, was the diminution of the felicity of the person of Christ, caused by the mere suffering of his manhood? We have no weight or measure to ascertain it; but brief reflection will teach us that it must have been inconceivably small. The happiness of the person of Christ, if his divinity tasted not of suffering, was infinite. It embraced the plenitude of the felicity of the Godhead. According to the prevalent theory, the suffering of the person of Christ was finite. It consisted in the suffering of the man alone. Subtract finite suffering from infinite beatitude, and the diminution will be too small for the most microscopic vision. Heavy as no doubt were the sufferings of Christ=s@s humanity, when estimated by an earthly standard, they must have been comparatively light when taken in reference to the person of him A"who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,@" and A"taketh up the isles as a very little thing.@"C-Isaiah, 40. 12, 15. The bitter stream of human wo must have been absorbed and lost in the illimitable ocean of divine felicity. If you subtract a single grain of sand from the globe we inhabit, arithmetic can perceive, and perhaps estimate the diminution; but the subtraction of the suffering of the finite man from the felicity of the person of Christ, embracing the full beatitude of the infinite God, would have caused a diminution of bliss too small for creature perception. Doubtless the ken of an archangel could not have perceived it. The happiness of the person of Christ, subject to his human suffering, must have been incalculably greater even at Gethsemane and Calvary, if the God suffered not in his ethereal essence, than the happiness of any other person who ever dwelt in this lower world, including the days of Eden. It must have surpassed the felicity of any other being in the universe, save that of the Father and the Holy Ghost. The minute atom of his human suffering, compared with the mighty totality of his divine beatitude, was less than the scarcely perceptible speck that often passes over without obscuring the orb of day.

Yet the Bible everywhere darkly shadows forth the sufferings of Christ, or, if our opponents prefer the phrase, the sufferings of the person of Christ, as having been too intense and vast for even Inspiration intelligibly to express in mortal language. The dimly portrayed sufferings darkened the face of day; they convulsed the earth; they must have wrung tears from heavenly eyes; they shook, well-nigh to dissolution, the person of the incarnate God. And was it, indeed, the mere finite suffering of Clhirist=s@s humanity, bearing a less proportion to the totality of his infinite bliss than the glow-worm bears to the luminary of our system, that the Bible thus labours, and labours, as it were, in vain, adequately to express to mortal ears? No! The sufferings, in the delineation of which even Inspiration seems to falter, were not limited to the finite, but pervaded also the most sacred recesses of that infinite essence which went to constitute the holy union, styled by our opponents the person of Christ. The sufferings of the man lay within the limits of scriptural delineation. The agonies of the God none but a God could conceive. Perhaps even Omnipotence could not make them intelligible to creature apprehension.

The position that, of the two natures united in the person of Christ, the one suffered and the other never tasted of suffering; that the one was filled to overflowing with unutterable anguish and the other with inconceivable joy; that the one drank to its dregs A"the cup of trembling,@" while the other was quaffing the ocean of more than seraphic beatitude, can derive no support from human reason. Such a theory, tending, as it does in no small degree, to augment, Athe mystery of godliness,@" required plenary scriptural proof for its support. Its advocates have not furnished such proof. In the face of the Christian world, we affectionately, yet solemnly invoke its production, if to be found in the Word of God.

The concurrence and participation of the two natures of Christ in all his sayings and doings subsequent to his resurrection and ascension will not be disputed. The man ascended with the God to heaven; he is seated with the God at the right hand of the Highest; he will come with the God, in the clouds of heaven, to judge the world in righteousness. The stupendous words closing the mediatorial drama, A"Come, ye blessed,@" and ADepart from me, ye cursed,@" will be pro-nounced by those very lips from whence proceeded that never-to-be-forgotten sermon on the mount, so fraught with fearful truths, so abounding in gracious benedictions. It would have seemed a strange anomaly, if there had not existed the like concurrence and participation of the divine and human natures of the incarnate God in all the sayings and doings of his earthly pilgrimage.

No such anomaly is indicated by the Word of God. On the contrary, it it a clear inference from Holy Writ that the two natures of Christ concurred and participated, according to the measure of their respective capacities, in all his sayings and doings, from his birth in the manger until the Acloud received him@" out of the sight of his steadfastly-gazing disciples.

mediatorial office that A"Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness, and every disease among the people.@"C-Matthew, 9. 35.

When the wearied Emanuel sat down on Jacob=s@s well, and craved of the wondering woman a draught of its cooling beverage, it was less to refresh the frail mortal than to afford the in-dwelling God an occasion to plant a twig of the tree of life in the moral desert of Samaria. In his solitary and prolonged prayers, the God concurred and participated with the man. To instruct, as well as to save the world, was the purpose of his mediatorial mission. The duty of frequent and retired devotion was one of the primary lessons taught, practically as well as theoretically, by this Schoolmaster from above. In the solitude of night, on the lonely mountain, the God, too, might best resume his sweet communion with the beloved brethren of his everlasting reign. It was the King of Zion, in his united natures, who, in fulfilment of an inspired prediction, rode into Jerusalem, Alowly and meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.@"C-Matthew, 21. 5. Zechariah, 9. 9. When Jesus mourned over the devoted, yet still beloved city which had killed the prophets and stoned those who had come to it as messengers of grace, his pathetic wailing betokened less the yearning of his human heart than the travail of his divine spirit.

In all the miracles of Christ, his two natures, according to the measure of their respective capacities, concurred and participated. The man was bidden to the marriage of Cana; the God there accomplished his Abeginning of miracles.@" It was the man whose hand was laid upon the sick and the suffering; it was the God who imparted to that hand its healing power. It was the corporeal substance of Jesus that walked upon the waves; it was his ethereal essence that upheld it there. It was the hand of the man that broke the Afive barley loaves@" and the Atwo small fishes;@" it was the potency of the God that multiplied, and multiplied, and multiplied them into superabundant aliment for five thousand famished persons. It was the body of the man that was transfigured on the mountain; it was the mandate of the God that made Ahis face shine as the sun, and his raiment white as the light,@" and that summoned Moses and Elias from heaven, to behold the prospective glory of the incarnate Deity. It was the voice of the man that called Lazarus forth from the grave; it was the fiat of the God which forced even the reluctant grave to yield up its victim.

AJesus wept.@" His tears were not the ebullitions of mere human sympathy. He had foreseen the decease of his friend, and might have averted it by his presence or his mandate. He was just about, by the mere word of his power, to reanimate the dead. The physician weeps not, though the symptoms, may wring tears from surrounding relatives, if he knows that, by a touch of his lancet, he can at once restore health and cheerfulness. The tomb of Lazarus symbolized a world Adead in trespasses and sins.@" Over the grave of that world destroyed Jesus stood, and A"Jesus, wept.@" The word even of Omnipotence could not reanimate moral death. For that malady, the only cure was the blood of God. Jesus wept as a man; more especially as a God did Jesus weep.

page 95If the two natures of Christ thus concurred and participated in the multifarious sayings and doings of his mediatorial life, why should the epoch of suffering have wrought a severance in natures which had become united and indivisible? We have already seen that the God lacked not physical or moral capacity to suffer. We have justly inferred that suffering, actual, not figurative, was the object for which he had left the heavenly reins of universal government to wear the humble weeds of humanity. Why, then, should his divinity have retiredr6ti@e@& into abeyance from the impending conflict. leaving its frail earthly associateLt6@ to trea,@d aljoneo Athe wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God?@"

The uncreated Son did not retire from the impending conflict. He bore his own infinite share of the curse of sin. Golgotha felt, in the trembling of its solid mount, the viewless and nameless throes of the suffering God. Whose voice was it that uttered the, heaven-piercing cry, A"My God!, my God! why hast thou forsaken me?@" It was the same voice that had commanded the winds and the waves, and they obeyed. It was the same voice which had assumed the awful appellation of the Old Testament, AA I AM.@" It was the same voice that had; declared, A,I and my Father are one.@"

The wailing, voice, was, of course, the voice of96 the sufferer. If it was the united voice of his combined A natures, then, beyond peradventure, the natures unitedly suffered. Those who affirm that the divine essence did not participate in the moan, encounter the more than Sisyphean task of demonstrating that the in-dwelfling God had retired from the scene of wo, leaving the struggling man alone; that the divine voice which called Lazarus forth from the grave was hushed in profound silence; and that the piteous cries from Calvary were the mere Ahuman A wailings of Mary=@s son. The son of mere an the Virgin was not the forsaken of his God. His own God, his kindred God, his sympathizing, indwelling God would never, for a moment, have forsaken him. To him his in-dwelling God was bound by ties indissoluble. But the incarnate Deity was himself writhing under the more than scorpion sting of the sins of a world. The forsaken of God was, alas! the in-dwelling God himself. The forsaken of the Father was t@he F]Pather=s"B own, only-begotten, well-beloved, eternal Son. The wailing voice, in anticipation of which the luminary of day had hidden its saddened face, was the same voice which, at the beginning, had spoken that luminary into being. The other dying cry from the cross, AA Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,@" was also of that same divine and forgiving Voice, who, A walking in the garden in the cool of the day,@" had. cheered -the@ despairing hearts of the guilty, penite@nt pair wWith the distant, yet radiant vision of ever-cherishe@d, ever-brightening hope.C-Genesis, 3iii. 8, 15. -

The prevalent theory might as well seek to exclude the participation of the divinity from any other department of the mediatorial office as from its suffering department. The Bible declares that Christ went about preaching the A gospel of the kingdom.@" The Bible declares that Christ wrought a succession of stupendous miracles. The Bible declares that Christ suffered for the redemrhption of the world. Each declaration designates the Actor by the name of Christ, or one of its synonymes. Each declaration is couched in the same unequivocal terms, without exception, restriction, or qualification. Each declaration pervades the united natures of the Messiah. The prevalent theory has singled out the pains of the suffering department as the sole subject of its exclusion of divine participa-

tion. Why this distinction? @ There is the same scriptural evidence of@ the participation of the God. in the mniediatorial sufferings as there is of the participation of the God in the preaching of the gospel or the working of the miracles. lf the mediatorial Preacher of the gospel was the God-man in his united natures; if the mediatorial Worker of the miracles was the God-man in his un@ited Anatures, so must the mediatorial Sufferer have been the God-man in his united natures. Any distinction is Arbitrary. It has no scriptural authority

Ahigh and lifted up@ on his celestial throne. But there was a special and peculiar reason requiring the actual presence and participation of the God in the agonies of the suffering department. His actual participation alone gave to those agonies their redeeming value. He could communicate, without his actual presence, the right to preach the gospel and the power to work miracles. The infinite burden of suffering for the redemption of man was incommunicable. It was to be borne by the God, not by his substitute. The God was himself to suffer, not merely the man substituted for the God. The man was to bear the finite share, the God the infinite share of the expiatory agonies.

Disjoining the two inseparable natures of Christ in the paramount article of his expiatory suffering, is the deep-rooted error of the prevalent theory. The Bible affirms that Jesus Christ sufferedCthat Jesus Christ diedCfor the salvation of man. The theory conductsCunwittingly no doubtCto the conclusion that Jesus Christ died not-suffered not. The suffering, dying Jesus Christ of the Bible was compounded of the finite man, and the infinite Jehovah; both natures indispensable to the constitution of his personality. Had the infinite nature been dissevered from participation with the finite in the article of suffering, the personality of the scriptural sufferer must have been lost; the suffering, dying victim for mortal sins would have been, not Athe Christ of God,@ but the human son of the Virgin; and the sole suffering and death of Mary's human son would have left wholly unsatisfied the abounding and unqualified scriptural declarations that Jesus Christ was the suffererCthat Jesus Christ died.

The mediation between God and man was a suffering mediation. Its element was suffering. In suffering it began; in suffering was it Afinished.@ In all that pertained to this suffering mediation, both natures of the incarnate Deity concurred and participated, according to the measure of their respective capacities. The man did all that humanity could do; the God did all that infinite love could prompt. Neither of the two natures was at any time inert; neither in a state of abeyance.

In the first mediatorial movement, the God was the sole Actor. He became incarnate ; he cast off Athe form of God;@ he Aemptied himself@ of his celestial glory; he took upon him the Aform of a servant;@ he became the lowly son of a lowly Virgin; he was born in a manger, and wrapped in its straw. That the manger actually contained, and that its straw actually covered Him who formed the worlds was no fiction. The miraculous star and the worship of the Oriental wise men demonstrated a present Deity. The star was not an ignis fatuus to lure men into idolatry. The everlasting mandate, A worship God,@" was not forgotten in heaven. Sufferance was the object for which the second person of the Sacred Three thus Ahumbled himself.@" In the conclave of the Godhead it had been deemed most fitting that he should suffer clothed in the flesh of fallen man. The humiliation was real; the transformation not metaphorical; the suffering was actual.

In the manger of Bethlehem the son of Mary began to enact his humble part. The incarnate God, in early iniiifancy, was carried into Egypt. It,, was a hurried, wintry journey, marked with all the privations of penury. Back again was he hurried to the land of Israel, not to find his native home there; for, A being warned of God in a dream,@" his parents turned aside, to dwell obscure and destitute in the city of Nazareth. In all these privations, He who, from everlasting, had occupied the right-hand throne of glory, concurred and participated. Into his distressed estate he carried not the beatitude of his celestial home. He had A46 emptied himself@ " of that, as well as of A the form of God.@" The second who bears A"record in heaven@" was, in very truth, on the earth, A"wounded for our transgressions,@" and A"bruised for our iniquities.@ ",The allegation of the prevalent theory, that the second person of the Trinity, in becoming incarnate, A"emptied himself@" of his glory alone, retaining in full perfection all his infinite beatitude, has no other foundation than the imagination of its advocates. Transcendent, indeed, is the glory of God. Moses could not have seen it, in all its effulgence, and lived.C-Exodus, 33xxxiii. 18, 20. Of the glory of the Highest we would speak with humility and fear; yet we trust that, without irreverence, we may be permitted to suppose that it pertains rather to the expression of his ineffable excellence than to that intrinsic excellence itself. lt is the external manifestation of inherent, viewless, and infinite perfection. The glory of God is the robe of majesty in which he arrays himself A,as with a garment.@" His beatitude dwells within, while his glory unceasingly surrounds him, as the halo sometimes circles the luminary of day. The supposition that the God, about to become incarnate, cast aside his glory alone, retaining and carrying with him to earth his infinite beatitude, is opposed to the letter and the spirit of the declarations of the Holy Ghost.

in human speech; expressions too strong for the fastidiousness of modern translators; expressions unsatisfied by the doffing of the mere external robes of majesty ; expressions pervading the inner being, and reaching that vital region of sensation and life where beatitude dwells. The God about to become incarnate could not have been said to have A emptied himself,@" in the full meaning of the mighty terms, if the infinitude of his celestial blessedness accompanied him through his earthly pilgrimage; making the straw of the manger as downy a pillow as the bosom of his Father; the revilings, and scoffings, and hissingys of the crucifying mob as little annoying as the hallelujahs of heaven; the garden and the cross as redolent of bliss as his celestial throne.

The emptying himself of his infinite beatitude was peculiarly appropriate to the God, about to become an incarnate sufferer. Suffering was the object of his terrestrial mission. The suffering of its Creator was the price to be paid for the redemption of a lost world. To qualify him for his suffering office, it was needful that the self-devoted Mediator should divest himself of his primitive blessedness. A The Captain of our salvation@" could not carry the beatific peace of heaven along with him into his terrible campaign on earth. It was not with gleeful heart, any more than in triumphal robes, that A the wine press of the wrath and fierceness of Alimnighlityv God@" was to be trodden.

The, redeeming God was present, and partaking in all the wanderings and hardships of the redeeming man. He was baptized by the reluctant and trembling John. On him rested the descending dove. For him the voice from heaven proclaimed once, and again, and yet again, A This is my beloved Son.@" The elements recognized and obeyed the present Deity. Devils believed and trembled. He forgave sins. He proclaimed hbimrhself A Lord even of the Sabbath day.@" He toiled with his own hbands. The Architect of the universe became a laborious carpenter in the workshop of Joseph. Of his divinity as well as his manhood was uttered the pathetic exclamation, A The son of man hath not where to lay his head.@" The Creator of the world found in it no spot of repose until the kind grave received him. He was steeped A in poverty to the very lips.@" To pay the tribute money which the law exacted, he was obliged to work a miracle.

The manner in which human reasonC-at least the reason of the learnmedC-has met and received the declarations of Scripture, that the eternal Son suffered for our redemption, is a curiosity in theological literature. It has rejected the glorious mass of this celestial truth, and clung only to a fragment. It has gratuitously limited the unlimited declarations of heaven, that the eternal Son suffered for our sins, by the earth-born amendment, Aexcept in his divine nature.@" The exception nearly absorbs the totality of the blessed truth. The remnaniit left bears a less proportion to the majestic whole than the scarcely perceptible promontory bears to the mighty continent of which it forms so inconsiderable a part.

voted God. The exception is the progeny, not of the Bible, but of that long-continued and widespread hypothesis, A God is impassible.@" If this hypothesis should be exploded from Christian theology, the exception which it has engendered would sink, with its parent into nothl-iing. That the hypothesis itself was but the offspring of human reasoning, we have already shown.

We profoundly reverence science. It has transmuted into plain and palpable truth, that which, without it, might have seemed poetic rhapsody. ,,@WWhat a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in formrm and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a God!@" Nor does science ever appear so majestic as when wearing its sacred tiara. Yet has science pride. Even sacred science is not always as humble as was its Ameek and lowly@ " Master.

AIn pride, in reasoning pride@72 its A"error lies.@

the breath of life, he stood unsurpassed among the sons of humanity. Had terrestrial ambition contented him, he might have been the Demosthenes of his oppressed country, thundering forth against Roman domination the same pierceiniig bolts which the Athenian statesman, and patriot, and orator hurled at the head of Philip. He had drunk copiously of A,the sweets of sweet philosophy;@" with the choicest treasures of the Grecian muse, he was familiar as with A"household words;@" but all his mental wealth and literary acquisitions were laid humbly at the feet of his Redeemer. The variegated and lucid colouring, and the richest flowers that he had gathered in the fertile fields of learning, he freely offered up to make more clear the lineaments, and to deck the lovely brow of that meek and lowly religion which had been cradled in the manger of Bethlehem, and brought up among the fishermen of Galilee.

Paul, so deeply instructed in the lore of Inspiration; Paul, who had been caught up into the third heaven, and shown things which it was not lawful for him to intimate A"to ears of flesh@ and blood,@ " could not have been ignorant of the kind and extent of his Saviour=@s sufferings ; and had there existed a distinction between his two natures in the grand article of suffering, the philosophic, the logical, the lucid, the discriminating Paul would not have failed to indicate it somewhere in his voluminoutis writings, even if omitted by the less-exteniided authors of the New Testament. It is not intimated by any of the inspired writers, because it was not intimated to any of them by the Holy Ghost. The distinction is earth-born. The general scriptural declarations of Christ=@s sufferings, then, according to every legitimate rule of construction, apply to his divine and human natures unitedly. The Bible not having severed their meaning, it is as indivisible as the two natures of Christ.

St. Peter, indeed, speaks of Christ having suffered and died for us in the flesh. There are two passages in which this affirmation is made by that apostle. The first is as follows: A For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.@C@1 l Peter, 3iii. 18. The second passage is as follows: A"Forasmuch, then, as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind.@" C-1 Peter, 4iv. 1. Bishop Pearson has invoked these two passages into the support of the prevalent, theory that Christ=@s sufferings were confined to his humanity.* And as they are the only scriptural passages which he has cited as bearing directly on the subject, we are doubtless justified in concluding that they were the only ones he could find. With the profoundest respect for the learned and pious prelate, we are constrained to dissent from his construction. Several answers may be given to the argument sought to be derived from the6se passages.

First.. St. Peter might have meant to speak only of the time of Christ=@s passion, not of its locality. He might have intended to say that Christ suffered while he was in the flesh on earth, not that his flesh, or even his manhood, was the sole or peculiar recipient of his @ suffering. In his epistle to the Hebrews, St. Paul, when referring to the A"prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears,@" offered up by Christ, designated their date by the words, A in the days of his flesh.@"C-Hebrews, 5v. 7. So St. Peter may, perhaps, be understood as- having merely declared that Christ suffered and died Ain the days of his flesh.@"

Thirdly. But the most conclusive answer to the passages from I Peter remains to be stated. And as this additional solution commingles itself with various other matters of debate between the advocates of the prevalent theory and ourselves, we shall be excused if we examine it a little more in detail than we should have deemed necessary, had a reply to the passages from I Peter been the sole object in view. The Bible often employs expressions, applicable, in their primary and strict sense, to the outer being only, to designate also the inner being. Thus the term flesh, in its primary and literal import, expresses only the body. But it is often used figuratively in Scripture to include the immaterial as well as the material part of man. Take the following samples of this scriptural use of the term: A I will not fear what flesh can do unto me,@" exclaimed the Psalmist.C-Psalm, 56Ivi. 4. And again: A For he remembereth that they were but flesh.@"C@Psalm,rn 78lxxviii. 39. A No flesh shall have peace,@" saith the prophet.C-Jeremiah, 12xii. 12. And again: A"Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm.@C" Jeremiah, 17. 5.. AFor all flesh is grass,@" declared the apostolic Peter.C-I Peter, 1i. 24.

scriptural position, that the sufferings of our Lord were confined literally to his body. It would ill comport with the generally received conceptions to suppose that mere A" corporal sufferance@" was accepted by the infinite Father as a full propitiation for the transgressions of the world. Even the advocates of the prevalent theory will, therefore, geni-ierally understand the declarations of St. Peter to import mental as well as bodilyv sufferingo-,s. But, in their allowance of a figurative meaning to his declarations, the advocates of the prevalent theory stop short at the line separating Christ=s@s human soul from his ethereal essence. Why stop at that line? Inspiration has left no landmark there. The landmark there, which has appeared for ages, is an earthly structure, reared by human hands. If the scriptural meaning of the term flesh, when applied to man, has ample capacity to comprehend the corporeal and immaterial natures of our whole aggregate race, why may not the scriptural meaning of the same term, when applied to the fles h of the incarnate Word, be capacious enough to include both of the united natures of the Son of God, though the chief element in the immaterial part of his united natures was his ethereal essence?

That the term flesh, in scriptural language, when applied to the incarnate God, includes his whole united being, human and divine, is not left to be deduced by any mere reasoning process. AAnd the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.@"C-John, 1i. 14. Here the flesh consecrated by the in-dwelling Deity was clearly used to denote both his natures. But for this scriptural meaning of the term when thus divinely applied, we have still more explicit authority, coming direct from the lips of one of the Holy Three. AI am the living bread which came down from heaven: if a man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.@"C-John, 6vi. 51. In this passage, Christ used the terms A" my flesh@" to designate that A living bread which came from heaven;@" which he gave Afor the life of the world@ " and of which, if any man eats, A he shall live forever.@" He employed the terms to denote the whole infinite totality of his mediatorial sacrifice. He used them as an appropriate name, when applied to himself, to comprehend, not only his body and human soul, but also that ethereal Essence, who had, from everlasting, occupied the right-hand throne of heaven.

If St. Peter used the term flesh, in the two passages under review, according to its scriptural meaning when applied to ChristC-a meaning which he himself had heard his beloved Master ordain and establish by the word of his own supremacyC then the conclusion is inevitable, that the apostle meant to declare that our Saviour had suffered and died in both his united natures. He used the term without exception or restriction, and must be understood to have intended all that the term imports. If this conclusion is correct, then the two passages from I Peter, invoked and marshalled against us by the modern representative of the prevalent theory as competent of themselves to vanquish all opposition, are found in the day of trial, though forming his whole array, to leave the service into which they had been impressed, and, passing over into our ranks, to form two of the chief supporters of our argument.

So the word body has its figurative meaning, and is often used to denote the inner as well as the outer man. Hence the expressions As"someboody@" and A"nobody.@@ Hence, when we use the colloloquial phrase A,everybody,@" so constantly repeated in common parlance, we include not only the bodies, but also the spirits of all to whom we refer. The Scripture has borrowed the same figurative use of the word body, and applied it even to Christ. A And you, that were some time alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yvet now hath he reconciled in the body of his fle@sh through death.@"C-Colossians, 1i. 21, 22. A"By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.@"C-Hebrews, 10x. 1I0O. A"Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.@"C-l Peter, 2ii. 24. In these passages, the inspired writers used not the word Abody@" merely to denliote the clay tabernacle of Christ; for then would they have made his sufferings literally and strictly corporeal, thereby sinking their dignity from the infinite to the finite. They used the term Abody@" as expressive, not only of the outward visible materiality, but also of the immaterial, breathing, living principle within.

When our Lord, at the institution of his commemorative supper, gave to his disciples the sacramental bread, declaring AThis is my body,@" he did not mean that the body of which the bread was symbolical consisted of the mere corporeal temple of his flesh. That alone was not the price to be paid for the redemption of the world. The terms Amy body,@" according to the sublime meaning of the divine speaker, comprehended the in-dwelling God, whose self-sacrifice was to sanctify that outer temple, and form a glorious structure of salvation worthy of its great Architect. The consecrated bread was typical, not only of the material, but also of the viewless and spiritual substance of the God incarnate. The terms were used by Christ to represent and designate the whole infinitude of his united being.

The scriptural custom of using the outer name to denote the inner being is exemplified in a still more striking instance. The second person of the Trinity, shrouded in flesh, was often called man by his own inspired apostles. Even he, who was caught up into the third heaven, frequently so teri-med his beloved and divine Master. A@Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you.@"C-Acts, 2ii. 22. ABecause he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained.@"C-Acts, 17xvii. 31. AFor if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.@"C-Romans, 5v. 15. There is A one mediator between God and men, th e man Christ Jesus.@"C-l Timothy, 2ii. 5. A,But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, forever sat down on the right hand of God.@"C-Hebrews, 10x. 12 . These inspired writers well knewC-they felt in every pulsation of their throbbing heartsC the melting, the exalting truth, that the manhood of their Redeemer bore a less proportion to his Godhead than the dim and fading star of morning bears to A" the glorious king of day rejoicing in the east.@ "Yet they called him man. They thus gave a seeming prominence to his manhood, only as a faint emblemC-a shadowy figure of the ineffable splendours of the Godhead throned within.

But this scriptural usage is not of universal prevalence. .Qqualifying expressions often intervene in the sacred text to create exceptions. Thus, where, in speaking of Christ, the apostle declared, A" He was crucified through weakness.@"C-2 Corinthians, 13xiii. 4,C-the term Acrucified@" must, in the particular instance, have meant the crucifixion of the body of our Lord by the wood and irons of the cross, without reference to those spiritual sufferings, which constituted, no doubt, the infinite ingredient in the price of man=s@s salvation. The body was A crucified through weakness.@" The incorporeal substance throned within felt not, either in its divine or mortal element, the distorting wood or the lacerating irons.

Buoyed up, as was the vicarious victim, Afor the joy set before him,@" the wood and the nails of the cross affected his human soul no more, perhaps, than they did his ethereal essence. They scarcely moved even the hoping, believing, exulting spirit of the penitent thief; they checked not the dying transports of the early Christian martyrs. It was the body of Christ, and not his spirit, either in its celestial or human constituent, that was A crucified through weakness.@" It is by its figurative use alone that the cross was made to@ shadow forth in Holy Writ those viewless, nameless agonies which pervaded the inner being of the incarnate God. The term A"crucified@" in the passage under consideration, was restricted to its literal import by the qualifying adjunct.

Yet when applied in all its metaphorical amplitude to the sufferer on Calvary, the cross has a meaning high as heaven and vast as eternity. Though it strictly affected only the corporeal substance of our Lord, yet, when figuratively expanded, it includes also the vicarious sufferings of his human soul, and shadows forth to the awe stricken imagination those ineffable agonies which filled to overflowing the infinitude of his divine nature. The CROSS, in its ordinary scriptural import, is perhaps the most thrilling term to be found in the vocabularies of earth. The CROSS, the visible memorial of the humbled GodC-the suffering God C-is a term in itself, indeed, brief and simple, yet presenting to the mental vision exhaustless elements for the study of eternity;C-into which the angels are still looking with holy, unsatiated curiosity. This is the crowning illustration of the scriptural usage of expressing things invisible by the things which are seen.

,CHAPTER IX.

First. The incarnate God had blood. It was sweated forth at Gethsemane ; it was poured out on Calvary. But the Bible, in speaking of Christ=s@s blood, gives to the term a meaning vastly more comprehensive than its ordinary signification. When our Lord, the same night in which he was betrayed, after supper, took the cup, and, having given thanks, gave it to his disciples, saying, ADrink ye all of it, for this is my blood of@ the New Testament;@" and when his disciples, in obedience to his command, drank of the cup, they did not actually drink of the blood then flowing warm in the veins of their - Master; the sacramental fluid of which they partook6l- was the A blood of the iNnew Testament;@" that myvstical, viewless ocean of salvation provided, byv t@he whole expiatory sufferings of Christ, for A the healing of the nations.@" In thus expanding the term blood, when used to denote the blood of the Mediator between God and man, we place ourselves upon the authority of the dying declarations of the eternal Son. The expansion of the term, when applied to his own most precious blood,,, was dictated by his own unerring lips.C Matthew, 26xxvi. 27, 28. So, when the New Testament declares that the redeemed of every age and nation are A washlied,@" and A cleansed,@" and A made white,@" and A purged@" by the blood of Christ, it means not to use the term in its strict literal import, but in the same comprehensive sense in which our Saviour had himself used it at the institution of his holy eucharist.

In this vast ocean of infinite grace, opened at the dawn of time, Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham, and Lot were regenerated and sanctified, centuries before the vital element had begun to circulate through the arteries of the infant Jesus. In this same never ebbing ocean, boundless as the love of God, will all the countless myriads of the redeemed of all times, and tongues, Aand -a climes continue to be A14 washed,@" and Acleansed,@" and Aii made white,@" and:;, Aredeemed,@ "until the mighty angel, standing with one foot on the sea and the other on the earth, and lifting his hand to heaven, shall swear by him that liveth forever and ever that there shall be time no longer.

Christ is said, in Scripture, to have purchased us with his blood. But how small a part did the blood actually drawn from his veins, by the sweat of Gethsemane and the irons of Calvary, formra of the infinite price which he paid! The price, the infinite price of the purchase, was the whole stupendous aggregate of his humiliation and sufferings. The first great payment was made @when he exchanged his throne in heaven for the manger of Bethlehem. The payments were continued every day of his suffering life. From his birth to his death, he was A a man of sorrows, and acoequaindiiited with grief.@" He wander@ed@ a@bout Ahouseless and friendless, hungry and athirst. He had not, like the foxes of the field, a hole to which he might retire; he had not, like the birds of the air, a nest wherein he might repose. He was hunted, A"like a partridge in the mountains,@" until he found rest in the tomb of Joseph. Gethsemane had poured its copious and tearful contribution into the treasury @of justice, and the last installment of the mighty debt created by our sins was paid on Calvary.

By the blood of Christ, then, the Oracles of Truth mean the totality of the merits of his expiatory sufferings. This explanation solves the seeming mystery of Paul=s@s injunction, A Feed the Church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.@"C-Acts, 20xx. 28. The proposition contained in the injunction was literally correct. God the Son, in very fact, purchased the Church with his ow,*n blood, according to the sublime meaning of the term, @as expounded by himself at his sacramental supper. The passage from Acts,. then, is clear proof that the divinity of Christ participated in his sufferings ; for had not his divinity participated, the sufferings with which he purchased his Church could not have been called the blood of God. He purchased his Church, ,not with the pains of the man alone, but with the humiliation and, agonies of the God, actual, and not merely construcuetive.@ Had the man only suffered, the stupendous proposition would not have been true, that God purchased the Church A with his own blood.@" The Bible deals little in detail. By one or two trumpet notes, it is wont to awaken trains of thought sufficient to fill uninspired volumes. Had it recounted all the variegated sufferings of Christ, corporeal and mental, human and divine, we would almost be led to suppose that, literally, Aeven the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.@"C-John, 21xxi. 25. From the countless group of his agonies, the Bible has selected the palpable and startling incident of hisMs shed bloodC-an incident always appalling to humanityC-as one well calculated deeply to impress on the imagination,. the memory, and the hearts of men the whole most pathetic tragedy of his vicarious sufferings, divine and human, commencing when he lLeft. the right hand of his@ Father, and ending not until, from the crwoss, he cried, AIt is finished,@" and gave up the ghost.

Secondly. The incarnate God could die. He did die. Without his life--giving death the Bible would be a dead letter, or, rather, A a consuming fire.@" The incarnate God, in his united natures, was born of woman, as the ordinary sons of humanity are born; he died in hiMs united natures, as the ordinary sons of humanity die. If t he Godhead of Christ is an eternal spirit, so is the@ Soul of an ordinary man, as to the eternity to come. The human soul is as deathless as the ethereal essence of its Creator. The soul of an ordinary man does not cease to be at his death, any more than the ethereal essence of the Son of God ceased to be when he died in his united natures. There is nothing more startling in the idea, that the second person of the Trinityv really died in his united ,,.natures, than there is in the thought that he really became incarnate and was born into our world.

companitied its divine occupant to his celestial home, bearing, no doubt, on its hands the print of the nails, and in its side the mark of the spear shown to the unbelieving Thomas. It was the second person of the Trinity, clothed in his now glorified vestment of flesh, who appeared to St. John when he was in the Spirit on the Lord=s@s day, commencing with the thrilling declaration, AI am the first and the last; I am he that liveth and was dead, and, behold, I am alive forever more.@"C-Revelation, 1 i. 17, 18. The same divine speaker, in the leleventh verse, had declared of himself, A@I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.@" Who was he of whom the declaration was thus made that he had been dead? It was the same being who was alive again. And who was he that was thus alive? It was the God-man in his united natures. To give truth, then, to the divine declaration, it must have been the God-manian in his united natures, who had been dead.

Nor is this all. The glorious apparition at Patmos, in declaring that he had been dead, di A id not intend merely to refer to the severance of the immaterial and material parts of his being. The Speaker was the Creator and the Ruler of the universe. When he said that he himself, his own, undivided, majestic self, had been dead, he did not mean to point alone to the visible extinction of his life on Calvary. He must rather have primarily intended to intimate to that beloved disciple, who had leaned on his bosom, as far as mortal ears could hear and live, those mysterious agonies, aptly termed death, which, as the incarnate substitute for sin, his divine spirit had endured from the overflowing deluge of infinite wrath. It would depreciate the majesty of the awful scene, to suppose that the divine personage meant to speak only of the severance, for three days, of his material and incorporeal natures.

There are other expressions, not yet the subject of comment, in this august passage, which seem to carry along with them intrinsic demonstration that the divine spirit of the redeeming, God had participated in the vicarious agonies denominated death in Scripture. Helie who spoke, and he who had been dead, and he who was alive again, was identical. The speaker applied to himself, in the three stages of his actionC-the speaking, the dying, and the resuscitated stageC-the same personal pronoun. AI am he that liveth and was dead; and, behold, I am alive forever more.@" If the speaker was God, it follows that he who had been dead and was alive again was also God. That he who spoke was God, is self-evident from the fact that he appropriated to himself, perhaps, the loftiest attribute of the Godhead. He styled himself Athe First,@" the, AAlpha.@" The Alpha, then, was he who spoke, and had been dead, and was alive again. The Alpha was the speaking God, the dying God, the living God of this everliving passage. To predicate all this of the human son of the Virgin would be impiety, were it not for innocency of intention. The human son of the Virgin was created out of nothing in the reign of Herod; he was not coeval with the uncreated Ancient of Days. Instead of being the principal personage of the passage, the human son of the Virgin was not named in it, or even made the subject of allusion. He was not thus named, or even made the subject of allusion, because he was only the guise, the vestment, the human veil covering the ineffable and shrouded glories of the speaking God, the dying God, the everliving God of the first chapter of Revelation.

come into collision with his attributes ; that he had not capacity to suffer in his united natures ; that if he had the capacity, it was not A,fitting to God@" thus to suffer; that the declarations of the God at Patmos are too high, too vast, too incomprehensible and stupendous to be entitled to full credence, according to the plain import of the terms. We would respectfully invite the authors of these suggestions to turn their eyes to the eighth and ninth verses of the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah. A For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.@"

The revealed Aways@" and Athoughts@" of God are not only beyond, but sometimes seemingly opposed to reason. To yield them implicit, credence often requires a flight of sublime faith not of-@,!pf easy attainment. Yet Abraham, the father o-0f the faithful, Astaggered not at the promise of God through unbelief.@" Proud philosophy might have urged that the fulfilment of the promise involved a physical impossibility. Yet the faithful Abraham A believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.@"C-Romans, 4iv. 3, 20. Our argument asks nothing but belief in the declarations of the living God. It seeks not to sustain the doctrine that the divinity of Christ participated in - his expiatory sufferings by the frail props of human reasoning. It fixes its great doctrine on the adamantine foundation. , that , Athe mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.@C Isaiah, 1i. 20. The doctrine developed may, indeed, be too lofty for mortal comprehension. It may be opposed to what reason deems A fitting to God.@" It may come into imagined collision with the attributes of the Deity. It should, nevertheless, be enough to convince, at least to silence unbelief, that ,the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.@

Let not human reason, in the garb of the prevalent theory, affirm that, by the declaration at Patmos, A"I am the first and the last; I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore,@" the august Speaker meant to be understood that the man had been dead in reality, and the God dead by construction. What right has a worm of -the dust to limit -the unlimited and illimitable declaration of him whose voice was A"as the sound of many waters?@"

It is, indeed, a Bible--taught inference that, in announcing himself the Alpha, the divine Speaker at Patmos must have referred to his Godhead. For it is recorded in scriptural history, that the redeeming man was formed out of nothing at the time of the blessed incarnation. - He was but an infant of days, and could not have been styled the Alpha of beings. The incommunicable name was limited by Inspiration itself to him who A inhabiteth eternity.@" But it is not a Bible-taught inference that, in ascribing death to himself, the divine Speaker at Patmos meant the death of his manhood alone. The declaration, in its terms, is general, reaching his entire personality and it finds no restriction or qualification elsewhere in Holy Writ. The whole letter and spirit of the Bible leave the declaration just as applicable to the redeeming God as to the redeeming man. Inspiration intimates no distinction between the divine and human natures of the incarnate Deity in the endurance of those expiatory sufferings to which Scripture has given the name of death.

We are, therefore, authorized, and in duty bound, to construe the declaration at Patmos, that the divine Speaker had been dead, according to the natural and obvious meaning of its terms, and to apply it to his whole united being. The Bible contains nothing to interdict such construction. The construction is required by the elemental rudiments of speech. It is a self-evident truism that a part is not the whole. A declaration appropriate to the whole, and to the whole only, cannot be depressed capriciously to a part, without violating the principles of sound interpretation and impugning the laws of nature. The incarnate God at Patmos ascribed death to the infinitude of his whole united being. A,I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I -am alive for evermore.@" The pronouns AI@" and AHe@" included the God as well as the man. To subtract the divinity by arbitrary construction, and sink the declaration of death to the mere finite atom of his humanity, would be doing violence to the plain and unqualified words of the speaking Deity. It is the Bible alone that can wrest from its natural, and obvious, and plain import, the unambiguous language of the Bible. Human reason cannot do it by the despotic Word of her own power.

Nothing short of plenary scriptural proof that the divinity of Christ was constitutionally incapable of suffering, or some direct scriptural aver. ment that he in fact suffered in his manyihood alone, could limit to that manhood his unequivocal declaration at Patmos, ascribing death to his whole united being in both its natures. Had such scriptural proof or averment existed, the Bible then, acting as iAts own interpreter, would, by its own paramount authority, have restricted within finite bounds its infinitely capacious declaration of death promulged to the beloved disciple. The contraction of the infinite to the finite, would in such case, have been by divine, not by human authority. But there is no such scriptural proof or averment. As then, the Bible has left us free to believe that the Alpha, revealed in flesh, had constitutional capacity to suffer and to die the death of expiation in both his united natures, and as he himself has assured us, if we will but receive his gracious words in their own natural, obvious, and ineffable import, that he did thus suffer and die, where is the theo<)ry, of earth, though crowned with the venerable frost of centuries, that will perseveringly continue to impeach the official proclamation of the incarnate, the suffering, the dying, the risen, the everliving God !

THE great apostle to the Gentiles declared, AWhen we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.@"C-Romans, 5v. 10. The two following passages are found in one of the epistles of the beloved disciple: A Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us.@"C-l John, 3iii. 16. A In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.@"C-l John, 4iv. 9, 10. We have presented these two passages from 1 John in the order in which they stand in the epistle, but shall, nevertheless, consider the last first.

Who was the Apropitiation for our sins?@" He, was the Aonly begotten Son@" of the Father ; he was the Son, whom the Father A sent@" A into the world.@" It was not the human son of the Virgin. That, terrestrial sonC-that son by adoptionC-was not the A@only begotten Son@" of the Father. Nor was he begotten of the Father at all; the conception of the Virgin was by the power of the Holy Ghost.C-Luke, 1i. 35. The human son of Mary was not A sent@" A into the world ;@" it was in the world that he was created Aand born. A AThe propitiation for our sins,@" then, was no less a being than the second person of the Trinity.

How did the second person of the Trinity become Athe propitiation for our sins ?@" The beloved disciple himself informs us, in the first of the passages transcribed from his epistle. The second person of the Trinity became Athe propitiation for our sins@" when, clothed in flesh, Ahe laid down his life for us.@" The term Adeath,@" in the passage from Romans, means the same as the terms A,he laid down his@ life for us,@" in the passage from I John. In both passages the Sufferer is the same, though he is called AGod@" in one of the passages, and Ahis Son@" in the other. Each passage plainly points to the second person of the Trinity, and each passage virtually declares that, made incarnate, he died for our redemption. Of the same import is the following passage: A,And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faithli of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.@"C- Galatians, 2ii. 20. The terms A"and gave himself for me@" are synonymous with the term Adeath@" and the terms Ahe laid down his life for us,@" found in the preceding passages. Nor is the following passage of less decisive bearing: A Who, being the brightness of his@" (God=s@s) A glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high.@"C-Hebrews, 1i. 3. We learn elsewhere in Scripture that the purging of our sins was effected by the blood of God.C-Acts, 20xx. 28.

A passage that we have already partly transcribed in another connexion is too important in its influence on the present point to be omitted here. A Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but emptied himself, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.@"C-Philippians, 2ii. 5-12. The reader will perceive that we have restored to this passage the terms A emptied himself,@" unjustly subtracted by the translators. Who was it that, A being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God?@" It was certainly the second person of the Trinity. Who was it that A emptied himself" of the glory and beatitude of his Godhead? Beyond peradventure, the second person of the Trinity. Who was it that A"took

upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men?@" Verily, the second person of the Trinity. Who was it that A,humbled himself?@" Not the lowly son of the lowly Virgin. No earth-born creature would have A,humbled himself@" by an everlasting alliance with his own kindred, in-dwelling God, to be consummated with a seat at the right hand of the Highest. Who was it that Abecame obedient unto death, even the death of the cross?@" With no less certainty, it was still the second person of the Trinity. In each stage of the mighty action the second person of the Sacred Three was, in his own ethereal essence, the paramount Actor. He was as much the paramount Actor in the article of death as he was the paramount Actor in the article of incarnation. That theory which, down to the dying scene, would leave the God the Actor, and, at that trying moment, suddenly withdraw the God, and substitute the man alone, is surely Aof the earth, earthy.@"

The great mediatorial death is called in Scripture Athe death of the cross,@"C-not that the divine essence, or even Christ=s@s human soul, absorbed as it was in its overpowering reflections, felt the wood or the irons of the flesh-torturing tree. Material wood and iron have not power over the rapt spirit. If the expiatory death was but the Adeath of the cross@" in the literal import of the words, then bodily pain was the sole price of redemption. Such literal construction would exclude Christ=@s spiritual agonies, divine and human, not caused byi-iot caused by wood or irons, and yet constituting the infinite element in the atoning sacrifice. The terms A" the death of the cross,@" when applied by the Holy Ghost to the passion of the incarnate Deity, swell beyond their lexicographic meaning as far as the Adistance from the manger cradle to the eternal throne. The lowly terms, when thus infinitely ex-

panded, represent not only the pains, corporeal and mental, of Mary=s@s human son, but the descent, and incarnation, and self-immolation of Him who said ALet there be light, and there was light.@"

* Whitby=ls Notes on Philippians, 2ii. 9.

ment in the atoning sacrifice. The terms " the death of the cross," when applied by the Holy Ghost to the passion of the incarnate Deity, swell beyond their lexicographic meaning as far as the Adistance from the manger cradle to the eternal throne. The lowly terms, when thus infinitely ex-

panded, represent not only the pains, corporeal and mental, of Mary@s human son, but the descent, and incarnation, and self-immolation of Him who said Let there be light, and there was light."

hended the God. To the in-dwelling God belonged the infinite share of the homage of the universe. If the man could have been severed from the God, the man could not have been the object of heaven=s@s worship. The cherubim and the seraphim would not have been taught to bow the knee to him. A Worshi@p God@" is engraved on the pillars, and the walls, and the very pavements of heaven. It was the in-dwelling God that was to gather the bending knees around the name of Jesus.

nest prayer by the second person of the Trinity while incarnate on earth, A"And now, 0 Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was,@" breathed forth its aspirations after that very exalta-

tion with which he was greeted on his return to his native heavens.C-John, 17xvii. 5.

nounced that the confession of every tongue to the supremacy of Jesus Christ should be A to the glory of God the Father.@" A Glory to God in the high-

est,@" was the opening of the anthem of praise by the choir of angels who had descended on the plains of Bethlehem to celebrate the birth of the infant Messiah.C-Luke, 2ii. 14. A,Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for-

ever,@" was the A"new song@" of heaven to mag-

nify the riches of redeeming love.C-Revelation, 5v. 9, 13.

greeted at the gates of paradise as THE SAVIOURlt OF THE WORLD. This was doubtless the A name which is above every name.@" The appellation of Creator he had acquired by the word of his power. This new name was consecrated in the baptism of his blood. At this name, every knee in heaven de-

ted: A Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.@"C-Matthew, 20xx. 28. Who was the Son of man? He himself tells us in an-

other of his evangelists, A,And no man hath as-

cended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.@" C-John, 3iii. 13. This was the Son of man, who gave A his life a ransom for many.@" What life did he give as the priceless A,ransom ?@" He gave that life A Awhich came down from heaven.@" He gave that life which fills immensity. He gave that life which lived at once in heaven and on the earth. If farther scriptural proof is needed that the second perilson of the Trinity made incarnate, died A to be the propitiation for our siniis,@" we in-

voke once more his own sublime proclamation to his beloved disciple 140at Patmos, A I am he that liv

eth, and was dead;-. and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen.@"C-Revelation, 1i. 18.

ever stand, though A heaven and earth pass away.@" That it is mysterious, and beyond the comprehen-

ory would boldly affirm that he died in no other sense than by the severance of the material and immaterial parts of his manhood; that it was the redeeming man who was A wounded for our trans-

gressions,@" and with whose A stripes we are healed;@" that the redeeming God remained wrapped ,in the mantle of his impassibility ; that he continued as blessed on earth as he had ever been in heaven; that his infinite beatitude was as perfect in the

Trinity A laid down his life for us@" as as @ll tl* i"-

Athe Apropitiar9 tion for our sins,@" he was as much the@ ever-livIting God as when he breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of our primeval ancestor.

fered through an endless eternity. His expiatory agonies were, doubtless, beyond the conception of mortal man; probably beyond the comprehension of the highest archangel. TArhey could not be bodied forth, with distinctness, in words to be found in any human vocabulary, nor, probably, in the vocabulary of heaven; yet spiritual things, in-

scurely unveiled to the imagination of man by the revelation of God. So it is with the secrets of A"that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.@" So it is with the propounder secrets of that pavilion of wo, where He who in-

spired Isaiah=s@s harp A was wounded for our trans-

gressions@" and A bruised for our iniquities.@" Mind-

ful of the imperfections of human speech, and the dimness of human conception, the Bible, to impar;?,rt to redeemed creatures some twilight glimpses of@ the redeeming agonies of their Creator, has selected the most potent term known to the dwellers upon the earth; a term appalling to the imagination and affecting to the heart; a term rendered more ex-

second person of the Trintity, @mea4nt not to intimate

ration on the cross. The media-heine4@torial death, which wrought the salvation @of t,ihe@ world4, began when; the second person of the Trinity Aemptied himself@" of the glory and beatitude of his Godhead. It descended with him to the manger of Bethle-

hemern. - It followed him to the workshop of Joseph. It clung with a vulture=s@s grasp to the bosom of the houseless God, through his terrestrial pilgrimage. It included the totality of his expiatory humiliation and sufferings. Calvary witnessed its ceonsumma-

of the atoning offering, lower the awful standard of divine justice, and thus dim one of the brightest gems of the celestial diadem. Terrible indeed was the consummation of the atoning death. It was the outpouring of the full cup of God=s@s wrath. Awful beyond what creatures on earth, or, prob-

ever, consisted not chiefly in the physical death of Christ.L AThat was but its finite element. His physical deathl7. was@ but the demolition of A"the temple @of his body,@ "A that- it might be reared again more gloriously on the third day. The astonished centurion apprehended not that secret, yet almighty cause which darkened the sun, rent the rocks, and convulsed the earth.

Creator@. The rre6, where,@e the sword of the ,.Lord of

I-. Hlosts inflicted on Godaod the Son A the chastisementchastisement of our peace,@" was the scene of that concentration and sublimation of unearthly agonies which Inspi-

ical expiration on Calvary, is a theory opposed to the letter and spirit of Scripture. There were sufferings behind the veil which shut out mortal vision, unseen and nameless. Those sufferings formed the true consummation of the mediatorial death of the Bible. Of that death of deaths; the visible extinction of l,,Iife on Calvary was but the shadow. The physical expiration on Calvary was the death of the redeeming man. The expiatory sufferings of the redeeming God, included, too, under the awful name of the king of terrors, and constituting the infinite portion of the redeeming sacrifice, were viewlessC-unseen by mortals, per-

haps seen only by the Sacred Three. , . The @strong, yet seemingly unsatisfied desire of angels to look@A into them intimates that they were not open, palpa ble, and familiarx to the angelic vision.a;

cond death. There is a death for mortals to die, and a death of which immortals are capable of dying. When Christ said, A If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death;@" and again, when he sabid, AAnd whosoever liveth, and believeth in me, shall never die;@ he did not -mean to exempt

from physical death him who beliem e-ved in - iri him and kept his saying,C John, 8viii, 51xi; 11.. 26. @@He left physical death as he found it, the common inheritance of humanity. It was from spiritual death only that our Lord promised to protect those who yielded him their belief and their obedience. When Paul declared that Christ had A"abolished death,@" he spoke only of the death of the redeemed soul.C-2 Timothy, 1i. 10.

It was, then, to save us, not from physical, but from spiritual death; not from the death of time, but from the death of eternity, that the second person of the Trinity, clothed in flesh, A laid down his life.@" All the redeemed of every nation, and clime, and age, were destined to the relentless grasp of this undying death. They owed it an amount which human arithmetic has not powers to compute. Payment to the uttermost farthing in the sufferings of the transgressorsC-sufferings as ceaseless as the flow of eternityC-was to be exacted. Then appeared, as their Redeemer, the second person of the glorious Trinity, clothed in the weeds of humanity. He came not to cancel or to mi-nitigate their debts without rendering what the eternal Father might deem a full equivalent; for that would have been to make infinite justice weakly break its sword. His mediatorial mission had for its object the substitution of his sufferings for theirs. For their spiritual death was interposed what the Bible calls his own death. His sufferings had the same awful name which would have attached to their sufferings. Nothing short of this infinite sacrifice could have satisfied the high, and inflexible requisitions of infinite justice. The redeeming equivalent was death for death; the death of the God for the undying death of his redeemed.

This was what was meant by the Holy Ghost, speaking by the tongue of his rapt apostle, when he said A that he@" (Jesus), A by the grace of God, should taste of death for every man.@"C-Hebrews, 2ii. 9. It was not the taste of physical death that was intended. Every man had drunk, or was to drink, of that bitter draught for himself. From the general doom pronounced on our first parents and their descendants, A Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,@" the flight of six thousand years has afforded but two exceptions.OD.S. Of physical death, the terrestrial son of Mary, from the laws of his human nature, must have tasted for himself in his own person, unless he had, like Enoch and Elijah, been miraculously translated. The redeeming death, then, to be tasted, was not physical death, but an equivalent for the undying deat@h to which the redeemed themselves stood exposed.

What composed the cup of suffering, in Scripture denominated death, of which the eternal Son, clothed in flesh, tasted for every man, we know not distinctly, except that it was filled to its very brim with the wrath of almighty God against sin. The human son of the Virgin could no more, at least within the brief space of mortal life, have drank this cup than he could have quaffed an ocean of liquid fire. But the second person of the Trinity, in the omnipotence of hiMs might and the infinitude of his pitying grace, drained it, as the substitute of sinners, to its very dregs. It was a real, not a fictitious or seeming draining of the cup of divine wrath by the redeeming Son. No wonder that, at the unimaginable agonies of its Creator, the sun hid its face in darkness; that the rocks were rent asunder; that the earth shook to its foundations; that the repose of the dead was disturbed. This, doubtless, was the mystery of mysteriesC-new and A"strange@" in the history of the universeC-which riveted the holy curiosity of heavenC.-into which A"the angels desired to look.@" C-1 Peter, 1. 12.

The second chapter of Hebrews contains the declaration, that the incarnate God tasted death for every man. Was the tasting of death the act of his mere humanity, or the concurrent act of both his united natures ? The question is vital to our discussion. We suppose that this inspired chapter, while it shows that the manhood of Christ suffered aiand died, evinces also that his divinity participated in his suffering and death. It seems utterly to exclude the hypothesis that his divinity was shrouded in impassibility. The ninth verse reads thus; A But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.@" The tenth verse reads thus; A,For it became Him for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.@" The mighty Being represented as AHim for whom are all things, and by whom are all thiffings,@ is un-

ternm in the work of redemption.. To s:'uppose that the august personage of these passages tasted death in his human nature merely, and was the Captain of our salvation, not only in his human nature, but also in his divine, is a gratuitous as-

The Captain of ourt salvation was made A"perfect through sufferings.@ @The expressions last quoted were doubtless applied to the humanity of Christ. They were also applied to his divinity. As God, he was, indeed, infinitely perfect ere the worlds were formed. To pe@rfect him, however, for his 152 SON PERFECTED TIIROUGII SUFFERING.

In the sixteenth verse, it is said of the Taster of death for every man, called, too, the Captain of our salvation, that Ahe took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abra-

hbam.@ That the Taker on him of the seed of Abraham was the God, about to be made man, is beyond peradventuiare. HIle had been pre-existent,; hbe took on him the seed of Abraham of his own free choice. He might, had he so elected, have taken on him the nature of angels. While our op SECOND CHAPTER OF IIE13REWS. 153

was the incarnation of the God. The God Amanifest in the flesh@" became the Captain of our salvation; and here manhood began to act its humble partC-the part of a secondary planet to the central sun, round which it is revolved. To the captainship of our salvation, suffering and death, of necessity, pertained. They were the chief purposes of the creation of the official character. It A behooved@" the Captain of our salvation to suffer. Luke, 24xxiv. 46. To suffer and to die was the object for which the living God became the incarnate Captain of our salvation. The Captain of our salvation was to suffer and die in all the elements which constitute his being. He was to suffer in both his natures. He was to die the death of a mortal ; he was to die the death of an immortal. If he did not suffer and die in all the elements which formed his united being and constituted his identity, then the Captain of our salvation was never made A"perfect through sufferings.@" The central sun would not be extinguished, or moved from its sphere by the mere dissolution or derangement of its attendant planet.

On the prevalent theory, the Bible was mistaken in its asseveration that the Captain of our salvation suffered. The Bible supposed that the lightning of infinite wrath had pierced him through and through. The Bible was deceived; it was but the rent of his outer garmrment. The Captain of our salvation, in the paramount -and infiniteinfinfte element of his united being, passed scathless through the fiery deluge. It was only his subaltern, niaot himself, who suffered and tasted of death. The divine Captain remained cased in impassibility. If this be true, then He, who is the most disinterested of beings, would not have arrogated, or permitted his inspired disciples to arrogate for hiMmself, the honours hard earned by the suffering and death of his devoted subaltern. In the scriptural proclamations of the struggles and triumphs of redeeming love, it would somewhere have been announced, or, at least, intimated, that it was the self-sacrificed subaltern alone who, by his suffering and death, paid the price of the world=s@s redemption.

The fourteenth verse is, as follows: A Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; -that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.@" He who, with A" the children,@ "himself likewise took part of flesh and blood@, was the second person of the glorious Trinity. The human@ son of the Virgin took not part of flesh and blood by voluntary agency. He was the passive recipient. That the second person of the Trinity assumed not incarnation from any lack of capacity to suffer in his ethereal essence, if such had been hiMs holy will, has already appeared. But it was deemed fitting in the conclave of the Godhead that its second glo

diction that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent=s@s head must have passed away unae

complished, unless the redeeming God had assumed the woman=s@s nature. A Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same.@" And A a body@" was prepared for the descending Deity. Hebrews, 10x. 5. To the reasons which might have induced him to select the garb of humanity as hiMs suffering costume, we shall most reverentially return in a subsequent chapter.

It was Athrough death@" that the Son of God destroyed Ahim that - had the power of death.@" What then was this@ conquering death, through which the A power of darkness@" was subdued, and a world redeemed? The inquiry touches the very core of our argument. It has mo@re than once been the subject of allusion in the progress of this, and the preceding chapters; its paramont importance seems to justify its expansion in the present connection. What then constituted the conquering death thus announced by the great apostle as the very pivot of salvation? Whitby, the distinguished commentator, limits it to the corporeal sufferings of our Lord. That we may not be thought to libel this learned adherent of the prevalent theory, we give his own words, recorded in his note to the thirty-eighth verse of the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew. His concluding remarks on that passage are as follows:C

Against such degoradation of that atoning sacrifice for which the Creator of the worlds left his celestial throne, we enter our respectful, yet solemn remonstrance. And in this remonstrance we are conscious that the general heart of Christendom, if left free from theq shackles of theory, would join, as it were by acclamation. Nor was it mere physical decease which constituted the conquering death announced by the apostle. Sufferings from physical decease consist in the pangs attending. the rupture between the dying body and its sis@ter spirit. Neither the agonies of his ethereal essence, nor the preternatural pains of his human soul, flowing directly from the hand of its heavenly Father, formed an integral part of Christ=s physical death. Of that death the cross was the all-sufficient cause; in their sure work, its wood and its irons needed no unearthly aid. Had Christ died a mere physical death, his expiatory suffering would not have surpassed that of the penitent thief at his side. It was not the laying down of physical life, and that for three days only, which procured the salvation of the world.

Of the great conquering death, the anguish of physical decease was only the covering pall. The life-giving death reigned within. Into its composition went, no doubt, the preternatural suffering of Christ=s@s human soul : its efficacious, its absorbing, its infinite element was, however, the world redeeming agony of his ethereal substance. It derived the name of death from no uninspired vocabulary. Human lore would have deemed incongruous the application of the name to those supernatural throes and spasms which filled to overflowing the undying spirituality, ino, the undying spirituality, divine and human, of c

But the Bible has imparted to the term death, a meaning unknown to the dictioina4ries of secular lore. In scriptural phraseology it of)ten, indeed, denotes physical decease; perhaps oftener the undying misery of the undestructible spirit. Physical death entered not Eden ; no inanimate and cold and decaying cCorse was seen in its bowers. Yet the denunciation, AIn the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,@" came to the ecars of our primeval ancestor from the lips of immutable Truth.C-Genesis, 2ii. 17. Nevertheless of

Still physical death appeared not in the garden of the Lord. The culprit, though driven from paradise, was allowed centuries of corporeal health after the A mortal taste.@" Yet the prediction was surely accomplished on the ve-ry day of the transgression. The denunciation, then, must have contemplated, not physical death, but cessation of moral vitality. Simultaneously with the transgression, the offender became A14 dead in trespasses and sins.@"C-Ephesians, 2ii. 1.

This was the first announcement of death in the Sacred Oracles; the last scriptural appearance of the name is in the eighth verse of the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. There it imports the A second death,@" of which the ruined and deathless soul is doubtless to be the chief recipient. It denotes the fearful consummation of that moral catastrophe which had its -inception when the sin-poisoned souls of the primeval pair died in the terrestrial paradise. So that, upon its first and last occurrence in Holy Writ, the name, instead of being 160 THE CONQUERING DEATH.

In the vocabulary of the Bible death means penal su offering, corporeal and incorporeal, temporal and eternal. It is the appropriate scriptural name of penal suffering in all its infinite variety of modification. It shadows forth the penal suffering of lost souls, and, as we believe, of fallen angels. Once, in the history of the universe, has penal suffering devolved on spotless purity. To express the penal suffering borne by the Son of God, no new name was introduced into scriptural diction; none could have been formi-ned from the elements of human speech; none would have been intelligible to A ears .of flesh and blood.@" The ancient appellation of the king of terrors mysteriously expanded in its latent import for the tremendous exigency, was employed by Inspiration, dimly to intimate the whole penal suffering of the sinless Victim, corporeal and incorporeal, human and divine, vicariously endured for the sins of the redeemed.

It was in this majestic sense of the mighty term, that the apostle, overflowing with the Holy Ghost, declared that the great Captain of our salvation A through death destroyed him that had the power of death.@" This was indeed the conquering death of the@ Bible. This was the death of deaths, of which none but an incarnate God could die, compounded of the natural dissolution wrought by the wood and nails of the cross, and especially of those spiritual sufferings unknown to physical decease, which the holy Substitute for sin sustained in his divine as well as human nature, from the outpouring of the terrible cup of almighty wrath.

This development illustrates more forcibly the truth stated in our last chapter, that the conquering death of the Bible was not limited to the brief space of expiration between the two thieves. Consisting, as it did, of penal sufferings vicariously borne, it commenced with their commencement, and ended not until their termination. The redeeming God began to die, in the scriptural sense of the term, when he left the right hand of his Father; for then began his penal sufferings. He continued dying until the close of the tragedy of redemption; for then, and not till then, were A finished@" his penal sufferings. The brief death-struggle of mortals may occupy an hour or a day: the protracted death-agonies of the redeeming God filled almost one-third of what earth calls a century; progressing in intenseness from the hour of his humiliation until their tremendous consummation on Calvary.

That the length and breadth and height and depth of the conquering death were but dimly perceptible to carnal vision, was in strict accordance with the scriptural manifestations of the God revealed in flesh. Almost from the first to the last of his terrestrial humiliation, the self A"emptied@" Deity was closely veiled under the weeds of humanity. The manger of Bethlehem disclosed but the birth of an humble babe; the cross of Calvary displayed but the expiration of an obscure and forsaken mortal. Yet nature could not always withhold her significant indications of a present God. The moving star pointed to Divinity just born into the flesh; the darkened sun, the rent rocks, the shuddering earth, fearfully betokened their suffering, writhing, dying Creator.

It was a merciful provision in the economy of redeeming grace that the great Deliverer, when descending to our world on his benign errand, should have concealed his ineffable glory under the mantle of manhood. Had he appeared as he appeared at Sinai, who on earth could have endured his presence! Even Moses could not behold him face to face and live. Well was it for the oriental sages who came, heaven directed, to the mangerCwell was it for the apostolic band-well was it for the little children folded in the arms of the benignant Jesus-well was it for the beloved disciple leaning on the bosom of his Master-well was it for the mother of Bethlehem=s@s babe when nursing the young Incarnate, or hoverini-ig around his cross for one last lingering look-that humanity had kindly interposed its protecting veil betwixt them and the consuming effulgence of -their redeeming God.

The last verse of the second chapter of Hebrews reads thus: AFor in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to -succour them that are tempted.@" This was do4oubtless applied to the man Christ Jesus. It was also applied to the God Christ Jesus. That the whole incarnate God was for a moment A tempted@ " to pause in his mediatorial career by the near approach of his viewless, inexpressible, unimaginable sufferings, let the amazement, and agony, and bloody sweat, and piercing cries, and vehement supplications of Gethsemane bear witness. His peculiar aptitude, acquired from his own personal experience, to be. come the efficient and divine succourer of tempted suffering, in every place and in every age, has been tested by the lapse of eighteen centuries. Does any unbelieving Thomas doubt the infinitude of this consoling truth? Let him look back to the A tempted,@" yet triumphant martyrdoms of the early Church. Let him trace the modern footsteps of the A"tempted,@" yet patient and enduring missionary of the cross, on the pestilential and burninzig sands of Africa=s@s physical and moral desert. Let him strengthen his morbid faith by com.. muning with the voices that come up from the islands of the farthest seas.

Temptation was predicated of Jehovah ages before the holy incarnation. Take the following samples from the Old Testament. A, And Moses said unto them, why chide ye with me? Wherefore cdlo ye tempt the Lord?@"C-Exodus, 17xvii. 2. A,And he called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the Lord.@"C-Exodus, 17.xvii. 7. A Because all those men which have seen my glory and my miracles, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, have tempted me now these ten times.@"C-Numbers, 14xiv. 22. AY Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah.@" C-Deuteronomy, 6vi. 16. A And they tempted God in their heart.@"C-Psalms, 78lxxviii. 18. A Yet they tempted and provoked the Most High God.@C" Psalms, 78lxxviii. 56. A When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.@"C-Psalms, 95xcv. 9. A And tempted God in the desert.@"C-Psalms, 106cvi. 14. A Yea, they that tempt God are even , delivered.@"C-Malachi, 3iii. 15.

The New Testament also distinctly predicates temptation of a person of the Godhead in passages where the name of Christ is not found. A How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord.@"C-Acts, 5v. 9. A Now therefore, why tempt ye God?@"C-Acts, 15xv. 10. A When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.@"C-HebrKews, 3iii. 9. So God is said to have tempted one of his -mcoist faithful servants. A And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham.@"C-Genesis, 22xxii. 1.

St. James did not intend to place himself in collision with his inspired brethren of the Old and New Testaments, when he declared, A Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempteth he any man.@"C-James, 1i. 13. The apostle, in the text and context has so qualified the terms here used to indicate temptation, as to impart to them a meaning different from that attached to terms nearly similar in the other scriptural passages to which we have just referred. In those other scriptural passages, temptation, in its application to the Deity, is synonymous with trial; to tempt signifies to try; to be tempted signifies to be tried. In the passage from St. James, the words indicative of temptation, qualified as they are by the inspired writer himself, imply, not abortive, but overcoming trials; the terms Atempted@" and A" tempteth@" in the passage, mean successful enticements into sin. It is a self-evident truism that neither temptation, nor any of its derivatives, can, in this sense, be predicated of the omnipotent and holy God. He@ may be tried, as he was tried by the wayward Israelites; he may try hiMs children as he did the father of the faithful. But he cannot -be beguiled into evil, neither beguileth he into evil any of his creatures. This solution, and this alone, brings the brioother of our Lord into harmony with his inspired predecessors and contemporariescotemporaries.

The temptations of Christ, unlike those indicated by St. James, were but abortive trials. Though he was A tempted,@" it was A44 yet without sin.@C"Hebrews, 4iv. 15. The trials of the man Christ Jesuo.s were just as vain as the trials of the indwelling God. No element of his united being was ever touched by any incipient movement of forbidden desire. In the path of holiness, his human nature faltered no more than did his divine. His .temptations are applied by Inspiration to the whole undivided Messiah. Why should we seek to subtract his divinity ? If temptation was predicated of the infinite Spirit not revealed in flesh, why should it. be withdrawn from the eternal Word made man and dwelling among us ? There seems a peculiar fitness in the inspired ascription ocOf temptation to the incarnate, Deity. The meek endurance of trials formed-1 -.tfkls a prominent constituent in his humiliation.@ @ His Bet ,wvhol-e mournful sojourn on earth, from Bethlehem to Calvary, was distinguished by @himself as it he time of his A temptations.@"C-Luke, 22xxii. 28. Human reason has no right to restrict to the manhood of Christ the unlimited declarations of Scripture, predicating temptation of his whole united being. His terrestrial pilgrimage was the hour of A" the power of darkness.@"C-Luke, 22xxii. 53. Who on earth canll fathom that tremendous pPower, second onl y to the Omnipotent? When its profane but abortive temptations are ascribed by Inspiration to the whole incarnate Deity, will reason boldly seek to confine them to his human nature, because she deems temptation not A fittinilg to God?@"

Take, for example, the memn-iorable temptation of the desert. The arch-tempter had once unfurled the flag of defiance in the very capital of God=s@s empire, challenging to combat Almightiness armed in the terrors of its wrath, surrounded by the faithful hierarchies of heaven. He faiiled; hfie fell. It seems not A passing strange,@" that, made reckless by despair, exasperated to phrenzy by the near consummation of long-promised salvation to the hated A,seed of the woman,@" he should have ventured to assail his great Conqueror, when he found him a solitary wanderer in the wilderness of Judea, arrayed ?in the vestments of frail mortality he was conscioH@us that he stood in the presence ofi

the Son of God. He virtually named him the Son of God. The Holy One admitted, at least by implication, the truth of the appellation. It was,@, then, the second that bears A"record in heaven,@" seen and recognized beneath the weeds of @the lonely pilgrim, on whom, as well as on the redeeming man, the prince of darkness made his aui-idacious assault.

If the effort to tempt the in-dwelling GodJ. appears too bold and desperate even for the maddened fiend, no less so would seem his effort to tempt the chosen and guarded man in whom dwelt the never-sleeping Jehovah. Satan was a learned scholar; in prophetic lore he was deeply skilled; he had heard the song of the descended angels; he had seen the moving star; the voice so audible at Jordan= s waves, recognizing the beloved and just baptized Son, was still ringing in the ears of the fallen archangel; he could no more hope to sever the holy union developed in the manger cradle, than to rend asunder the Triple Throne. But the father of the wicked, like his children, was restless and reckless as A the troubled sea.@"

If we pass onward in the mrnediatorial biography, we shall find that all the temptations of the High -Priests, and of the Scribes, and of the Pharisees, and of the Sadducees, and of the Herodians, and of the lawyers, and of the throng without a name, had for their subject the whole united being of Him, who cast out trembling devils, cured by his touch all manner of diseases, restored vitality to the dead by the word of his power, and commanded the obedience of the conscious elements. It was the whole undivided and undivisible Christ of the BibleC-it was he who thought it not robbery to c@laimrn oneness with the infinite FatherC-it was he who assumed the august appellation of the Old Testament, I AM,C-who meekly stooped, in the days of his humiliation, to the mocking trials of faithless men, urged onward by A the power of darkness.@"C-Matthew, 16xvi. 1 ; 19xix. 3; 22xxii. 18, 35. Mark, 8viii. 11A ; 10x. 2; 12xii. 15. Luke, 10x. 25; 11xi. 16; 20xx. 23. John, 8viii. 6.

Christ, in his humanity, A"was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.@@C@Hebrews, 4iv. 15. How he was tempted in his divinity, if communicable to mortal apprehension, Scripture has not deemed fit to communicate. Nor would the communication have been of seeming use. The fortitude of the tempted man was revealed, in its outlines, as a model for our imitation; we @-could not have aspired to imitate the ineffable enduraiance of the deeply tried God. That his divine and human, temptations were dissimilar, in kind as well as in degree, may be inferred from a kindred dissimilarity in his divine and human sufferings. The body of the redeeming man was distorted and lacerated by the visible wood and irons of the cross; the essence of the redeeming Deity was pierced by the viewless sword of the Lord of Hosts.

The supposition that the Word made flesh passed untried through, the ordeal of his humiliation, is opposed alikeq to @the letter and whole spirit of the Bible. If the Jehovah oDf the fO)ld Testament, A"high and lifted up,@" was tempted by the wayward Israelites, how much more abounding and intense must have been the trials of the New Testament Jehovah, A"emptied@" and incarnate; rejected and traduced by those he came to save; betrayed by one of his chosen twelve, denied by another, and deserted by all; mocked, scourged, spitted upon, crucified,Ccrucified between two thieves! Nothing but the patience of a God could have withheld the thunderbolts of the tempted God.

That the footsteps of the mediatorial God are often apparent in the second chapter of Hebrews will not be denied by our opponents. But they will affirm that the footsteps of the mediatorial man appear still oftener; and that, in the suffering and dying scenes, the man is the sole actor. This is a just specimen of the cardinal fault of the prevalent theory in its whole representation of the character of the Messiah. Ever and anon it presents the God apart; still oftener it presents the man apart. Its scenes are perpetually changing, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye, from the divinity to the manhood, and thence back again, as, P.@a suddenly, from the manhood to the divinityI.v NoIt so the scriptural representation. In the grand drama of the New Testament, whose author is God, and whose theme is salvation, the divinity and thelw manhood of the Mediator act throughout in concert. They are one and indivisible; separated, or capable of separation, in nothing. They / are born into the@ world together; together are they wrapped in the stra-w of the manger. They suffer tog@ether: together they .die the scriptural death of expiation.

THERE -is a passage in Acts, and another in Corinthians, which are kindred passages with those upon which we have been commenting in the preceding chapters. The passage in Acts stands thus: A,@But ye denied the Holy One, and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you; and killed the Prince of life.@"C-Acts, 3iii. 14, 15. The passage in Corinthians stands thus: AWhich none of the princes of this world knew; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.@"C-l Corinthians, 2ii. 8.

Who was the A"Prince of life,@" the A"Lord of glory,@" of these, passages? Doubtless it was -not the mere humanity of. him of Nazareth. Beyond peradventure, he whom these passages denominated the APrince of life,@" the A Lord of glory,@" was the second person of the Trinity, arrayed in his vestment of flesh. We have, then, these additional declarations of the Holy Ghost, that the second person of the Trinity, thus arrayed, was crucified and killed. These declarations must have been accomplished in all the plenitude of their awful truth. Would they have been accomplished by the crucifixion and death of the mere humanity of the Virgin=s@s child? A man is not perforated by the perforation of his vestment. That the ethereal essence of the second person of the Trinity was distorted by the wood, and lacerated by the irons of the cross, no one will be wild enough to intimate; but that his ethereal essence endured viewless sufferings denominated in Scripture death, inflicted by the invisible sword of the Lord of Hosts, of which the visible dissolution of his terrestrial being on Calvary was but the representative, we cannot doubt, with the declarations of the Holy Ghost to that effect sounding in our ears.

The Sacred Three have, Aat sundry times and in divers manners,@" declared, without restriction or limitation, that their second glorious person, clothed in flesh, suffered and died for the salvation of the world. Man, for whose sake this miracle of grace was wrought, yields not his credence to these stupendous declarations but with qualifications and exceptions, the creatures of his own reasoning pride, lowering their sublime truths, as it were, from heaven down to earth. What is the cause of this strange phenomenon ? It is caused by the sin of unbelief, that great moral ailment of our natures. This ailment lost us paradise. It withstood the personal miracles of the Son of God. That celestial Physician could cure, by the word of his power or the touch of his hand, the physical maladies of man; but to mitigate this moral malady, he was obliged to lay down his most precious life. And even in the soul renovated by his blood, the final victory of faith over the remnant of unbelief is its last triumph. The sin of skepticism is not peculiar to the scoffing infidel; it is the evil spirit which haunts the path even of the pious Christian. It often obtrudes its A"miscreated front@" into the closet, whither he has retired to commune with his Redeemer; it sometimes pursues him to the very altar of his God. Regenerated man, while in this wilderness of temptation, is, alas! but a believer in part. The time, however, is at hand when his feeble, trembling, hesitating faith will be swallowed up in glorious certainty.

The following passage is specially relevant to the point in issue: A"I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.@"C John, 10x. 14, AAs the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.@C" John, 10x. 15. The last verse will be considered first. The speaker, in this pPassage, was Christ. When he said, A"As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father,@" he must, beyond doubt, have spoken of himself in, his united natures, and with special reference to his Godhead. It was only the omniscient Son who could know the Father, even as the Father knew him. A"Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?@"CJob, 11xi. 7, 8. These sublime interrogatories were propounded to demonstrate to feeble man his utter incapacity to explore and comprehend the mysterious and awful elements of the unsearchable God. The manhood of Christ had no greater capacity, physical or intellectual, than an ordinary man ; it had no infinitude of comprehension; it admitted its want of prescience. The mighty speaker, then, who thus claimed community of omniscience with the Father, must have been the fellow of the Father=s@s everlasting reign.

AAnd I lay down my life for the sheep.@" The speaker had two lives, the human and the divine ; the drop and the ocean of vitality; distinct, yet united. If his meaning was that he would lay down the human drop, leaving the divine ocean untouched, then must he have made a sudden, abrupt, and strange transition, in one brief sentence, from the altitude of his united natures, where the sentence began, down to his mere exclusive humanity. There is nothing on the face of the passage to intimate that such sudden descent was intended. Such abrupt transition is not required or indicated by anything in the context. In a verse shortly succeeding, in the same chapter, are found the memorable words, AI and my Father are one.@" C-John, 10x. 30. The terms used by Christ, in the passage under review, were unlimited and illimitable. They import the laying down of both his lives. They are not satisfied with anything of the totality. To compress them within a small fractional part of that stupendous whole, is to straiten, and distort, and maim the terms. Why will reasoning man gratuitously crucify the living, palpable, speaking words of the crucified God? Because, as the needle is true to the pole, so does unbending man implicitly follow the guidance of that hypothesis which he has adopted for his polar star, AGod is impassible.@" Yet has it been shown that this assumed polar star, though it has hung for centuries on the skirts of the horizon, is but an exhalation of the earth.

He who laid down his A"life for the sheep@" designated himself by the name of the good shepherd. A"I am the good shepherd.@" To whom was this endearing name applied? Not to the human son of Mary, but to the A"Lord of glory.@" The human son of the Virgin was but the mansion of the good shepherdCthe temple consecrated by the indwelling God. As, then, a man dieth not because his mansion is consumed ; as the God is not destroyed. by the destruction of the temple, so the life of the good shepherd would not have been laid down by the dissolution of his tabernacle of clay, according to the mighty meaning of the august speaker. His declarations, which so astonished the heavens, could have been satisfied only by laying down the divine life of the second person of the Trinity, in the scriptural import of the stupendous terms, as well as the life of the associated man.

Christ did not leave the meaning of the term Alife@" as applicable to himself, to be inferred by reasoning process. Five chapters before that upon which we are commenting, he explicitly fixed its signification by his own paramount authority. A"For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.@"C John, 5v. 26. The Father=s@s own vitality was imparted to the Son. His was the life which came down from heaven. It was the life that had breathed vitality into created intelligences. When Christ, therefore, announced the laying down his life, he meant not merely the human drop. He included the divine ocean of being.

According to Christ=s@s own explication of the term life, when applied to himself, the life of the incarnate Son was as the life of the Father. This authoritative explication of the term, when so applied, became a governing precedent for all future cases. Christ, then, in using the same term, with the same application to himself, five chapters afterward, intended, doubtless, to abide by his own explication and precedent. Hence we justly infer, that when he declared, Aand I lay down my life for the sheep,@" he meant that the life which he was about to lay down was as the life of the infinite Father. It was the life, the whole united life of the incarnate God. The advocates of the prevalent theory cannot escape this conclusion, unless they are prepared to allege that the Son of God applied the term life to himself in one sense in the fifth chapter of John, and in a totally different sense in the tenth chapter of the same evangelist. But such discrepancy of meaning, in the use of a term solemnly defined by himself, and declarative of his own vitality, could scarcely have proceeded from the lips of the incarnate Word; at least, such discrepancy is not to be inferred without some scriptural intimation of its existence. No such intimation is to be found in the Volume of Inspiration.

In the passage cconcerning the coming immolation of the Shepherd God, the pronouns A"I@" and Amy@" hold conspicuous places. The personal pronoun, A"I@" is thrice repeated to denote the second person of the Trinity, clothed in flesh. AI am the good shepherd.@" AAs the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father, and I lay down My life for the sheep.@" Mark well the mighty terms, Amy life.@" Thus applied, the little pronoun Amy@ acquired a meaning high as heaven and vast as the universe. It gave such exaltation to its adjunct noun as to grasp the life which A"inhabiteth eternity.@ " No person is wont to employ the name of a whole to denote one of its minute parts. Should historian or geographer apply the peculiar name of a continent to designate its smallest kingdom, he would speak in language unintelligible and misleading. The terms A"my life,@" according to their obvious and plain import, intended the whole united life of the divine speaker. If he meant merely the little spark of his mortal vitality, he must, in this case, have departed from that simplicity and perspicuity which formed so distinguishing a characteristic of him who spake as never man spake. To narrow down the terms to the mere mortal life of Mary=s@s son would be imparting to this stupendous passageCwe speak it witlh reverenceCan illusory meaning. It would make the passage, though infinite in seeming and profession, finite only in its real purpose; finite only in its fulfilment.

The Lamb of the fifth chapter of Revelation was certainly Christ. That Lamb had been slain. That glorious Lamb of God had two natures, the human and the divine. And had he, indeed, been slain but in one of them, and that, too, his inferior nature? The scene of this sublime chapter was laid in the celestial court. The Lamb, having just taken from the right hand of him who sat upon the throne the sealted book, had opened its seals, when straightway there ascended a A"new song@" of praise and thanksgiving, perhaps louder and more heartfelt than even heaven had been wont to hear, beginning around the throne of the Highest, and echoed back by A"every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth!@" For whom did this unwonted shout ascend? It was raised to theo glory of the lamb? And why? Because he had been slain for the redemption of the saints. That was the reason specially assigned. And would the mere slaying of his human nature, the mere extinction of his mortal life, have been thus assigned by the hierarchies of heaven as a special reason for raising higher than, perhaps, it had ever been raised before, the pealing anthem of the universe!CRevelation, 5v. 7--14.

Christ, while on earth, said, A"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.@"C-John, 3iii. 16, 17. And the Holy Spirit, by the lips of one of his inspired apostles, says still more expressively, A"He@" (meaning God) A"that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?@C" Romans, 8viii. 32.

That the Being designated in these passages by the name of God was the first person of the Trinity will not be questioned. A"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.@"CJohn, 1i. 14. Who was A"the only-begotten of the Father,@" A"sent@" A"into the world,@" and A"spared not,@" styled, in one of the passages forming the last paragraph, God=s@s A"own Son,@" by way of distinction and pre-eminence, and in the other A"his only-begotten Son?@" Clearly, he was not the human son of the Virgin. Mary=s@s human offspring was not the A"only-begotten Son@" of the infinite Father. Nor did the infinite Father beget him. The conception of the Virgin was by the power of the Holy GhostCLuke, 1i. 35.

In the thirteenth verse of the same third chapter of John, it is declared that the Son of the Father, there called the Son of man, Acame down from heaven.@" And in one of the transcribed passages, it is stated, as we have seen, that he was A"sent@" A"into thhe world.@" But the human son of the Virgin never A"came down from heaven,@" at least before his ascension. Nor was he A"sent@", A"into the world.@" It was in the world that he was created. It was in the manger of Bethlehem that he first came into being. He had no antecedent existence.

It is demonstrated, then, that God=s@s A"own Son,@" his A"only-begotten Son,@" his Son who A"came@ down from heaven,@" his Son A"sent@" A"into the world,@" and A"spared not,@" was none other than the second person of the Trinity. It was not the mortal progeny of MaryCearth-born and earth-composed in the elements of his humanityCthat formed the glowing theme of the Holy Ghost in these stupendous passages. He spoke of his fellow God as the unspared Son of the Father. The unspared Son was he by whom the Father created, the worlds, the hierarchies of heaven, the dwellers upon earth. The unspared Son was the Son who had sat at his Father=s@s right hand, and shared in his councils from the earliest eternity.

For what purpose did the infinite Father send into the world A"his own,@" A"his only-begotten Son?@" It was not that he might explore this remote province of his Father=s@s boundless empire. It was not that he might make a pleasant sojourn on this goodly earth. The Son of God was sent into the world to suffer. Suffering was the object, the great object of his mission. He came, not to impart dignity and value to the human sufferings of his earthly associate, but to suffer himself; to suffer, not by proxy or substitute, but in his own divine person. Infinite wisdom, indeed, thought it best that he should suffer in the fallen nature he came to redeem. But that was only the garb in which he appeared. His manhood was but the adjunct; his divinity was the principal. He came to suffer, not in his adjunct nature only, but also in his principal nature. He came to make, not a seeming and illusory, but a real atonement for the sins of man. That venerated common law, which our fathers brought from our fatherland with their language, their liberties, and their religion, is encumbered with many fictions, which, for the supposed furtherance of justice, it regards as truths. The divine law deals not in fiction. In its administration of universal justice, in its penal code, in its punishment of incorrigible sinners, in its pardons to the penitent, all is reality. Its celestial city for the abode of the blessed is no fiction. Its great and everlasting prison-house is no fiction. In the passion of Christ there was nothing of fiction.

The passage transcribed froim Romans contains terms not surpassed in awful import by any words written in any of the tongues of earth. God A"spared not his own Son!@" The infinite Father A"spared not@" his own infinite Son! We have seen that the unspared victim was the second person of the Trinity. One of the Sacred Three would not have termed his kindred God the unspared of the Father, had he carried along with him his divine beatitude, in all its infinite perfection, from the throne of heaven to the manger of Bethlehem, and from the manger of Bethlehem to the tomb of Joseph. Had the throes and spasms by which salvation was earned, touched not the ethereal essence of the incarnate God ; had his divinity continuned as blissful on earth as it had ever been in heaven; had the expiatory agonies devolved exclusively on his terrestrial adjunct, the uncreated, the eternal Son would have been the spared, and not the unspared of his Father. It would have been only the human son of Mary whom the infinite Father A"spared not.@" Yet the declaration that the devoted victim was A"spared not,@" rendered, by the very simplicity of its terms, lucid as thhe sunbeam, is applied by the Holy Ghost directly to the Father=s@s A"own Son ;@" and, by necessary inference, to his A"only-begotten Son;@" to his Son A"who came down from heaven;@" to his Son who was A"sent@" A"into the world.@"

It was when the infinite Father inflicted on the divine spirit of A"his own,@" A"his only-begotten Son,@" made a voluntary curse for those he came to save, A"the fiercerieness and wrath of almighty God,@" that the tremendous declaratioon of the Holy Ghost was accomplished. The Father A"spared not his own Son.@" True, that Son had been the fellow of his everlasting reign, with whom he had taken A"sweet counsel@" ere time was known, yet the Father spared him not. True, the paternal heart yearned with throes, to which the silent, though deep emotions of the faithful Abraham were but as the finite to the infinite, yet the Father A"spared not his own Son.@" True, the angelic hosts, if permitted to behold the appalling spectacle, must have cast their dismayed, their deprecatory, their beseeching eyes now on the descending arm, now on the stern, though still benignant face of the Ancient of Days, yet the infinite Father spared not his own infinite Son. True, the uncomplaining, the submissive, the unoffending Son, A"brought as a lamb to the slaughter,@" presented, in his own meek and gentle form, an appeal to parental sympathy, almost enough to make even divine justice A"break its sword,@" yet the Father spared him not. This was indeed the magnanimity of a God! This A"became Him for whom are all things, and by whom are all things!@" It became the First who bears A"record in heaven;@" it became the august Ancient of Days; it became the infinite Father. This was the sublime mode, devised in the conclave of the Godhead, for A"bringing many sons unto glory.@"CHebrews, 2ii. 10. The sacrifice was not delusive; the Holy Trinity never delude. It was an awful reality, not an Oriental metaphor.

A"God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.@"C Romans, 5v. 8. The A"God@" of this passage was the eternal Father; it is A"his love@" displayed in the death of Christ, that is here commended to us. A"God is love.@" The love of God is proclaimed by the visible creation; it glows in the sun ; it twinkles in every star; it is seen in A"the green of the earth, and the blue of the skies;@" it is heard in the song of the groves, and in the harmony of the heavens. But in the death of Christ, its dispersed and variegated rays are converged into one concentrated, luminous, melting point. The miracle of the Father=s@s love displayed in the redeeming sacrifice, indeed A"passeth knowledge.@" We can but study it, A" as through a glass darkly@" in the scriptural picture of that original, unique and incommunicable scene, the most magnificent, terrible., pathetic, and awfully mysterious that eternity has witnessed, where God the Father, the very personification of mercy, for our guilty sakes, A"spared not@" his own, his only-begotten, his well-beloved Son.

Over the love of God manifested in the death of Christ, the prevalent theory has cast its eclipse, compounded of the vapors of earth. The bewildered eye now looks in vain for that prodigy of grace commended by the eternal Father as the masterpiece of his own infinite beneficence. The human son of the Virgin is made the only real victim for the sacrificial altar, while God=s@s own Son is depicted as passing through the ordeal scathless, ever overflowing with the beatitude of his Father=s@s right hand, impassive to all the throes and spasms, the sighs and groans, of his terrestrial, sinless, yet sin-bearing associate. From the scene of Christ=s@s death, the prevalent theory has thus banished those astounding testimonials of the love of the infinite Father, which form so glowing a theme of the Sacred Volume! The scriptural immolation of God=s@s own ethereal Son by the paternal arm sinks, in the theory, to the immolation of the human son of Mary!

A"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.@"CJohn, 15xv. 13. The speaker in this passage was the second person of the Trinity clothed in humanity; his theme was the stupendous atonement by which he achieved the friendship and salvation of his enemies. To die for a friend is the acme of human love; to die for a foe, is beyond the aspiration of mortal mag-nanimity; the thought belongs to infinitude; it could have been conceived and executed only by a God; it was the mightiest movement of that uncreated Word, who spake, and material worlds sprung into being, and who breathed into the spirits of heaven their vitality, and holiness, and blessedness. The text constituting the subject of the last preceding comment, and that now under review, are sister passages; the former pointing to the love of the infinite Father, the latter to that of the infinite Son, displayed in the miracle of redemption. The Parent of the universe so loved our fallen race that, for their salvation, he awakened the sword of divine justice to smite his Other Self; his Other Self, moved by pity known only in the pavilion of the Godhead, freely bared his filial heart to the descending stroke, which naught but Omnipotence could have endured.

A"For even Christ pleased not himself.@" CRom. 15xv. 3. A"For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty was thus rich might be rich.@"C-2 Corinthians, 8viii. 9. He who was thus rich and became poor for the salvation of the world, was not the mortal son of the Virgin, but the second person in the Trinity. Mary=s@s human son was not rich before he became poor; he was born in want, his existence had its inception in the most abject poverty. It was the Proprietor of the universe who made his voluntary transit from wealth to penury. He who passed through this most wondrous change, was the same personification of pitying and almighty grace, A"who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself and took upon him the form of a servant.@"CPhilippians, 2ii. 6, 7.

The self-denial of the second person of the Trinity is one of the most prominent and affecting truths of our holy religion. Self-denial is the voluntary sacrifice of one=s@s own happiness for the happiness of others. Without some sacrifice of personal felicity, the virtue of self-denial cannot be developed. Where but in suffering was the self denial of the second person of the Trinity ? What privation did he undergo, if the sackcloth of incarnation was just as conducive to his blessedness as the robe of glory he had worn in heaven? What proofs of divine self-denial did Gethsemane or Calvary display, if the redeeming God carried with him into the garden and to the cross all the fulness of the bliss of his Father=s@s right hand? Royalty has sometimes, of its own choice, abdicated the throne for the humble cottage; but when it transferred to the cottage the undiminished felicity of the throne, to what self-denial could royalty have laid claim? It had parted, indeed, with, A"the pride, pomp and circumstance@" of sovereignty Cbut without the loss of its felicity, it had in reality lost nothing. Even the stupendous transition of the eternal Word from A"the form of God@" to A"the form of a servant@" was, if it touched not his indwelling beatitude, but a modification of his outward state. Infinite happiness remained still infinitely happy; and had, therefore, sustained no real privation. The prevalent theory would thus transmute into metaphor the scriptural passages affirming the sublime self-denial of the second person of the Trinity.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE dismay with which Christ beheld his coming sufferings, and the perturbation which their endurance caused him, can be explained only on the supposition that the sufferings were not confined to his human nature. Had the primitive Christian martyrs exhibited the same dismay and perturbation at the approach of death, one of the chief arguments in favour of the truth of our holy religion would have been lost to the world. The patience, fortitude, and triumph with which they met and endured the excruciating agonies of martyrdom ranked high among the miracles by which early Christianity was propagated. A" See how a Christian can die!@" is an appeal to infidelity not of modern origin. Its thrilling- effect was well known and felt in the early Chuorch. The triumphant death of the first martyrs was among the most eloquent of the --addresses ever made by Christianity to the pagan world. It was a miracle, perhaps, more touchiiing to the heart than the healing of the sick or the raising,, of the dead.

The difference between these martyrs and their Master in meeting and enduring the agonies of a violent death is an historic fact not to be passed over unnoticed. It is not a point of literary curiosity alone; it deeply concerns our faith. It indicates that his suffering must have differed from theirs, not only in its degree, but in its very element. Contrast, for instance, the death of Stephen with that of his Lord; look at the face of the former, shining A as it had been the face of an angel,@" and then turn your melting eye to the A" marred visage@" of the latter ; listen to the joyous exclamation of the finite martyr, when he saw through the opening heavens the gloryy of God, and Jesus 9

In farther proof of the correctness of this conclusion, let us direct our attention to the, enthusiastic exclamations of this same, Saul, baptized of the ,,Mtlze@ a@of Holy Ghost by the name of Paul, approaching his own martyrdom. A For,@" says he, A" I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good OA fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge shall give me at that day.@"C-2 Timothy, 4iv. 6-8. And with these eloquent bursts of exulting faith pealing in our ears, -, ,let our souls kneel down beside our prostrate Lord, on the cold, hard, earth of Gethsemane, and become the astounded .auditors of his piteous cry, A" 0, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.@"C-Matthew, 26.xxvi. 39.

Even without the sustaining power of religion, the resolved mind has often met and endured, without dismay, the utmost suffering of which humanity can be made the heir. The Roman Regulus returned of his own free choice to Carthage, though he well knew that, to the violent death which awaited him there, Punic cruelty and Punic cunning would superadd the severest tortures that history had ever suggested or fiction shadowed forth. And when the Africans had cut off his eyelids, and exposed his naked and lacerated eyes to their scorching sgands and burning sun until their patience was exhausted; when they had rolled about his naked person in a barrel filled with sharp spikes, pointed inward, to pierce and tear his quivering flesh, until tardy death came at last to his relief, they could no more disturb the fortitude of the hero than they could have shaken Atlas from its everlasting base. @ Yet was Regulus but a heathen patriot. Nor is g@the Western Indian chief, tied by his captors to a tree in his native forests, and encompassed round with dry materials, just lighted by the fires which are to consume him, less firm and Aimmoveable. The taunts of his tormentors and the searching flames, are alike impotent to dis-

The dismay with which the Son of God anticipated his sufferings, and the perturbation which their endurance caused him, have been, for more than eighteen centuries, the wonder of Christendom. On this phenomenon the eyes of all beholders have been riveted by their own spontaneous and irrepressible reflections. For where is the man to be found with A"soul so dead@" that, with the full assurance of the A"joy set before,@" and the influences sustaining the man Christ JesusC-an assurance made doubly sure by successive miracles, by audible and repeated voices from heaven, by the upholding consciousness of in-dwelling OmnipotenceC-would not himself willingly endure all the human suffering of which the incarnate God could have been the recipient? Even for the bawble of an earthly crown, what privations, what toils, what scorching sands, what snow-capped he A ights, what A,@most disastrous chances,@" what A"hair-breadth >scapes in the imminent, deadly breach,@@ have not been joyously encountered! 1 Comparedl@U, then with a celestial diadem, a rank above the cherubim and the seraphim, a seat at the ri@ight hand of the Highest, made sure and everlasting by the guarantee of the Godhead, how slight and evanescent would seem all the ills that, in the brief span of a single life, could be poured into the cup of humanity, even if unceasingly filled to overflowing!

But one solution can be given of the stran ge phenomenon of Christ=s@s dismay and perturbation. His sufferings were not the, mere sufferings of humanity. They must have had their chief seat within the hitherto unapproachable pavilion of hiMs divinity. The brightest intellects, deeply schooled in the science of logic, and armed with the trea-sures of profane and sacred lore, have laboured for centuries to explain the mysterious indications on principles familiar to human nature. They have utterly failed; and the failure is a farther confirmation of the justness of our supposition, that the sufferings of Christ penetrated the sanctuary of his divine nature. A brief review of the causes to which human ingenuity has attributed the dismay and perturbation of the incarnate God, will best evince their utter insufficiency to produce the stupendous effects attributed to them.

First. The advocates of the prevalent theory have assigned, as one cause of his dismay and pertubation, the new and more vivid views of the deformity of sin suddenly impressed on him at the time of his last passion ; representing that the almighty arm then lifted the covering pall from the hitherto disguised features of moral evil and presented them in all their native hideousness. This suggestion is sustained by the high authority of Bishop Bu I rnett. Doctor South, a preacher of the English church in the reign of Charles II., justly distinguished for his piety, learning, and eloquence, speaks C-of Christ=s@s last passion in the following terms. He says:

We might dismiss this assigned cause of Christ=sCbrist@s dismay and perturbation with the passing remark, that it is nowhere intimated in the Bible; but other materials for its refutation, ample and conclusive, are at hand. The God Christ Jesus, before be left his heavenly home, had been fully conscious of the heinousness of sin. He was the being sinned against. He had come down from heaven to offer himself a sacrifice for sin. His omniscience could learn nothing new on earth of its frightful nature. The man Christ Jesus had been early taught the heinousness of sin by his own holy reflections. He hbad learned it from the audible discourses and the secret monitions of the indwelling God. And if he saw its heinousness more clearly at the time of his last passion, he must then also have felt more strongly the necessity of that atonement of which his humanity was the vehicle, to rescue from the pollution and penalty of sin the host of the redeemed. It is the extremity of his country=s@s da;inger, forcibly presented to the mental vision of the patriot, that best sustains his exulting resolution to die in its behalf.

There is no reason for supposing that a near view of sin, to which the beholder is himself a stranger, can disturb the felicity of a holy being. Gabriel has, doubtless, a sense of sin more vivid than humanity ever attained. And yet Gabriel, with his joyous harp, still stands A"in the presence of God.@" The humanity of Christ is glorified and blissful in heaven. Its sense of sin acquired on earth, however clear, must have grown clearer in the light of eternity. Yet this sense of sin, in- stead of impairing its bliss, opens wider and more enrapturing views of the grace and glory of its kindred God, and swells louder its pealing anthem of praise and thanksgiving for his redeeming love.

The man Christ Jesus had been early taught by the indwelling God that A"strait is the gate and narrow the way which leads to life, and few there are who find it.@" And as the fate of the finally impenitent caught his pitying eye, he might well repose on the consoling reflection, that the Judge of -all the earth would do right. It is a blessed provision of the Father of mercies, that the sufferings of the incorrigibly wicked are not permitted to impair the felicity of holy beings. If this were not so, the songs of heaven might be saddened by the wailingo,s of the pit. If this were not so, the bliss of the sainted Abraham might have been disturbed, at least for the time, by the pathetic appeal of his luxurious and lost descendant for a drop of water to cool his burning tongue.

Thirdly. It has been said that the agony which Christ foresaw with such dismay, and met with such perturbation, was caused, in a great measure, by the privation of the light of his FPather=s@s countenance. If it were understood that this privation reached the God Christ Jesus, it would indeed go far to explain the mysteries of Gethsemane and of Calvary. But our opponents cannot for a moment admit that it was the divinity of Christ that was thus forsaken octf the Father; for that would at once concede that his divinity suffered; it would be giving up the point at issue between them and us. Upon the prevalent theory, the God Christ Jesus, in the garden and on the cross, beheld his Father=s@s countenance lit up with the same benignant smile which had been wont to greet him in the courts of paradise.

But even to the man Christ Jesus it was no slight privation that he underwent, though but for a few brief hours, the hidings of his Father=es face. The pious soul, accustomed to bask in the sunshine of heavenly love, experiences, from the sensation of its temporary loss, an anguish, of which the world cannot judge. But the sting of the suffering is the sufferer=s@s consciousness that his own sins have interposed the cloud between him and heaven. David felt this calamity, and its terrible cause, rankling in the central recesses of his heart.

Christ suffered, the A"just for the unjust.@" He well knew his own spotless innocence. When his heavenly Father seemed to forsake him, he knew that it was for the sins of others, not for any demerits of his own. He doubted not that he was in the plain path of duty, however arduous and rugged. He knew that, if the light of his FPather=s@s countenance was for a brief space withdrawn, it was only the temporary absence of a beloved friend, who was sure to love him the better for being absent. And yet his fortitude seemed about to forsake himn with his God! 1 An eclipse has no terrors to him who knows that it is caused only by the intervention of an opaque body between him and the central luminary, that is ever ready to shed on him anew its enlightening, warming, and cheering rays the moment the obstruction has passed away. Christ indeed suffered under a temporary eclipse of the light of his Father=s@s face; but he well knew that it was the opaque body of others=@ sins which alone caused the brief obstruction that a few short hours would remove forever.

Besides his consciousness of perfect innocence, Christ had other supports never before or since known in the history of suffering. He knew that he must conquer in the struggle ; that the utinited Godhbead stood pledged for his triumph. To him victory was a matter, not of faith, but of knowledge. He knew, too, that the contest would be short; that he should speedily rise from the dead. He was conscious that the reward of his sufferings would be an everlasting crown ; that his place between the two thieves would be exchanged for the right hand of God; that hlie would leave the tomb of Joseph for the throne of heaven. He knew that he should A see of the travail of his soul,@" and A be satisfied;@" that his blood would save fromui perdition countless millions of fallen immortals; that his sufferings would fill the kingdom of righteousness with the joyous sons and daughters of salvation, evermore raising the song of thanksgiving to him their Saviour King. It was a cherished axiom of ancient patriotism, that it was sweet to die for one=s@s country. How much more self-sustaining the Godlike thought of dying for a world! This was the A"joy set before him.@" For this he might well have A endured the cross, despising the shame.@" C-HebrewWs, x12ii. 2.

with triumph. The struggle on Calvary would have been hailed as the joyous termination of his vicarious privations and sufferings; the blissful hour of his deliverancem, nce from the heavy curse of others=@ sins; the glorious epoch of his return to his Father=s@s arms, crowned with the laurels of a world redeemed.

rences of the garden, so far as they relate to our present purpose, are thus related by St. Matthew: A And he took with him Peter, and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith hlie unto them, My soul is ex-

****** away again, the second time, and prayed, saying, 0 my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink of it, thy will be done. And he came and found them asleep again; for their eyes were heavy. And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.@"C-Matthew, 26xxvi. 37, and the verses following.

words: A@ And he taketh with him Peter, and

swer him. And he cometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: it is enough; the hour is come; behold, the Son of manrpau is betrayed into the hands of sinners.@"C-. Mark, 14xiv. 33, and following verses.

lars to the narration: A And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And beingo, in an agony, he prayed more ear-

nestly ; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.@"C-Luke, 22xxii. 43, 44.

fication of man. A The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are re-

vealed belong unto us, and to our children for ever.@" C-Deunt. 29xxix. 29. A All scripture was given by di. vine inspiration, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteous-

ness.@C@2 Timothy, 3iii. 16. Had not the garden scene been intended for human meditation, it would have found no place, in the Bible. The prevalent theory has locked up the sacred pages in which it is portrayed in seemingly inextricable mystery. To unlock those precious pages there is but one key. Our comments on this memorable scene will be arranged under several heads.

den ascended from the lips of that august Being who had thought it no robbery to be equal with God; it was pronounced by that almighty voice which had commanded the winds and the waves and they obeyed. With face prone on the cold@ ground, and body quivering with nameless anguish, did the only-begotten, the uncreated, the divine, the incarnated Son utter the piercing cry, A 0 my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.@" To drink this very cup he had come into the world. Of this fearful cup he had often spoken. From his contemplation it had never been absent. Had the cup passed from him, the sole purpose of his in-

ous cry a-iscended, wafted upward byv more than earthly fervour. The cry, and its fervour, too, are engraved on the Bible=s@s imperishable record, point-

mighty wrath must have scorched into annihilation the vital elements of the loftiest being ever created by the word of the Highest. That the infinite, the world-redeeming Son, in a moment superadded the pathetic qualification, A Nevertheless, not as I will,

but as thou wilt,@" while it denotes the patient meekness of him who was A brought as a lamb to the slaughter@ " derogates nothing from the tremen-

Sixthly. A" And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.@" To whom did the angel appear? It appeared A unto him.@" The pronoun A61 him@@@ is twice used in the passage from Luke, and the context demonstrates that, in each instance, it was used to designate the Christ, the whole Christ. The angel then appeared, not merely to the human son of the Virgin, but unto the united being of the incarnate God. For what purpose , 0 did the angel appea run 0 unto him? The . r , t

peared merely to strengthen the manhood of Christ. The declaration is general, pervading, according to its plain signification, every recess oOf the united natures of the God A66 manifest in the flesh.@" The declaration would be cramped and maimed if with-

***** If reasoning pride is thus presumptuously arrogant, it may as well aim at consistence in its arrogance. Let it, then, if it dare, seek, by its rash skepticism,@ to blot out from scriptural theology the stupendous article of the incarnation. The incarnation was the wonder of wonders. That very God should become very flesh, and verily dwell among us, is surely not less strange than that an angel from heaven should appear unto the incarnate God, Astrengthening hi@m.@"

The manhood of the Virgin=s@s son needed, ordi-

ing child, A that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb,@" yet could not the incarnate and compassionate God fail to listen to every sigh, and count every tear, and remember, @as though they had been graven A upon the palms of his hands,@" all the weaknesses, and pains, and fears of that feeble humanity, which he had adopted as his own, and, as it were, incorporated into himself. While the strength of the incarnate Deity remained unimpaired, there was no need that there should appear unto the human son of the Virgin an angel from heaven, A strengthening him.@"

greetings from the court of heaven. He was the ambassador of the holy Trinity, fraught with every soothing, A"strengthening@" consideration which could flow from the wisdom and love of the Godhead. It is true that the omnipresent and omniscient Fa-

The infinite Father,g from his exalted throne, beheld his only-begotten, his well-beloved Son struggling in the garden. He saw him A sorrowful even unto death;@" he saw him Asore amazed;@" he beheld him, being in an agony, Asweat as it were great drops of blood, falling down to the ground;@ he heard his pathetic cry, A, 0 my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me;@" he saw that even his infinite and omnipotent Son, now made a curse for sin, was almost ready to sink under its more than mountain weight: and it was therefore that A, there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.@"

Seventhly. A, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.@" The true meaning of the original Greek words rendered by our translators p.212 A"soul,@" becomes here a subject of interest. The divine speaker had a material and immaterial nature. Within his body were lodged a human soul, and that ethereal essence, which constituted the second person of the Trinity; the former bearing to the latter the same proportion as the finite bears to the infinite. The original word, here translated soul, when applied to ordinary men, means the immaterial, breathing, living principle within them. The term finds, within the common children of humanity, no other aliment. But if applied to subjects affording other aliment for its sustenance, then the term spontaneously expands itself, so as to embrace the whole indwelling immateriality, however vast it may be. Plato had received, through the channels of tradition, some few scattered rays of that divine light which, in early ages, had been communicated to man. These rays he carefully concentrated, and was thus enabled to form a theory which advanced one incipient step towards the glorious system of revealed truth. He darkly conceived the outlines of an immaterial, omnipresent, omniscient God, the creator and preserver of the heavens and the earth. To denote this ethereal essence, this immaterial, viewless, living principle, pervading and animating the immeasurable universe, the Athenian philosopher employed the identical Greek word with which the evangelists Matthew and Mark, have opened their narratives of the pathetic wailings of their Lord in the garden, and which has been rendered soul by our translators.

When Christ said at Gethsemane, A"My soul isg exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,@" he must have intended to declare that his whole immaterial or spiritual nature was overwhelmed with sorrow. He intimated no distinction between the human and divine portions of his immaterial or spiritual being. He used a general term, applicable to both; a term not technically confined to the human soul; a term comprehensive enough to include his divine as well as his human immateriality; a term which the great master of the Greek tongue had employed to denote the divine essence. When, therefore, reasoning pride seeks to narrow down the term thus used by Christ, so as to confine its meaning to the inferior part of his immaterial or spiritual being, bearing a less proportion to the whole than a single grain of sand bears to the vast earth we inhabit, it seeks to render particular that awful declaration which the Son of God left general. To make the point clearer, let us suppose that the translators, instead of the present version, had translated the passages in question so as to make them conform, in terms, to the limited meaning now sought to be attached to them, by inserting the adjective human before the substantive soul. The exclamation of Christ would then have stood thus, A"My human soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.@" This version would doubtless have been startling, even to the advocates of the prevalent theory. But if the adjective A"human@" is to be insinuated into the passages by

What were the contents of the cup, whose mere anticipation caused the sorrow, and amazement, and agony of the garden, the human imagination has not powers to conceive. It was Athe cup of trembling,@ " filled to overflowing with the Afierceness and wrath of almighty God.@" The visible agonies of Calvary doubtless bore no comparison to those which were unseen. The real tragedy was behind the curtain. There, impervious to human vision, was perfected the spiritual crucifixion of the eternal Son of God. The body of Christ heeded not the scourgings of the soldiery, but his whole immaterial being writhed under the anguish of those stripes by which we are healed. He looked down with indifference on the vindictive gaze of the crucifying multitude; but he looked upward with dismay at his Father=s@s altered face. Through the opening skies he beheld that coun-, tenance, which, until he became a curse for us, had forever beamed on him with the sunshine of heaven, now darkened with a frown. The draught of mingled vinegar and gall he could reject; but now made sin, though sinless, he was@ compelled to drain to the very dregs the terrible cup of infinite wrath. The nails of the cross, which lacerated his quivering flesh, he regarded not; but he, felt in all the elements of his spiritual natures, that invisible, yet flaming sword of the Lord of Hosts, which was piercing him through and through, as the substitute for sinners.

But the scene was about to close. The last cry was ascending from the cross. A"It is finished!@" exclaimed the dying God, and gave up the ghost. A"It is finished!@" was echoed through the courts of heaven with triumphant acclamations. A"It is finished!@" was reverberated through the vaults of hell in tones of despair. What was finished? The throes and spasms of a suffering Deity were finished. The reconcilement of infinite justice and infinite mercy was finished. The everlasting triumph over the powers of darkness was finished. The redemption of a world was finished. We close this chapter by presenting to our readers the remarks of one of the master-spirits of the age on the extent and nature of Christ=s@s sufferings. The remarks first reached our knowledge after these sheets were prepared for the press. The great and pious Chalmers says,

A"It blunts the gratitude of men when they think lightly of the sacrifice which God had to make when he gave up his Son unto the death; and, akin to this pernicious imagination, our gratitude is farther deadened and made dull when we think lightly of the death itself. This death was an equivalent for the punishment of guilty millions. In the account which is given of it, we behold all the symptoms of a deep and dreadful enduranceC of an agony which was shrunk from even by the Son of God, though he had all the strength of the divinity to uphold himC of a conflict, and a terror, and a pain, under which omnipotence itself had well nigh given way, and which, while it proved that the strength of the sufferer was infinite, proved that the sin for which he suffered, in its guilt and in its evil, was infinite also. Christ made not a seeming, but a substantial atonement for the sins of the world. There was something more than an ordinary martyrdom. There was an actual laying on of the iniquities of us all; and, however little we are fitted for diving into the mysteries of the divine jurisprudenceC-however obscurely we know of all that was felt by the Son of God when the dreadful hour and power of darkness were upon him, yet we may be well assured that it was no mockery; that something more than the mere representation of a sacrifice, it was most truly and essentially a sacrifice itself a full satisfaction rendered for the outrage that had been done upon the LawgiverChis whole authority vindicated, the entire burden of his wrath discharged. This is enough for all the moral purposes that are to be gained by our faith in Christ=s@s propitiation. It is enough that we know of the travail of his soul. It is enough that he exchanged places with the world he died for, and that what to us would have been the wretchedness of eternity, was all concentrated upon him, and by him was fully borne.@"*

*Chalmer=s Lectures on Romans, pp. 318, 319. Carter=s New York edition.

Humanity of Christ had not Physical Capacities to endure all his SufferingsC-B13ody and Hum-uaan Soul of Christ differ,,ed in nothing but Holiness from those of ordinary MenC-Body can suffer only to limited ExtentC-So of Human SoulC-Sufferings of ris a Chris A t Infinite, or., at lea st, beyond Mortal EnduranceC-Christ=@s Physical Capacities not expanded at last PassionC-If so, he would not have Suffered in our NatureC-@@Shifts to which Prevalent Theory is put to reconcile Extent of Christ=s@s Sufferings with limited Capacities of Humanity to suffer.

******* 218 CHRIST@13 MANHOOD NOT PECULIAR.

As a preliminary to this branch of our argument, we would remind the reader that the body and human soul of Christ differed in nothing from the bodies and souls of ordinary men, except in being sinless. This important fact rests on the firm basis of the Bible. The leading feature in the revealed plan of redemption is, that the second person of the Trinity should suffer in our nature. He would not have suffered in our nature had his manhood, except in its sinless character, been either more or less than the nature of ordinary men. Had he suffered in an angelic nature, or in a superhuman nature, he would not have suffered. in our nature; and thus the scriptural delineation of the atonement itself would have lost its characteristic feature. The suggestion so often made and repeated by@ theorists, that the body and human soul of Christ had peculiar susceptibilities for suffering, finds no support in the Oracles of God. The Bible informs us that , AJesus increased in wisdom andii stature@" like ordinary youths.C-Luke, 2ii. 52. But on the great fact of the identityv of his body and human soul, save in their exemption from sin, with the bodies and souls common to our race, the Bible is still more explicit. The Holy Ghost, in lan-

guage not to be frittered away by interpretation, has declared, A,Wherefore in all things it behooved hi@rmn to be made like unto his brethren.@"C-Hebrews, 2ii. 17.

manity, Christ=s@s body and human soul had physical capacities to become the recipient of that unutter-

mated by the stupendous scenes of Gethsemane and of Calvary, we direct it inward, to view, as through a microscope, the diminutive lineaments of our own material and immaterial natures, we are driven to the conclusion that the manhood of Christ (A,made like unto his brethren@") could not have been the recipient of all his illimitable suffer-

sion just stated, if they believe that the suffel@rings' of Christ were infinite. A finite being cannot be

MANHOOD COULD NO@I@ A,O SITFFTltl. 221

ity ? In answering this question in the, affirmative, we appeal to the scriptural intimations, scattered through the Old and New Testaments, evincing the extremity of our Saviour=s@s sufferings; we ap-

peal to the indications on the cross, and especially to those of the garden; we invoke the bloody sweat of Gethsemane, A falling down to the ground@" C-to be understood, not as a delusive metaphor, but as a stupendous truth; not as applicable to a person incapacitated by disease to retain in his veins and arteries the circulating and vital fluid, but as applicable to a person in perfect health.

gate sufferings of the doublyC-laden man will prob-

ably bear a less proportion to the awful totality of Christ=s@s sufferings than the drop of the bucket bears to the A multitudinous sea.@" No imaginable concentration of human anguish, corporeal and mental, could ever have produced the appalling phenomenon which crimsoned the soil of Gethse-

See Appendix, No. A, p. 352.

no longer have been A,in all things like unto his brethren.@" Had Christ suffered in this mingled na-

ture, how could he have been what his apostle Peter represents him to have been when he says, A Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an exam-

ple ?@"C-1 I Peter, 2ii. 21. How could he have left us an example, with any expectation of our following it, unless he had actually suffered in our common nature ? The supposition that he also suffered in his divine nature does not impair the efficacy of his human example. The supposition presents to us a suffering man to imitate ; a suffering God to adore.

crease of holiness.- We do not infer that the A strengthening@" envoy of the garden added any-

of his last passion, would have been to effect a change in the elements of the incorporeal portion of his humanity. He would then rather have taken on him A the nature of angels,@" than have remained of the unmixed A seed of Abraham.@"C-

firmed of him, A,Wherefore in all things it behooved him to be made like unto his brethren.@" He was not like unto his brethren, if his human nature dif-

fered from theirs in the paramount article of its suffering capacity. And if he was A made like unto his brethren,@" he continued A like unto his breth-

ren@" until his mediatorial sufferings were A" fin-

ished.@" Increase of physical capacity for the exigency-

The Bible would not have exhibited the patience of Christ in endurance from the cradle to the grave as a pattern to be successfully imitated by mortals, unless he had at all times remained, not only the Lord of glory, but also a frail man, A like unto his brethren@, in the suffering elements of his humanity. The incarnation constituted him very

manity of our common nature in the workshop of Joseph, it doubtless continued such in the garden of Gethsemane,. and on the cross of Calvary. The sweat of labou@r and the sweat of blood flowed alike from the same feeble mortality. The infant wailings of the manger, and the expiring wailings which shook the firm-seated earth, proceeded from the self-same being, unaltered save in physical and natural growth.

To reconcile the magnitude of Christ=s@s sufferings with the limited capabilities of humanity to suffer, has ever been one of the most trying shifts of the prevalent theory. One class of its advocates, as has already appeared, have imagined that the man-

thor of the A Freedom of the Will@ " was obliged to seek refuge from the anomalies of the prevalent theory, in the same hypothesis.*

*Whitby=s Comments on Matthew, 26. 38; Dwight=s Theology, vol.

2. p. 217; Edwards=s Works, vol. 8. pp. 176, 177 New York, 1830.

* Whitby@s Comments on Matthew, xxvi, 38; Dwight@s The-

ology, vol. ii. p. 217; Edwards@s Works, vol. viii. pp. 176, 177 New York, 1830.

tendom, that Christ did not specifically pay the debts of the redeemed in kind and in full, as such payment might have enabled them to demand from eternal justice the remission of their sins as matter of right, and not of@ mere grace. We eschew all debateable ground not directly connected with the main-.i position of our argument. Yet without de-

lief requires for its vital aliminent the supposition that such deficiency as existed in the quantity of Christ=@,s sufferings, compared with what would have been the aggregate sufferings of the re-

****** 228 CIIRIST@S SUFFERINGS EXPLAINED

structively that he will, one day, judge the quick and the dead. His heaven and his hell are not constructive. Nor was it merely constructively that his ethereal essence tasted A"of death for every man.@"

ity=s@s limited powers, its meager estimate of the atoning sufferings affords but scanty aliment for the redemption of a world. The theory has its Scylla on the one side, and its Charybdis on the other. Nothing but the unequalled, though noise-

gust truth cannot, indeed, fully unravel the A myss-

tery of godliness.@" That still remains, as it was beheld by the apostle and the angels, shrouded in its own ineffable majesty, A high and lifted up@" above the ken of mortal scrutiny ; but it clears the spiritual horizon of the vapours and clouds which human theories have congregated there. If it were believed that a God, made sin for sinners, was just about to meet the A fierceness and wrath@if@ of an avenging God, the scene at Gethsemane, though towering to the third heaven in interest and grandeur, would lose some of its marvels. The bloody perspiration forcing itself through the corporeal substance of the incarnate, self-devoted Deity; the shaking, almost to annihilation, of A,the temple of his body;@" the momuientary, eager, soul-

might pass from him; the appearance of the A strengthening@" envoy from the celestial court, are what even the finite imagination might shadow forth as the appropriate preludes of an exhibition, from which the dismayed sun fled away.

The explanation unfolded by this august central truth, though it may not, durst not, cannot draw fully aside the veil of the inner sanctuary, where A the chastisement of our peace was upon Him@@ who created the worlds, yet indicates to our ador-

tween the penitent, joyous, exulting malefactor, and the suffering, writhing, sinking Deity by his side; extorting from his bursting spirit the piercing cry sent up to the Ancient of Days, A,My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?@"

passing the comprehension of the brightest archan. gel. He would not have healed A slightly the hurt of the daughter of his people.@"C-Jeremiah, 6vi. 14. He would not, by the paucity of the expiatory suf-

magnificence the glory of the created worlds; they might have failed to I form the brightest crown of Him who A" wears on his head many crowns.@" And if, indeed, the God thus suffered, we might have expected that the near approach of his infi-

nite agonies would have caused anticipations new and A strange@" in the flight of eternal ages. We need not be surprised that their actual occurrence rent asunder the solid rocks, and convulsed to its centre the firm-seated, yet shuddering earth.

quisitiveness of our fallen race, to probe the secrets of the A world unknown.@" Such was the mythol-

culation.C-Exodus, 16xvi. 20. This exact economy of its revelations is a distinguishing characteristic of Scripture, strongly indicative of its celestial pa-

prehension of his approaching suffering had, more than once-@d"@e,, visibly affected the incarnate God. The first passage illustrating this truth is the following: AI am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled ?@"C-Luke, 12xii. 49. A14But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!@C Luke, 12xii. 50. A Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on the earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.@"C-Luke,te# 12xii. 51. The whole pas-

sage has been transcribed, with a view the better to exhibit, in all its potency, the full meaning of the fiftieth verse. The speaker was Christ. The dreaded baptism was his last passion. Who was Astraitened@" until the baptism should be accom-

dwelling God also A straitened?@" Did the distress-

vine speaker. He adverted to his having A come@" into the world : manifestly referring to his advent as the second person of the Trinity. He an-

nounced one of the effects of hiMs having A come@" into the world. His advent was to A send fire@" and engender A"division@" on the earth. The foretold Aii shaking of the nations@" was to be effected, not by the meek and pacific son of Mary, but by the al-

cing A division@" created by the Gospel pervaded and severed the sinews, and arteries, and very heart of the social world. A fire was kindled on the day of Pentecost, whose mighty conflagration scarcely ceased to rage until the faith of the fisher-

men had fixed its sandalled foot on the; throne of the Cae,%sars. This triumph of the@ religion of the cross over the marshalled powers of unbelieving man, armed with the terrors of persecution, headed by the prince of darkness, and re-enforced by all his legions, was, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle ever displayed by him who came A,to send fire on the earth.@"

If, then, in the forty-ninth and fifty-first verses of this memorable passage, the Godhead of the divine speaker was thus the almost exclusive theme, is it indeed true that, in the intervening, or fiftieth verse, it became, as it were, utterly merged in the little atom of his manhood? Did the divinity suddenly pass, in the Acontinuous discourse, under a total eclipse at the end of the forty-ninth verse, which eclipse as suddenly disappeared at the beginning of the fifty-first? Or, to drop the figures, did the incarnate God, at the commencement of the fiftieth verse, abruptly descend from hiMs divinity to his mere manhood, and as abruptly re-ascend, at the end of that verse, from his mere manhood back to his divinity? Such a double transition, so instantaneously repeated, would have seemed almost a phenomenon, had we been forced to yield our credence to its existence, by intrinsic indications that such was the intention of the speaker; but there are no such indications on th