But something more yet remains to be said. Every theory of the Atonement in the end must come to grief, which is based upon the assumption that Christ is separate from the race which He came to redeem, or the Church, which is the part of humanity in actual process of redemption. Professor Inge, in his work on Mysticism and Personal Idealism, has justly denounced the miserable theory which regards human personalities as so many impervious atoms, as self-contained and isolated units. This popular view is theologically disastrous when the Atonement is interpreted in the light, or rather the darkness of it.

As the Son of man He is the Head of the human race, "the last Adam" in the language of St. Paul. No mere sovereignty over mankind is denoted by that title. He is that living, personal Thought of God which each man, as man, embodies and, with more or less distortion, represents. He Who became Incarnate is, as He ever was, the Light which lighteneth every man coming into the world.

It was because of this, His vital and organic connexion with the race, and with every member of it, that He could become Incarnate, and that His sufferings and triumph could have more than a pictorial, or representative, or vicarious efficacy. His work of redemption was rendered possible by His relation, as the Word, to the whole universe, and to mankind.

It was because of this, that He could become "the Head of the Body, the Church." Former ages interpreted the Atonement in the terms of Roman law. It is the mission of our age to learn to interpret it in terms of biology. We are only just beginning, by the aid of modern thought, to discover the true, profound meaning of the biological language of the New Testament. "As the body is one, and has many members, so also is the Christ." Not, let us mark, the Head only, but the Body. The Church is "the fulness of Him Who at all points, in all men, is being fulfilled." The words tell us of an organic growth. "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Can any terms express organic connexion more clearly than these?

It is our Head, to Whom we are bound by vital ties, in the mysterious unity of a common life, Who has repudiated sin by dying to it. By personal surrender to Christ we make His Mind our own; but we are enabled to do so, because, in so doing, we are attaining to our own true mind, we are entering into the possession of our own true selves, we are "winning our souls," realising the Christ-nature within us. By faith and sacraments, that which is potentially ours becomes our own in actual fact.

In simpler language, and in more familiar but not less true words, we who are members of Christ's Body, in all our weak attempts after repentance and faith, are not left to our own unaided resources, but are at every point aided and enabled to advance to final, complete reconciliation and union by the Spirit of the Christ working in us.

He is no merely external reconciler. He reconciles us from within, working along with our own wills, to create that changed mind which is His own Mind revealed upon the Cross for no other reason than that it might become our mind, the most real and fundamental thing in us, that "new man, which is being renewed after the image of Him Who created him."



VI REDEMPTION

"Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect."—MATT. V. 48.

"Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver from the body of this death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord."—ROM. VII. 24, 25.

We have studied the meaning of reconciliation through the Cross. We have said that to be reconciled to God means to cease to be the object of the Wrath of God, that is, His hostility to sin. We can only cease to be the objects of this Divine Wrath by identifying ourselves with it, by making God's Mind in regard to sin, and our sins, our own mind. The Cross gives us power to do this. For it reveals to us in the terms of humanity, that is, in the only way in which it could be made intelligible to us, the Divine Mind in its relation to sin. By faith, which is personal surrender to Christ, His mind thus revealed becomes our mind. Thus we attain to "repentance," in the New Testament sense of the changed mind and outlook upon sin. And the motive power to faith and repentance is supplied by our union with Christ.

But all this is not yet enough. We have not exhausted the glory, the full meaning of the Cross. If this were indeed all, the work of our salvation would be incomplete. For I may indeed have, in Christ, died to sin; in Him I may have repudiated it; but the task of life still lies before me to be fulfilled, and that task is nothing short of this: the complete putting off of sin, the complete putting on of holiness, the final achievement of that union with God which is life eternal.

For this I was made. "Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." Our Lord is not, in these words, enunciating a rule of perfection for a few saintly souls. He is laying down the law, the standard of all human lives. To fall short of this, is to fall short of what it means to be a man.

The proof that this is so, is to be found in our own consciousness, bearing its witness to these words of Jesus Christ. The one most constant feature in human life is its restlessness, the feeling of dissatisfaction which broods over its best achievements, the attainment of all its desires. That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with Him. No being who was merely finite, could be conscious of its finitude.

Spite of yourselves ye witness this, Who blindly self or sense adore. Else, wherefore, leaving your true bliss, Still restless, ask ye more?

"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart knoweth no rest, till it find rest in Thee."

Then look at the other picture. Side by side with the glory of our calling, place the shame and the misery of what we are. My desires, my passions are ever at war with the true self, and too often overcome it. "I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin and death which is in my members." And so there goes up the bitter cry, "Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

Now the Cross of Jesus Christ is the Divine answer to this great and exceeding bitter cry of our suffering, struggling, sinful humanity. For the Cross is not merely an altar, but a battlefield, by far the greatest battlefield in all human history. That was the crisis of the conflict between good and evil which gives endless interest to the most insignificant human life, which is the source of the pathos and the tragedy, the degradation and the glory, of the long history of our race. It is the human struggle which we watch upon the Cross: the human victory there won which we acclaim with endless joy and exultation. Man faced the fiercest assault of the foe, and man conquered.

O loving wisdom of our God! When all was sin and shame, A second Adam to the fight And to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood, Which did in Adam fail, Should strive afresh against the foe, Should strive, and should prevail.

Man conquered man's foe, and in the only way in which that foe could be conquered, the way of obedience. "He became obedient unto death." The Death was in a real sense the victory, for its only meaning and value consisted in its being the crown and culmination of His life-long obedience. The Resurrection itself, in one aspect of it, was but the symbol, the "sign," of that victory which was already achieved upon the Cross.

But what has this to do with us? It cannot be too often repeated, that it has nothing to do with us, if Christ be merely "Another," separate from us as we are, or imagine ourselves to be, separate from each other. That which He took of the Virgin Mary, and took in the only way in which it could have been taken, by the Virgin Birth, was not a separate human individuality, but human nature; that nature which we all share. It was in that nature that He faced and overcame our enemy.

Here we pause to note a difficulty based on a misunderstanding. If Christ were a Divine Person, working in and through human nature, if that humanity which He assumed were itself impersonal, then how could He have had a human will? And, after all, is an impersonal human nature really human? That is the difficulty, and the very fact that we feel it as a difficulty, is a proof that we have not yet grasped that conception of the Divine Nature which underlies the belief in the Incarnation. God and man are not beings of a different order. The humanity of every man is the indwelling in him of the Word Who became flesh. Each one of us is a shadow, a reflection of the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ God came; and, it would be equally true to say, in Him first, man came. All human nature, I believe it would be true to say all organic nature, pointed forward to the Incarnation as its fulfilment, as the justification for its existence.

Thus, when it is said that the human nature of Christ was impersonal, what is meant is, impersonal in the modern and restricted sense of personality. The phrase is useful, when explained, to guard against the idea, which is contrary to the very principle of the Atonement, that the Son of man was just one more human soul added to the myriads of human souls who have appeared on this planet. He Who became Incarnate is the true self of every man, the very Light of true personality in all men. As a matter of fact, He was more truly humanly Personal than any of the sons of men, and all the more truly humanly Personal, because He was Divinely Personal, the Word in the image of Whom man was made.

The immense significance of these truths in regard to our redemption is this, that a separate individuality cannot be imparted to us, but a common nature can. And that nature which the Eternal Word assumed of the Virgin Mary, and in which He conquered sin and death, is communicated to us by His Spirit, above all, in the sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion. Here is the heart of the Atonement.

That victory over sin and death is mine, and yet not mine. That is the splendid paradox which lies at the very root of Christianity. It is mine, because I share in that Human Nature, which by its perfect obedience, the obedience unto death, "triumphed gloriously" upon the Cross. It is not mine until, by a deliberate act of my will, in self- surrender to Christ, I have made it my own. By grace and by faith, not by one of these without the other, we become one with Him Who died and rose again. It is faith, the hand of the soul stretched out to receive, which accepts and welcomes grace, the Hand of God stretched out to give.

These great thoughts we will pursue in our next address. But meanwhile, we have at least seen that the Cross is both victory and attainment: victory over the sin by which I have been so long held in bondage; attainment of all I can be, all I long to be, all I was made by God to be. "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord."



VII REDEMPTION (CONTINUED)

"He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal."—JOHN VI. 54.

We were made for holiness, union with God, eternal life. These are but different expressions for one and the same thing. For holiness is the realisation of our manhood, of that Divine Image which is the true self, expressing itself and acting, as it does in us, through the highest of animal forms. That perfect self-realisation is not merely dependent upon, but is union with God, at its beginning, throughout its course, and in its final consummation. And the life of self-realisation or holiness, which is the life of union with God, is eternal. Eternal life is not, as in the popular idea of it, an endless and wearisome prolongation of mere existence. Primarily, the idea is of the quality, not the duration of life. In the teaching of the New Testament, eternal life is a present possession of Christians. "These things I write to you, who believe on the Name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life." Being as it is a moral and spiritual reality, it is outside time and space. It is unaffected by "changes and chances." It is for ever beyond the reach of the temporal processes of decay, corruption, death. Here it manifests itself in service, that service of our fellows which is the service of God. Hereafter, it will be manifested in higher and more exalted forms of service. "Have thou authority over ten, over five, cities."

Now all this, the consummation and glorious fruit of our humanity, holiness, union with God, life eternal, we see already realised in Jesus Christ, the Son of man. We see it realised, as we have learnt, not in a separate, solitary, individual, isolated life, but in that common nature which "for us men and for our salvation" He assumed of the Virgin Mary.

All that is in Him was in Him first, in order that it might be in us. And this is the important point: it can only be in us by virtue of our union with Him. That union He describes under the vivid and forcible metaphor of eating His flesh, and drinking His blood. "He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal." His flesh and blood—a common Jewish phrase for human nature—is precisely that common nature which He assumed, in which He died to sin, which He raised from the dead and exalted to the Right Hand of God, and which He imparts to us, by His Spirit given to dwell in us for evermore.

The doctrine of the Atonement is incomplete, it is irrational, until it is completed by the doctrine of the Spirit, the Giver of Life. As He is the source of life in all living organisms, so He is in Christians the source of the Christ-life. He comes to dwell in us, not simply as the Spirit, but as the Spirit of Christ—the Spirit Who first created, and then "descended" to abide in the Perfect Manhood. That gift of the Spirit of Christ as the indwelling source of the life of Christ, and the means of the Presence of Christ in us, is the characteristic gift of the New Dispensation. It is His work to make us ever more and more partakers of Christ, to be perpetually feeding us with His flesh and blood.

And, as we are about to speak of the Holy Communion, it is well to insist first on this, that the work of the Spirit in there feeding us with the flesh and blood of the Son of man is a continuous process. It is of the very essence of what is meant by being a Christian. "If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." The sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel is not a mere prediction of the Eucharist. It is the revelation of that principle of which the Eucharist is an illustration. Our Communions are the supreme moments, the crises, in a process which is for ever going on, the feeding of us, by the Spirit, with the flesh and blood, the holy and victorious manhood, of the Redeemer.

What relation, then, can this spiritual process have to the material substances, to the bread and wine which are used in the Eucharist? This question at once opens out into the larger one, as to the relation between matter and spirit. Now, that question could not be dealt with at all satisfactorily without undertaking a vastly larger task than we are prepared for at the present moment. We should have to ask, What is, after all, meant by "matter," and what by "spirit"?

But something may be achieved on a much humbler scale. It will suffice for our present purpose to concentrate our attention on a remarkable fact which seems to underlie all our experience. And we will approach the statement of this fact by first recalling the familiar definition of a sacrament, which fastens upon the union of the outward and visible with the inward and invisible as being the essence of what is meant by a sacrament. Now, the fact we have in view is this: every outward object in the world is, in this respect, a sacrament. What we seem to see is everywhere spirit working through what we call "material" objects. That sacramental principle of the universe is the very principle which underlies our Lord's parables of Nature. Speaking more accurately, we see in "matter" (1) the means of the self-revelation of spirit; (2) the instrument by which spirit acts.

The human organism may serve as a type of this. Here is a spiritual being, the Ego, in its will, its thoughts, its affections, invisible, and it makes its presence manifest, and it acts, through the material manifestation and instrument of itself, the body. To believers in God, nature itself, in its deepest reality, is the revelation of the Divine Presence, and the instrument of the Divine action. A beautiful sunset is a veritable and genuine sacrament. In the light of this profound truth, of matter as the manifestation and instrument of spirit, we are enabled to see how futile was the ancient dispute concerning the number of the Sacraments. In view of the fuller and larger knowledge which has come to us, this, like so many other objects of theological strife, ought before this to have been consigned to the limbo of forgotten controversies.

But in all this we have been, in fact, interpreting the whole universe in the light of the Incarnation. For that is the supreme sacrament of all, the very type and complete embodiment of the sacramental principle. There we see the Divine manifesting Itself through, and using as the instrument of its action, a Human, a "material" Body.

The Eucharist thus for the first time becomes intelligible. It is only one particular illustration, although a most momentous one, of the universal sacramental principle, of which all things else in the world are also illustrations. There we have the Spirit manifesting itself and acting, as always and everywhere, wherever "matter" is found; but in a particular way, and for a particular purpose.

The bread and the wine are the material substances which He uses at the critical moments in His perpetual action of feeding us with the flesh and blood of the Son of man. And these elements were obviously chosen, "ordained by Christ Himself," for their most significant symbolism. There is no truer philosophy of the Eucharist than that which is contained in the familiar words of the Church Catechism, which speak of "the strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the bread and wine." That wonderful, and in itself essentially sacramental process, by which the organism lives by the incorporation and assimilation into its own substance of other substances which we call foods, is the exact analogue of the way in which our true, spiritual manhood lives by the incorporation and assimilation of the manhood of Christ, that manhood which is holy, which exists in the Divine Union, which has perfectly realised eternal life in the complete dying to sin, and the complete putting on of holiness.

The Eucharist is, in the broadest sense, the final act in the drama of our salvation. It is the means by which, by His own appointment, all that Christ achieved for us upon the Cross, the repudiation of, or dying to sin, the realisation of perfect obedience, obedience unto death, comes to be in us, is made all our own.

But it is most important that we should ever remember that this truth has two sides.

(i) It is Christ Who saves us; that is, Who is the actually putting away of sin, attainment of holiness, union with God, eternal life, by what He does in us. "Christ for us" finds its perfect fulfilment and end in "Christ in us."

(ii) Yet, Christ does not save us apart from ourselves. Else the Eucharist would be degraded to the level of some heathen, magical charm. We must will and intend the putting off of sin, and the putting on of holiness. We must recognise, and this is a truth of experience, our complete inability to attain this without Him. That will, and that recognition, are the repentance and faith which constitute the necessary contribution on our part to the work of Christ for our salvation.

Our Communions are the most important moments in our lives. Each marks a distinct and definite stage in the fulfilment of the purpose of God for us, the fulfilment in us of all that is meant by the Death and Resurrection of the Lord. We ought to come, therefore, not only after due preparation, with repentance and faith, but also with hope and joy; not to perform a duty, but to receive the best gift which God Himself can bestow upon us—that gift which is the perfect conquest of sin, the complete realisation of holiness, union with God, eternal life; the fulfilment of every aspiration, the accomplishment of every dream, the achievement of every glory, the crown, the consummation, the attainment of our manhood in union with Jesus Christ the Son of man.



VIII THE SACRIFICE

"For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?"—HEB. IX. 13, 14.

No Christian doctrine is more commonly misunderstood than that of the sacrifice of Christ. This misunderstanding arises from ignorance as to the meaning of sacrifices in the ancient world.

Sacrifice is one of the earliest and most widely spread of all human institutions. Behind the laws regulating sacrifice in the Old Testament there lies the long history of Shemitic ritual and religion. These sacrificial rites were not then introduced for the first time. They formed part of the inheritance of the Israelites from their far-off ancestors; an inheritance shared by them with the Ammonites and Edomites, and other kindred and neighbouring nations. They differed from these not in matter or form, but in the loftier moral and spiritual tone which formed the peculiar and distinguishing mark of the Hebrew religion, and in which we to-day can clearly trace the actions in the minds of men of the Spirit of God.

It follows that it is hopeless to attempt to understand the sacrificial teaching of the Old Testament without some grasp of the meaning of sacrifice in the ancient world. Failure to attain this has led to the idea that the sacrifice of Christ must mean the appeasing of an offended Deity by blood and death. But this view of sacrifice is not merely a heathen, but a late and debased heathen conception. "Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of the soul?" was the cry of the King of Moab, and it marks the lowest depth into which the pagan idea of sacrifice had sunk. It is a genuine instance of deterioration in ethnic religion. The primitive view was far loftier and more spiritual than this.

Recent researches, dependent on the comparative method, into the earliest forms of religion have brought to light two principles which underlay the conception of sacrifice, and which to a great extent can be discerned more clearly in the most ancient period than in later times. Now these two principles which, taken together, constitute the primitive theory of sacrifice, which make up the fundamental idea of it, however little prehistoric man may have been capable of giving distinct and logical expression to them, were these:

1. Death is necessary to the attainment of the fulness of life.

2. Man is, by his very nature, capable of sharing in, becoming a partaker of, the Divine life.

The earliest known form of sacrifice is the killing of the sacred animal of the tribe, the animal which was held to be the representative of the tribal god, followed by the sacred tribal meal upon the victim. There, in this earliest totem rite, we have already implicit the two great ideas of sacrifice, the communion of man with God by actual participation in the Divine life (the feast on the sacrifice), and that this communion is rendered possible by the death of the sacred victim.

These ideas were very largely obscured in ancient times by the conception of sacrifice as a gift, a tribute, or a propitiation. But these ideas, though they bulk largely in modern minds unacquainted with the recent researches of specialists in comparative religion, were, in fact, of later growth. They are accretions which, by a very natural and intelligible process, have overlain the oldest and really fundamental ideas which lie at the root and origin of sacrifice.

These two ideas were, however, present all through, in what we might perhaps call (without committing ourselves to any psychological theories) the racial subconsciousness. They were always there, ready to be evoked by the appropriate stimulus, whenever applied. They constituted the real essence and meaning of the ancient mysteries, which from 800 B.C. downwards formed so important a part of the real religion of the ancient world, and which have left their mark on the language of St. Paul and other early Christian teachers. These mysteries, roughly and broadly speaking, were of the nature of a religious reformation. They represented the discarding of the propitiatory idea in favour of the original meaning of sacrifice as communion.

These earliest notions of sacrifice really underlay the sacrifices of the Old Testament, especially in the case of the peace offerings. But, in these, we become conscious of a third element, the conviction that sin is a barrier to the Divine Communion. When the worshipper, in the sin-offering, laid his hands upon the head of the victim, he was, by a significant action, repudiating his sin, and presenting the spotlessness of the victim as his own, his own in will and intention henceforth. The blood was sprinkled upon the altar as the symbol of the life offered to and accepted by God; it was sprinkled upon the worshipper as the sign of the communication to him of that pure Divine life, by virtue of his participation in which man can alone approach God.

All this can be summed up in one word, "symbolism." All the value of ancient sacrifices, including those of the Old Testament, lay wholly in the moral and spiritual truths which, in a series of outward and significant actions, they stood for and symbolised. To attach objective value to that which was external in the Old Testament sacrifices, or even to the outward accompaniments of the Supreme Sacrifice, the Death of Jesus Christ upon the Cross, is to be guilty of a relapse from the Christian, or even the prophetic spirit, into the late and debased pagan idea of sacrifice, from which the ancient mysteries of the Eastern and Greek world were a reaction. Certainly, the outward sufferings of our Lord should sometimes form the subject of our thoughts as a motive, and one of the strongest motives, to penitence and love. But to lay such stress on these as to exalt them into the real meaning of the sacrifice of Christ, as constituting its value as a sacrifice, to regard them as in some way changing the Mind of God towards us, is contrary to the whole spirit of the New Testament. What the real teaching of the gospels is in the matter, is made plain by two significant facts.

(i) While it is quite clear that the inspired writers regard the Death of Christ, and the Christian life, as being, each of them, in a real sense, a sacrifice, direct sacrificial language is applied sparingly to the former, but without stint or hesitation to the latter. This is a point which has been strikingly brought out by Professor Loftus in his recent work on The Ethics of the Atonement.

(ii) While devoting a large portion of their narrative to the account of the Death of Christ, they exercised a very great and marked reserve as regards the physical details of the Crucifixion. In this respect the gospels are in harmony with the earliest Christian representations, as distinguished from the repulsive realism in which the medieval artists revelled.

To ask, then, in what sense the Death of Christ was a sacrifice, is to ask how far that Death realised the moral and spiritual truths which underlay the ancient institution of sacrifice, and to which all sacrifices ultimately pointed.

1. The first of these ideas, as we have seen, is that death is necessary to the fulness of life, that life can only be won by the surrender of life. That ancient conception constitutes the fundamental teaching of Christ: "He that willeth to save his life, shall lose it, and he who willeth to lose his life . . . shall save it unto life eternal." And of that great truth, which is nothing less than the formative principle of the Christian life, the Cross was the supreme expression "Herein have we come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

The laying down of life, self-sacrifice, of which the Cross is the highest manifestation, alone brings life, alone is fruitful. "Except a grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

Selfishness, whether as self-assertion or self-seeking, is essentially barren and unproductive, both in regard to the lives of others and our own lives. Only so far as we are, in some real sense, laying down our lives for others, denying (not that which belongs to us, but) ourselves, for their sake, can we hope to influence other persons for good, to be the cause of moral fruitfulness, of spiritual life in them. And for ourselves, we only win the fulness of our own lives, so far as we lose them in the lives of others, so far as we identify ourselves with their joys, sufferings, interests, pursuits, well-being; for our lives are real, and rich, and full exactly in proportion to the extent to which they include the lives of others.

And the Death of Christ ceases to be an unintelligible mystery, when it is regarded as the consummation of His Life of self-sacrifice. "Christ also pleased not Himself." "He went about doing good." And at last, in the fulfilment of a mission received of the Father for the good of men, His brethren, He crowned the Life, in which self-pleasing was not, by His Death, the necessary result, as we have seen, of His carrying out that mission in a world of sinful men. For Himself, that Death was, so He willed, the portal to the glory of the Resurrection. And the fruits of His uttermost self-sacrifice are still, after all these centuries, being gathered in, as in innumerable souls brought back from the darkness of sin into the light of the Divine Life, "He sees of the travail of His soul, and is satisfied."

2. But what answers, in the Death of Christ, to that in regard to which the death of the victim served but as a means to an end, the sacred meal of communion? The sacrificial principle has been laid down by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "without shedding of blood, there is no remission." Blood to the modern mind speaks of death, and usually of a violent and painful death. To the ancient mind, heathen or Israelite, blood stood for and symbolised life. "The Blood makes atonement by the Life that is in it." Man can only be made at one with God, can only have "remission of sins"—the barrier which sin interposes to communion with God can only be removed, he can only be restored to that Divine fellowship for which he was made—by actual reception into himself of the Divine life, of the life of Him Who, being God, became man, in order to impart His own Divine Life to our humanity which He assumed. And Christ's Life only then became available for men, capable of being imparted to each man, when it had passed through Death to Resurrection. If the grain die—only if it die first—"it bringeth forth much fruit." "If I go not away, the Comforter, the Paraclete, will not come unto you." Only by virtue of that "going away" of Christ, which includes His Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, could the Spirit which indwells His glorified manhood, come to impart the life of Christ to the members of the Body of Christ. Pentecost is the final consummation of man's atonement and redemption.

We may still more briefly summarise these two fundamental principles which constitute the sacrificial aspect of the Death of Christ.

1. Christ died, not that we should be excused from offering, but that we might be enabled to offer the one acceptable sacrifice to God, that is, the sacrifice of ourselves in that service of God which is the service of our fellow-men.

2. Christ died, in order that we might receive His Divine Life into ourselves, through the indwelling Spirit of Christ bestowed by the Ascended Lord.

Thus the Death of Christ is not merely a sacrifice, one out of many, or (as has been so mistakenly taught) simply the last of a series. It is rather the one sacrifice which alone realises the ideas of which all other so-called sacrifices were but the faint adumbrations. As the one true sacrifice it stands at the end of an age-long spiritual evolution. In the physical evolution, the first protoplasmic cell was not man, though it pointed forward to man, and implied man. So the totem feast and the old Jewish rites, were not truly and genuinely sacrifices, though both pointed forward to and implied the realisation of sacrifice in the Death of Christ. That Death was the fulfilment of the universal human aspiration, the assurance of the truth of that ancient dream of mankind, that man was capable of being, and might attain to be "partaker of the Divine nature."

And this whole teaching of ancient ritual as fulfilled and accomplished on the Cross of Jesus Christ, is summed up for us in our Christian Eucharist where on the one hand we, in union with the sacrifice of Christ, "offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice "to God; and, on the other hand, by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man, become partakers of Him Who, in the words of St. Athanasius, "was made man, that we might be made God," became partaker of our human nature, in order that we might realise the end of our manhood, by being made partakers of His Divine Life.



THE DEVOTION OF THE THREE HOURS

I INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS

The object with which we meet here can be expressed in a Pauline phrase of three words, it is "to learn Christ."

But, in those three words, there is contained, in the manner of St. Paul, a wealth of meaning. To learn Christ is clearly an affair of the intellect, in the first place. It quite certainly, in this sense, does not mean merely to accumulate information regarding the words and acts of our Lord. St. Paul himself is singularly sparing of allusions to the history of Christ, if we exclude from that His Death, Burial, and Resurrection. The phrase, in fact, describes that kind of knowledge to which a detailed study of the Saviour's Life is related as means to an end, the knowledge, namely, of Christ's character, of His Mind and Will. Such knowledge is not to be acquired in one hour or in three. It is, it ought to be, the life-long object of a Christian man to gain it in an ever-increasing measure of fulness and accuracy. But the last words of the Lord, the seven sayings from His Cross, constitute a special and in some measure unique disclosure of His Mind and Will. And, therefore, to meditate upon them, as we are now proposing to do, will be to advance one stage further, and a distinct stage, in the process of "learning Christ."

1. But we do well to remind ourselves, at the very outset, that our aim is not merely intellectual, but also practical. There is no real gain arising from the knowledge of Christ's Mind and Will, save so far as that knowledge enables us to make that Mind and Will our own mind and our own will. That is the very meaning of Christian discipleship. "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."

2. The end thus set before us is one capable of attainment by all. The individual, indeed, cannot hope to realise that end completely by himself. The embodiment of Christ's Mind and Will is the supreme task and the final achievement of the whole Body of Christ. The purpose of the long development of the Church on earth is, that "we should all (not each) arrive at a perfect man, at the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ." The whole Church, the Body in its completeness, is meant to reflect back in the eyes of the Father, the moral glory of the Son of man. Each individual has been called into membership in the Body, in order that he might reflect some one of the scattered rays of that glory; might embody in himself one aspect of the infinite perfection of the Son of man. So would each of us truly "come to himself," realise all that he is capable of becoming.

That progress of the Body of Christ towards its goal is described by St. Paul as being a growth of the Christ Himself. He is "at all points in all men being fulfilled." There is a true and important sense in which the Incarnation is as yet incomplete, in which the life-history of the Church is its growing completeness. Our individual task is the realisation in ourselves of that part of the Christ life which we, individually, have been created to embody.

3. It will be useful to sum up the Character, the Mind and Will of Christ, in a single phrase. Consider how He impressed His contemporaries. What was it which they saw in Him, who knew Him best, and had been united to Him by close ties of comradeship and discipleship? In one word, what they saw was Sonship. "We beheld His glory, as of an Only-Begotten from a Father." The Mind and Will of Christ are the perfect realisation of the Divine Sonship in our humanity.

But what is the meaning of God's Fatherhood and man's sonship? The ultimate truth of the relationship, the truth which underlies all such conceptions as care, love, obedience, is community of nature. Our human nature is really akin to the Divine. We are sons of God because our spiritual life is of one piece with His as derived from it. Baptism introduces no new element into our nature. By sacramental union with the Only Begotten, the Ground and Archetype of all sonship, it enables us to realise that which is in us, to actually become that which, potentially, we are. It gives us "power to become children of God," to attain the meaning of our manhood, to regain our true selves.

4. Baptism gives power, all sacraments give power, but in such wise that that power is useless, even, in a sense, non-existent, till we make it ours by deliberate exertion, by co-operation of mind and heart and will with the Divine in us.

The end of our living, to become truly and completely the sons of God, is to be attained by the joint action of two factors—

(1) The Spirit of Christ conforming our minds and wills more and more to the likeness of Christ.

(2) The co-operation of our whole personality with the work of the indwelling Spirit.

Our meditations this morning on the Seven Words in which Christ made some partial disclosure of His Mind and Will, will form some part of that co- operation, one little stage in the accomplishment of our life-long task.



II THE FIRST WORD

"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." ST. LUKE XXIII. 34.

1. Here we are watching the behaviour of the Son of God, the Ideal and Ground of Divine Sonship in humanity.

Is this supreme example of forgiveness an example to us? Is it not something unnatural to humanity as we know it?

We must recall, from a former address, the distinction which we then drew between the animal in us, with its self-assertive instincts, and the Divine in us, that which constitutes us not animal merely, but human, of which the very essence is the self-sacrifice of perfect love. Christ came to reveal God in our manhood. And I need this revelation, just because the animal in me has won so many victories in the past over the Divine, because in me the spiritual fire habitually burns so low and dim.

It is a very different thing to say that forgiveness of all serious injury is a hard thing. It is hard, but not impossible. That which makes it to be possible is the serious intention of discipleship, co-operating with the indwelling Spirit of Christ transforming us into His likeness.

To assert, on the other hand, that forgiveness of serious wrong is impossible, is to ignore the fact that He Who uttered these wonderful words is the true self of me, and of every man who breathes. He Who hung on the Cross, and spoke these seven words, is the Son of man, the Representative to all ages, to all varieties of human character, of true humanity.

2. Christ-like forgiveness is no weak thing, but the strongest thing in the world.

Yet, for its true effect to be produced, its true character must be recognised. No suspicion of cowardice or impotence must cleave to it. The man who being obviously able to resent an injury, and not lacking in the capacity of resentment, yet for Christ's sake forgives, exercises on earth no inconsiderable share of the moral power of Christ. God now, as of old, "has made choice of the weak things of the world," those things which the world accounts weak, "to confound the strong." "The meek" still "inherit the earth."

We are dealing, all through, with the injury which is personal, with the resentment which is the reaction of the individual against unprovoked wrong. Personal resentment we are bidden to relentlessly crush out—"to turn the other cheek" is the command of Christ. But the Christian man will recognise that the interests of the social order are not to be disregarded. These interests, and those of the offender himself, will sometimes demand that the wrong, even if it primarily affects ourselves, shall not go unpunished. Again, no one can be in the full sense a Christian, that is, a fully developed man, or a man on the way to the full development of his nature, who is without the capacity of moral indignation, in whom no flame is kindled by the oppression of the weak.

What the Christian moral law does demand of us, is the complete suppression of the merely personal anger which sometimes burns so fiercely in us when we receive unmerited insult or injury. That kind of anger belongs to "the flesh," is part of the defensive equipment of the animal nature. Before we can in any sense be Christ-like, the spirit must win many hard-won victories over its ancient foe.

To say "I will forgive, but I can never forget," is only to conceal from ourselves the defeat of the spiritual man, the Christ in us.

3. But carefully note the reason appended to the prayer: "they know not what they do." That is true, with every variety of degrees and shades of truth, of every sinner. It was true, clearly, of the soldiers then performing their duty: it was less true, but still in a real sense it was true, of the Pharisees, of the High Priests, of the Roman judge. It is true, but to a far less degree, even of us, that when we sin, we "know not what we do."

Sins are, in the language of St. Paul, works of darkness. That is the element in which alone they can exist. Sin is a huge deception. The very condition of its existence is the concealment of its true character. All this is summed up in that experience which we call "temptation." We are so familiar with sin, the atmosphere we breathe is so infected with it, we have given way so many times in the past, that it needs the objective revelation of the Cross to bring home to us the real horror and malignity of sin. It has been finely said, "Sin first drugs its victims before it consumes them." We, too, or some of us, have known the strange petrifying, hardening effect of sin on the conscience.

Great, then, is our need that we should pray that the revelation of the Cross may more and more come home to us; great our need to pray for an ever fuller measure of that Spirit of Christ, Whose first work it is "to convince the world of sin," to make men realise its true character and its inevitable issue.



III THE SECOND WORD

"Verily I say unto thee, To-day thou shall be with Me in Paradise." ST. LUKE XXIII. 43.

We judge of any power by the results which it effects. We gain some knowledge of the power of steam by its capacity to drive a huge mass of steel and wood weighing twenty thousand tons through the water at the rate of twenty knots an hour. There we have some standard by which we can gauge the force which sends our earth round the sun at twenty-five miles a second, or that which propels a whole solar system through space. But we may apply the same method, of estimation by results, to the powers of the moral and spiritual worlds. Judged thus, it was indeed a stupendous power which was exerted by Christ from the Cross. For what result can be more amazing than the reversal, at the last, of the character slowly built up by the habits of a lifetime? It is, of course, useless to speculate on the antecedents of the robber (not "thief") who turned to our Lord with the words, "Jesus, remember me when Thou shalt come into Thy kingdom." We know only what is implied by the word "robber" or "brigand," and the fact that he had joined, with his fellow- sufferer, in the mockery of our Lord. But the words thus addressed by him to Christ, in their context, represent the most wonderful "phenomenon" of human life, a genuine and thorough-going conversion. And the power which wrought that stupendous result was the patience and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. The weak things had, as so often since, confounded the strong. In His matchless forbearance, in the prayer for His executioners, the royalty of Christ our Lord was disclosed, and the "title" over His head was vindicated.

1. First then, we learn from the Second Word the Mind and Will of God towards penitence. There is no interposing of delay. Forgiveness is instantaneous. No pause intervenes between the prayer for pardon, and the pardon itself. But, that instant response was to genuine "change of mind," not to the repentance which is merely regret for the past, still less to a cowardly shrinking from a deserved punishment, but to a definite act of the man's will, repudiating sin, and ranging himself on God's side. The rejection of sin, the identifying of self with God's attitude towards it, that, we have seen, is alone, in the New Testament sense of the word, repentance.

2. The penitence of the robber, on analysis, discloses the three familiar elements—

(a) Contrition is obviously implied in the whole action.

(b) Confession—"we receive the due rewards of the things which we wrought."

(c) Amendment—in the separation of himself from those with whom he had hitherto joined in reviling Christ.

Now it is worth noting, that our Catechism bids us examine ourselves not about our sins, but about our repentance; "whether they truly repent." We are meant to ask ourselves—

(a) Is our contrition real? And here, for our comfort, we remember that God accepts as contrition the sincere desire to be contrite.

(b) Have we made such a painstaking self-examination as to ensure our making a good confession? "If we confess our sins" (separate, detailed sins, not our sinfulness in general terms), "He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins."

Have we used "sacramental" confession, according to the teaching of the Prayer Book, that is, when our conscience told us that we needed it?

(c) Is our resolution of amendment a clear and honest one? What sins are there, some of whose results we are able to modify or in part reverse (false impressions, untruths, acts or words of unkindness)? God is generous in forgiveness. Surely we are bound to be generous in our amendment. There is a sense in which the results of sin abide beyond possibility of recall. Yet I believe that the instinct which bids us "make up for" a hurt inflicted on a beloved person, is a Divine instinct in our nature, and one which we are to carry into the region of our relation to God.

3. We notice another important truth as regards the Divine forgiveness. It has nothing to do with the removal of punishment, the release from penalty or consequence of sin. The forgiveness of the robber was immediate and complete. But he had still to hang in agony, and there awaited him the frightful pain of the crurifragium, the breaking of the legs by beating with clubs.

The sooner we learn the two great truths about the punishment of sin, the better.

(a) Punishment is inevitable. It is a necessary result of the constitution of the physical and moral universe, of the working, in both regions, of those laws which are the expression of the Divine Mind.

(b) Punishment is remedial. Many Christian theologians have fallen far below Plato's conception of God, as One Who can only punish men with a view of making them better.

Think of one of the punishments of repented sin, the haunting memories of past evil. In this case, both principles are very clearly discernible. Each recollection may be made the means of a renewed act of rejection of sin, and thus become an opportunity for the deepening of repentance.

And what disclosure does this second word contain of the Mind and Will of God in us, as manifested not towards, but by ourselves? Our lesson is the prompt recognition and welcome of any, even the slightest signs of amendment. It may be our duty to punish. It is always our duty to keep alive, or to kindle, the hope in an offender of becoming better. In that hope, alone, lies the possibility of moral amendment. There is the golden rule, laid down by St. Paul for all who have to exercise discipline over others, in words which ring ever in our ears—"lest they be discouraged."



IV THE THIRD WORD

"Lady, behold thy son." "Behold thy mother."

ST. JOHN XIX. 26, 27.

In this Word we see the Son of God revealed as human son, and human friend, all the more truly and genuinely human in both relations, because in each and every relation of life, Divine.

1. The first lesson in the Divine Life for us to learn here is the simple, almost vulgarly commonplace one, yet so greatly needing to be learnt, that "charity," which is but a synonym of the Divine Life, "begins at home."

Home life is the real test of a person's Christianity. There the barriers with which society elsewhere hedges round and cramps the free expression of our individuality, no longer exist. We are at liberty to be ourselves. What sort of use do we make of it? What manner of self do we disclose? Would our best friends recognise that self to be the person whom they admire? If we are to be Christians at all, we must begin by being Christians at home.

At home, and beyond the limits of home, one great Christian virtue stands out as the supreme law of social behaviour—that is, for a disciple—the virtue of consideration for others.

In the midst of torturing physical pain, in the extreme form of that experience, of which the slightest degree makes us fretful, irritable, self-absorbed, our Lord calmly provides for the future of His mother and the disciple whom He loved.

What is required of us is not high-flown sentiment, but the practical proof of consideration, that we have really learnt the first lesson of the Christ-life, to put others, not self, in the first place. The proof, the test, is our willingness to put ourselves to inconvenience, to go without things, for the sake of others. If in such a little matter as so ordering our Sunday meals as to give our servants rest, as far as may be, and opportunity for worship, our practical, home Christianity breaks down, then we must not shirk the plain truth, there is in us nothing of the Spirit of Him Who spoke the Third Word. On the other hand, the readiness with which we do yield up our comforts is a proof—nothing short of that—a proof of the indwelling of God in us. "In this we know that He abideth in us, from the Spirit"—the Spirit of the Christ—"which He hath given to us."

2. We notice, in the second place, that Christ's proof of friendship is the assignment of a task, the giving of some work to do for Him. "Behold thy mother." We are His friends, as He Himself has told us. "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave is one who knows not what his master is doing; but you I have called friends." St. John had forsaken his Friend:

a torchlight and a noise, The sudden Roman faces, violent hands, And fear of what the Jews might do,

had been too much for the disciple's courage and the friend's devotion.

And it is written, I forsook and fled: That was my trial, and it ended thus.

But St. John had returned. There he is, in his true place, beside his Master and Friend.

We too have forsaken, sometimes denied, the same Master and Friend. We too with true repentance have returned, and are struggling to take up the old allegiance. What is the proof, where is the assurance for which we long more, perhaps, than for anything else in the world, that our repentance has been accepted, that we are once more in the number of those whom He calls His friends?

There is one decisive test. Upon all His friends He lays some task. If we have anything to do for Jesus Christ, then we may assure our hearts. Our desertion has been forgiven. He has spoken to us the words of peace, "Behold thy mother, thy brother, thy son." For, let us not forget, all work for others, for the bodies, the minds, the souls of our brethren in the family of God, is capable of being raised from the level of professional drudgery, and of becoming the direct service of Jesus Christ.

To work for Christ is the real foretaste of heaven, far removed from the sensuous imagery of some modern hymns. "Be thou ruler," there is the supreme reward, "over ten cities."

If we are doing any work for Christ, i.e. for others for Christ's sake, and as part of our service to Him, willingly and cheerfully, then we have the final and convincing proof that we are indeed forgiven, that the offer of renewed allegiance has been accepted, that we have been restored to His Friendship.



V THE FOURTH WORD

"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani."—ST. MATT. XXVII. 46; ST. MARK XV. 34.

There are three peculiar and distinguishing features of this fourth word which our Saviour uttered from His Cross.

1. It is the only one of the Seven which finds a place in the earliest record of our Lord's life, contained in the matter common to St. Matthew and St. Mark.

2. It is the only one which has been preserved to us in the original Aramaic, in the very syllables which were formed by the lips of Christ.

3. It is the only one which He is said to have "shouted" ([Greek text]), under the extremity of some overpowering emotion.

In fact, we are here at the very heart of the Passion. In this dread cry I see something of the height of the Divine love, something of the depths of my own sin.

The meaning of this dread "cry" is not perhaps so difficult to understand as some have thought. It is to be found in the entire reality of that human nature which the Son of God assumed—not merely a human body, but a human consciousness like our own; in the thoroughness with which He identified Himself with every phase of our experience, the knowledge of personal sin alone excepted.

In this identification more was involved than we commonly think. Sin cannot be in a world of which the constitution is the expression of the Mind of God, without introducing therein a fatal element of discord, confusion, and pain. To all consequences of sin the Saviour necessarily submitted Himself, by the mere fact of His entry into a world which sin had disordered. In respect of the external consequences, this is abundantly clear. We have seen, and it is, in fact, obvious, that His sufferings and Death were the result of the actual sins of men. But there were, it is important to remember, internal sufferings attributable to the same cause. We are at once reminded of His tears over the doomed city, doomed by the persistent refusal to recognise the Divine voice. But we are here on still deeper ground. The true explanation of the fourth word is to be found in that great principle which St. Paul has laid down in a familiar, but little understood, sentence: "the sting of death is sin."

The simplest and most obvious meaning of these words is that, whatever be the physiological meaning and necessity of human death, its peculiar horror and dread, that which makes death to be what it is for us, is to be found in sin, in the separation of man from God.

Now that horror consists, ultimately, in the fact that death is the analogue, or, in New Testament language, the "sign," of what sin is—separation. If sin is, essentially, the violent and unnatural separation of man, by his own act, from his spiritual environment, death is clearly the separation—and, as our sins have made it, the violent and unnatural separation of man from all that has hitherto been his world. It may be, that the final, extremest pang of death is the supreme moment of agony, when we feel that we are being made to let go our hold on reality, are slipping back into what, in our consciousness of it, must appear like nothingness, the mere blank negation of being. Here, then, we have the explanation of this awful cry. He Who came "for our salvation" into a world disordered by sin, willed so to identify Himself with our experience, as to realise death, not as it might have been, but as man had made it, the very sign and symbol of man's sin, of his separation from God. That moment of extreme mental anguish wrung from His lips the Cry, not of "dereliction," but of faith triumphing even in the moment when He "tasted death" as sin's most bitter fruit, "My God, why didst Thou forsake Me?"

What this view involves is briefly

(i) Death is an experience natural to man.

(ii) Sin has added to this natural experience a peculiar agony, a "sting."

(iii) This "sting" is an experience of utter isolation at some moment in the process of death, the feeling that one is being violently rent away from one's clinging hold of existence.

(iv) This "sting" is due to the disorder sin has introduced into the constitution of the world and of man.

(v) In virtue of this, death has become the "sign" in the "natural" world of what sin is in the spiritual.

(vi) Our Blessed Lord so utterly identified Himself with our experience, with the internal as well as with the external consequences of our sin, as to undergo this most terrible result of man's transgression.

(vii) And He felt the full agony of it as realising, what none but the Sinless One could realise, the horror of sin as separation from God.

In a word, the Cry represents the culmination of our Lord's sufferings, a real experience of His human consciousness.

The experience was "objective," as all states of consciousness are. Our sensations are as objective as "material things." It was, as we have just said, real: inasmuch as the only definition of reality is that which is included in personal experience.

Thus understood, this fourth word teaches us at least two valuable lessons.

1. It discloses to us the Mind of Christ, which is to be our own mind, in its outlook upon human sin. We, if "the same mind" is to be in us "which was also in Christ Jesus," must hate sin, and our sins, not because of any results or penalties external to sin, but because sin separates us from God, our true life. The worst punishment of sin, is sin itself. Into depths which make us tremble as we strive to gaze into them, Christ our Lord descended to deliver us from that deadly thing which is destroying our life. That appalling Cry burst from His lips, that we might learn to fear and dread sin worse than any pang of physical pain.

2. This Word, again, discloses the Mind of Christ, true Man, in its relation to God. He possessed fullest self-consciousness both as God and as Man. Thus He Himself alone knew, in their absolute fulness, the joy and the strength which come from the communion of man with God. That joy and that strength, in the measure in which we can attain to their realisation, are to be the goal of all our striving. Thus this Word has for us more than a merely negative teaching. Not only are we to shrink from that which destroys union with God. We must seek far more earnestly to make that union a greater and a deeper reality. This end we can achieve by making our prayers more deliberate acts of conscious communion with that Person Who is not merely above us, but in us, and in Whom "we live, and move, and have our being." We must all make the confession that we have not yet nearly realised all that prayer might be to us, if only we were more energetic, more strenuous, more utterly in earnest, in our attempts to pray. It is by prayer that we are to attain to our complete manhood, to "win our souls," to become our true selves.

For what are men better than sheep or goats, Which nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer, Both for themselves, and those that call them friend? For so the whole round world is, every way, Bound with gold chains about the feet of God.



VI THE FIFTH WORD

"I thirst."—JOHN XIX. 28.

This is the only utterance of our Blessed Lord in which He gave expression to His physical sufferings. Not least of these was that intolerable thirst which is the invariable result of all serious wounds, as those know well who have ever visited patients in a hospital after they have undergone a surgical operation. In this case it must have been aggravated beyond endurance by exposure to the burning heat of an Eastern sun. This word, then, spoken under such circumstances, discloses the Mind of the Son of God, perfect Man, in regard to physical pain.

1. Notice then, in the first place, the majestic calm of this word. It was spoken in intensest agony, yet with deliberation, exhibiting the restraint of the sovereign and victorious will of the Sufferer. "After these things, knowing that all things had now been accomplished, He saith [not 'cried'], I thirst." We cannot be wrong in reading this marvellous word in the light of that strange passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the writer tells us that Christ, "although He was Son, yet learnt He obedience by the things which He suffered." How are we to reconcile this with the moral perfection of our Lord's humanity? We can only do so, by applying the Aristotelian distinction between the potential and the actual. The obedience of the Son of God, existing as it did in all possible perfection from the first moment of His human consciousness, yet existed, prior to His complete identification of Himself with all our human experience, as a potentiality. It became actual, in the same way as our obedience can alone become actual, as a result of that experience, and, above all, in consequence of those sufferings which were part of that experience. In this sense He "learnt obedience," where we too must learn it, in God's school of pain.

Therein lies the answer, as complete an answer as we can at present receive, to the problem of pain. While that problem is, beyond doubt, the most perplexing of all the questions which confront us, the real difficulty lies, not in the existence of pain in God's world, but in the apparent absence, in so many instances, of any discernible purpose in pain. In itself, pain does not, or at least should not, conflict with the highest moral conception which we can form of the character of God. But purposeless pain, if such really occur anywhere in the universe, is hard indeed to reconcile with the revelation of the Highest as Infinite and Eternal Love. The real answer to the problem lies in our gradually dawning perception of the high purposes which pain subserves.

It is well, then, to remind ourselves of the teaching of natural science in regard to the function of pain in the animal world. There, at least, it has originated, and has survived, only because of its actual use to the possessors of that nervous system which makes pain possible. It serves as a danger signal of such inestimable value that no race of animals, of any high degree of organisation, which could be incapable of suffering pain, could for any length of time continue to survive. Pain here, at any rate, so far from being purposeless, owes its existence to the purpose which it subserves.

Ascending higher in the scale of being we see, as has been recently pointed out, that the progress of human civilisation has been very largely due to the successful efforts of man to resist and to remove pain. The most successful and progressive races of mankind are those which inhabit regions of the world where the conditions of life are neither so severe as to paralyse all exertion, or even to preclude its possibility, nor so favourable that men can avoid the pain of hunger or of cold without strenuous and unremitting effort. The stimulus of pain has been the means of perfecting the animal nature of man, and the secret of those victories which he has won over the inclement or dangerous forces of the material world, and which we call, in their totality, human civilisation.

And thus we come in sight of a great law, "perfection through suffering." And the revelation of the Cross is the exhibition to us of this law acting in the higher reaches of man's existence, in the moral and spiritual regions of his life. As the animal has gained its victories in the past, so the spiritual is advancing towards the final triumph of man, along the same path, of healthy reaction stimulated and necessitated by pain.

For wherein lies the triumph of the spiritual nature, save in its complete and sovereign control over all the other elements in our complex being? The spiritual man is not the man who has starved his physical or intellectual being; but the man whose whole nature, harmoniously developed in the whole range of its varied gifts and powers and faculties, is altogether brought under the mastery of that which is highest in him, that spirit in which he is akin to God, the wearer of the Divine Image. The saintliest, loftiest characters of men and women have been the fruits of this discipline.

We see the final demonstration of the purpose of pain in Him Who "learnt obedience by the things which He suffered." This one word which tells of physical suffering, tells also, as we have already seen, of the victory gained over it by His human Spirit. It was by the reaction of that Spirit under sharpest bodily pain, that the moral perfection of the Son of man ceased to be potential, and became actual. So it is with us, so at least it may be in ever-increasing measure, when pain is accepted and met in the way in which Christ accepted and met His pain, not in the spirit of useless and wild rebellion against the laws of the universe, nor in that of a blind, fatalistic, and unintelligent fatalism, which calls itself resignation. We may, hence, learn to look beyond and behind pain to that great law of perfection through suffering which takes effect, as it were, spontaneously in lower forms of life; but which, in the realm of the moral and the spiritual, demands the co-operation of the human mind and will.

2. We may see also, in the fifth word, the revelation of the attitude of the Son of God towards His own body. That attitude, and hence the only genuinely and characteristically Christian attitude, may be best described as the mean between the pampering of the body, and its savage neglect in the interests of a false asceticism.

As at first He put aside "the slumberous potion bland" and willed "to feel all, that He might pity all," so, now His task is over, He craves, and accepts, alleviation of His bodily pain. It is a wonderful illustration of the true, the Christian way of regarding the body. The human body is essentially a good and holy thing. Those sins which we call "bodily," like all sins, have their origin in the rebellious will. They are only distinguished from other sins, because in them the will uses the body, and in other sins other God-given endowments of our nature, in opposition to the eternal goodness which is the Will of God. We cannot too often remember, that "good" and "evil" are terms applicable to the will alone.

That splendid gift of the body has been given to us, in order that in it, and through it, we might "glorify God"; that is, do His Will, the only thing utterly worth doing. Therefore, we have to keep our bodies "fit," fit in all ways for their high and holy purpose. There is the law, the standard of all Christian self-discipline. Think of the glory of the prospect which it holds out to us, of the development and destiny of the body. Think of the care which we should bestow upon it, of the awful reverence with which we should regard this (in the Divine intention) splendid and perfect instrument for the fulfilment of the Will of God. For what reverence can be too great for that which the Eternal God chose as the tabernacle in which He should dwell among men, as the instrument by which He should do the Father's Will on earth?

Of all the religions of the world it is the religion of Jesus Christ alone which bids us "glorify God" in the body, that is, do His Will in and by that glorious instrument which He has created and redeemed for His service.

3. Finally, we may remind ourselves, very briefly, that we, in our own day, may share the blessedness of the Roman soldier who relieved the sufferings of Christ. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."

As Christians, we must have some ministry to fulfil towards the suffering members of Christ's Body. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, the eternal destiny of men is shown to depend, in the last resort, upon the manner in which they have performed, or failed to perform, this ministry. The complexities of modern life call for careful thought in regard to the manner in which we are to fulfil this duty, but they cannot relieve us of it. Somewhere or other in our lives we must be diligently relieving the necessities of others, ministering to their needs of body, mind, or spirit. Else—there is no shirking this conclusion—we are simply failing in the most characteristic of all Christian virtues; we are far removed from the Mind of Him Who "went about doing good"; we are on the way to hear that final condemnation, "Because ye did it not to the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me."



VII THE SIXTH WORD

"It is accomplished."—ST. JOHN XIX. 30.

1. What had been accomplished? In the first place, that work which Christ had come into the world to do. All that work may be resumed in a single word, "sacrifice." The Son of God had come for this one purpose, to offer a sacrifice. Here is room for serious misunderstanding. The blood, the pain, the death, were not the sacrifice. Nothing visible was the sacrifice, least of all the physical surroundings of its culminating act. There is only one thing which can rightly be called sacrifice—or, to put it otherwise, one sacrifice which alone has any worth, alone can win any acceptance in the sight of God—and that is, the obedience of the human will, the will of man brought into perfect union with that Divine Will which is its own highest moral ideal.

The perfect obedience of the human will of Christ to the Divine Will, could only be realised—such were the circumstances under which the mission received of the Father was to be fulfilled by Him for the good of man—by His faithfulness unto death. "He became obedient unto death," because in such a world perfect faithfulness must lead to death. But the death of Christ was no isolated fact, standing out solitary and alone from the rest of His ministry. It was not merely of one piece with, but the natural and fitting close of the whole. The death of uttermost obedience was the crown and consummation of the obedient life. On the Cross, He was carrying His life's work to its triumphant close. His Death was, itself, His victory.

This victorious aspect of the Passion is that on which St. John chiefly dwells. The "glorification" of the Son of man, His "lifting up," was the whole series of events extending from the Passion to the Ascension. So the first Christians loved to think of the Cross, not as the instrument of unutterable pain, but as the symbol of their Master's triumph. It is this feeling, this apprehension of the Johannine teaching on the Passion, which accounts for the late appearance of the crucifix. Even when, at last, the actual sufferings of the Saviour are depicted, we are still far removed from medieval realism. There are no nails—the Saviour is outstretched on the Cross by the moral power of His own will, steadfast and victorious in its obedience. The Sacred Face is not convulsed with agony, but is turned, with calm and benignant aspect, towards men whom He blesses. The earliest representations of the Passion, as we have noticed before, are far nearer to the spirit of the gospels, that of St. John above all, than those of the Middle Ages.

2. But the ministry itself was but the consummation of the age-long work now "accomplished." Throughout the whole course of man's history, in the entire spiritual evolution, whose first steps and rude beginnings we trace in the burial mounds of prehistoric races, He Whose lips now uttered that great "It is accomplished" had been the light of men, never amid thick clouds of error and cruelty and superstition wholly extinguished. In every approach of man to God however dimly conceived of, the Word, the Eternal Son, had been offering Himself in sacrifice to the Father.

So here, in the perfect act of the moral obedience of a human will, is that to which all sacrifices not only pointed forward but, all the time, meant, and aimed at, and symbolised, as men so slowly and so painfully groped after, felt their way to God, "if haply they might find Him."

"It is accomplished"—the true meaning of sacrifice, of all religion, heathen and Jewish, is attained and laid bare.

Thousands of years of human development reach their climax, find their issue and their explanation in these words.

3. In its teaching, this sixth word ascends to the heights, to the mysterious and ineffable relationships of the Godhead—which are the inner reality and meaning of all morality and religion—and it descends to the depths, to the lowliest details of the most commonplace life.

All work, for the Christian, is raised to the level, to the dignity of sacrifice. Once and for all we must rid ourselves of that idea which has wrought so much mischief, that sacrifice necessarily connotes pain, loss, death. Essentially our sacrifice is what essentially Christ's sacrifice was, the joyous dedication of the will to God, the Source and Light of all our being.

The daily round, the common task, Will furnish all we need to ask.

All work is sacred, or may be so, if we will. For all work has been consecrated for evermore by the perfect obedience, that is, the perfect sacrifice of the Son of man, the Head of our race. There is no task which any Christian, anywhere, can be called upon to do, which cannot be made part of that joyous service, that glad sacrifice, which, in union with that of Jesus Christ our Lord, we, one with Him in sacramental union, "offer and present" to the Father.



VIII THE SEVENTH WORD

"Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." ST. LUKE XXIII. 46.

The consummation of sacrifice, the union of the human will with the Divine, leads to the perfect rest in God.

1. We have tried to deal with the Seven Words as constituting a revelation of the Divine Sonship of humanity. From this point of view it is significant that the first and the last begin, like the Lord's Prayer, with a direct address to the Father.

The service of the Christian man is that of a son in his father's house, of a free man, not of a slave. The Fatherhood of God is the very key- note of the Christian view of life and of death. In both alike we are the objects of the Father's individual care and love; in both we bear the supreme dignity of "the sons of the Most High."

That dignity belongs inalienably to our human nature as such. Baptism conveys no gift alien and extraneous to our manhood. Rather, that union with the Only Begotten Son is not an addition to, but the restoration of our nature by Him in Whose Image it was created. United thus to the Eternal Son, we are placed in a position to realise the possibilities of our being, to become that which we are constituted capable of becoming. That is the true answer to the question, how can we be made children of God by Baptism?

And through work, and prayer, and suffering, we are to grow into, and perfectly realise, our Divine sonship.

2. These dying words of the Son of God breathe no spirit of mere passive resignation. That is the spirit of the Oriental fatalist, not of the son conscious of his sonship, of his heirship. Even the Lord's Death was not the yielding to inexorable necessity, to the inevitable working of the laws of nature. It was, if anything in His Life was, the deliberate act of His conscious Will. "I commend," rather, "I commit My Spirit." "I lay down My life . . . therefore the Father loveth Me."

Submission to the Will of God is not necessarily a Christian virtue at all. What is Christian is the glad recognition of what manner of will the Divine Will is, how altogether "good, perfect, and acceptable," how infinitely righteous, and holy, and loving; the doing of that glorious Will with mind, and heart, and will, and body; the praying with all sincerity and intention that that Will, which is the happiness and joy and life of all creatures, may increasingly "be done, as in heaven, so on earth"; the free and glad surrender, in life and death, to that Will which is the perfection and consummation of our manhood.

3. Such an attitude of our whole being, which is what is meant by being a Christian, can only be ours by virtue of the Spirit of the Son of God dwelling and working within us, and moulding us into His perfect Likeness. In Him alone we can come to our sonship, to that which is from the first, potentially, our own. "Ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus; for as many of you as were baptised into Christ did put on Christ." Work and suffering, life and death, can only be borne, and lived, and endured by us in the spirit of sonship, so far as we are actually "in Christ."

Let us pray that the Mind and Will of the Son of God, disclosed to us in these Seven Words, may be ours in ever-increasing measure. They can be ours, if we are in Him, and He in us.

The foundation fact of the Christian life, that which alone makes it possible, is our union, through sacraments and faith, with Christ; our actual sharing in His Life, imparted by His Spirit to the members of His Body. We are meant to be ever drawing upon the infinite moral resources of that Life by repeated acts of faith. For, as with all other gifts of God, so it is with this, His supreme gift; we only know it as ours—it is, in a real sense, only truly our own—in proportion as we are using it.



X ADDRESS ON EASTER EVE

"We were buried, therefore, with Him through baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also should walk in newness of life."—ROM. VI. 4.

"I delivered unto you, among the first things, that . . . He was buried."—I COR. XV. 3, 4.

St. Paul lays extraordinary and, at first sight, inexplicable stress, on the fact of our Lord's Burial. It is certainly strange that, in the second of these two texts, he mentions it as constituting, along with the Death of Jesus Christ for our sins, and His Resurrection on the third day according to the Scriptures, the foundation truths of the apostolic gospel, as being one of those "first things" of the Christian religion which, as he had "received," so had he "delivered" to the Corinthians.

This extreme importance attached by St. Paul to the Burial of Christ, can only be explained by the mysticism of the great apostle. To him the outward facts, however wonderful and striking in themselves, are of value only as "signs," as representing great moral and spiritual realities. To him, as to every man who thinks soberly and steadily, the internal is "real" in a sense in which the external is not: thought has a reality denied to "things."

The real meaning of Christ's Burial is the mystical meaning, that meaning which was brought home to the minds of the early Christians by the picturesque and symbolic ritual of baptism. The man who had, by faith, accepted Christ as his Lord and Master, was baptised into His Death; that is, in Him he died to the old life. His submergence beneath the baptismal waters, the very likeness of the Burial, was the assurance and the sealing of that death. As truly as the man who is dead and buried is cut off for ever from the life of this world, so was the baptised separated, once and for all, from the old heathen life with all its associations. As clearly did his emergence from those waters show forth his actual participation in the Lord's Resurrection. He had not merely left the old life behind, he had from that moment entered upon the new life, the "life of God"; that is, the life which henceforth had God for its foundation, its centre, and its goal; the life of moral health and sanity; the life which was to be, in all its relations, open and clear and undismayed; the life "in the Light."

1. The first thought, then, of Easter Eve must surely be one of profound sorrow and humiliation. We ought to be bowed to the very earth with self- abasement by the thought that we have been, so many times in the past, untrue to our baptism.

Soldiers of Christ, we have denied our Lord. More, ours has been the guilt, not of Peter only, but of Judas. Too often we have betrayed Him for the veriest pittance of this world's good.

We have missed the glory of the Risen Life. All the magnificent language of the Epistle to the Ephesians, the quickening with Christ, the raising together with Him from the dead, the enthronement in Him in the heavenly places—all this was written of Christians in this life. All this might have been true of us, and is not; for, worse than Esau, we have bartered away an incomparably more magnificent heritage.

What remains for us to do on this Easter Eve but, with truest penitence, with utter loathing of self, and utter longing for Him Who is our true self, to cast ourselves at the Feet of Christ?

2. But the second thought of Easter Eve is one of boundless hope. But remember, hope can only begin at the Feet of Christ. For Christian hope has evermore its beginning and its ground in humility. We only find safety, comfort, joy, encouragement, as we lie, prostrate in penitence, before our Redeemer. It is clear, is it not, what we mean by all this? We are, simply and naturally, to kneel before our Lord, and acknowledge to Him all our untruth, all our disloyalty, all the manifold failures of our service. And the very fact that we can do this sincerely and honestly, is the earnest of all good things to come in us. If only we can make this genuine and heartfelt confession, there is no degree of moral recovery beyond our reach.

For on Easter Eve we try to realise once more that greatest of Christian truths, the power of Christ's Resurrection. The power which was manifested in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the power which is universally present in nature and in mind, which is the reality behind all forces of nature, which all forces reveal. It has been finely said, that "the opening of a rose-bud and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ are facts of the same order, for they are equally manifestations of the one force which is the motive power of all phenomena."

We see that power in the glories of the opening spring; we are conscious of it in ourselves, in every good resolve, every upward aspiration. There comes to us the inspiring thought, that the physical and the moral Resurrection alike, in nature, in ourselves, in Jesus Christ, are different manifestations of one and the same power. Was the Resurrection of the Lord a mighty fact, the greatest of all the facts of history, a transcendent and astonishing miracle? The power which wrought it is in me; the same wondrous fact, the same stupendous miracle, if I will, may be accomplished in me.

That was the very meaning of my Christian calling—that "as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father," so I, by the self-same power, might be raised from the death of sin, and enabled "to walk in newness of life." The Death, the Burial, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ are not merely historical facts, external to me: they are meant to be spiritual facts in my own experience, in the experience of all Christians. And spiritual facts are beyond measure greater in value and meaning and influence than those historical facts which happened in space and time, in order to serve as signs and symbols of the inward and eternal realities.

So let us come to our Easter Communion, not only in the spirit of penitence, but in the spirit of undying and unconquerable hope. There is no limit to that which the power of God, symbolised, embodied externally, in the Resurrection, may effect within us, in the region of our moral and spiritual life. Or rather, there is no limit to the exercise of the Divine power, save that which we ourselves impose upon it, by our failure to correspond with it. Now as ever it is true, true of the work of God's grace upon our souls, as of the healing power of Christ over the bodies of men, that "according to our faith" it shall be done to us.

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH



FOOTNOTES

{0} Some of them also in the Parish Church of Colton, Staffordshire.