forth. Without patronage from the rich, without countenance from the learned, without sympathy from the men of his own nation, he emerges from the deep seclusion of Nazareth,-a friendless artizanprophet, to bear his resistless testimony against superstition, against hypocrisy, against a corrupt priesthood, against all falsehood, and against all sin. He gathers a little band around him,-obscure in station like himself. And having travelled with this handful of disciples over the cities and villages of Palestine, and having, in the course of his journeys, given to them a body of teaching, unsurpassed for the purity of its precepts, and the sublimity of its doctrines, and the augustness of its disclosures, after a ministry of three short years, and, under a ban of infamy and disgrace, he dies."*

The teaching of Christ was entirely opposed to that of the admired Jewish doctors of the age,"lovers of wrangling controversy, proposers of captious paradoxes, jealous upholders of their nation's exclusive privileges, zealous uncompromising sticklers for the least comma of the law, and most sophistical departers from its spirit."

"The most startling moral feature" in the life of Christ, says Liddon, " is that we can trace nowhere in it any—the faintest-consciousness of guilt. The best men ordinarily feel the moral taint of evil most constantly and acutely. But Jesus challenges His enemies to convince Him of sin, if they can. He never hints that He has done or said any one thing that need forgiveness. He teaches His disciples to pray, 'forgive us our trespasses:' He never prays for pardon Himself."

His bearing towards His disciples and mankind is another characteristic of Christ. The writer

* Moore's "The Age and the Gospel," pp. 71, 72.

quoted above says; "His attitude is that of one who takes His claims for granted, who has no error to confess, no demands to explain or to apologise for; no restraining instinct of self-distrust to keep Him in the background; no shrinking from high command, based upon a sense of the possible superiority of those around Him. It is the bearing of one who claims to be the first of all, the centre of all, with entire simplicity indeed, but also with unhesitating confidence."

The claims of Christ were justified by His being able to restore life to the dead by the words, "I say unto thee, Arise," and to hush the tempest in its fury by the command, "Peace, be still."

There is only one satisfactory explanation of the wonderful portrait of Jesus Christ in the Gospelsthat it was drawn from the life. Rousseau says, "It is more inconceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a history, than that one only should furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality, contained in the Gospel; the marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing man. than the hero."

The effects of Christ's teaching are another proof of His divinity. "When we see Him followed by the Greek, though a founder of none of his sects; revered by the Brahman, though preached unto him by men of the fisherman's caste; worshipped by the red man of Canada, though belonging to the hated pale race; we cannot but consider Him as destined to break down all distinction of colour, and shape, and countenance, and habits, to form in Himself the type of unity to which are referable all the sons of Adam."

The objection may be raised that it is improbable

that the Son of God should consent to become man, to be reviled, buffeted, and put to death. Barnes gives the following reply: "Men are very incompetent judges of what a Divine Being may be willing to endure. Who should suppose, beforehand, that God would submit to blasphemy and rebuke? Yet what being has been ever more calumniated? Who has been the object of more scorn? What is the daily offering that goes up from the wide world to the Maker of all worlds? There is not a nation that does not daily send up a dense cloud of obscenity and profaneness as its offering... To our minds it is no more strange that the Son of God should have borne reproach and pain with patience for thirty years, than that the God of creation should bear all this from age to age, and as an offering from the wide world."

"Jesus Christ is not merely the Teacher, but the substance of Christianity; not merely the author of the faith which Christians profess, but its central object." The "religion of Christ" " means the piety, the submission of thought and heart, the sense of obligation, the voluntary enthusiastic service of which He, together and equally with the Father, is the rightful and everlasting Object; which, when He was on earth, He claimed as His due; and which has been rendered to Him for more than eighteen hundred years by the best and noblest of the human race."

XXX.-THE ATONEMENT.

THE object of Christ's incarnation is one of the most important doctrines of Christianity, while, at the same time, perhaps none has been more misunderstood. Distorted views of it are current, which are opposed to reason and justice. On the other hand, rightly comprehended, it displays most gloriously the Divine perfections.

God created man holy. Happiness was to be the

reward of obedience; death was to be the penalty of transgression. Adam, the first man,disobeyed God, and his posterity have trodden in his footsteps. All mankind are guilty and deserve punishment.

The great question is, must the whole human race perish? or can any plan be devised by which they can be saved consistently with justice?

It may be said, that as an earthly parent forgives a repentant child, so we may be pardoned by our Heavenly Father. But a very important distinction has already been pointed out. God is our Sovereign as well as our Father. If a king were to pardon offenders upon their repentance, his laws would soon be disregarded, and his whole realm would be deluged with crime. A distinguished jurist says, "Forgiveness is a virtue only when justice is satisfied. Without this it is not a friend but a foe to society." And there are other reasons.

The relation in which God stands to His intelligent creatures is that of a moral governor, who has given them a law-to the transgression of which He has attached the heaviest of penalties. This law is not a mere arbitrary expression of the Divine will, but is based on the necessary and eternal distinction between right and wrong. What it commands is eternally right; and what it forbids is eternally evil. Penalty, as attached to transgression, is not a mere expedient to deter men from committing it, and so to prevent the injury to His creatures which would result from its prevalence. First and foremost is penalty designed to mark sin as intrinsically vile and hateful, and to do homage to the eternal law that wrong-doing deserves to suffer —a law which is written upon the human heart, and which our very consciousness of moral responsibility teaches us.

The feeling is universal, that man is a sinner,

and that sin deserves punishment. The most momentous inquiry that can agitate the human breast is, How can I, a consciously guilty, sinpolluted being, be delivered from this load of evil, obtain forgiveness, and be restored to the Divine favour ?*

Propitiatory sacrifices are the effort to solve this great problem. In them is expressed the need of reconciliation, and that the way to it is through suffering. Sacrifices were "either originally appointed by God Himself, or they spring from instincts so universal as to be inseparable from human nature. There is no other conceivable alternative that can account for their universal existence during all ages and among all nations of mankind...... On every hill-top, whence the smoke of sacrifice has ascended towards heaven, in every valley desecrated by the awful rites of demon worship, on every altar that has been stained with the blood of human sacrifices, is stamped indelibly the same universal sentiment that man needs an atonement."

The idea that pervades sacrifices is that of substitution. It was sometimes expressed in words: "We give thee this life instead of ours." The offerer acknowledged guilt, and confessed that he deserved punishment; but hoped that God would accept the victim in his stead.

The sacrifices of heathen nations contained traces of great truths though mingled with grievous errors.

We all suffer for each other and gain by each other's sufferings. Parents work and endure pain that their children may prosper; children suffer for the sin of their parents, who have died before it bore fruit. Sometimes it is a compulsory, sometimes

* Abridged from "Theories of the Atonement," by Professor Chalmers.