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LECTURE XXIV.

THE GREAT SACRIFICE.

"And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself; and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined."-Daniel ix. 26.

In my previous lecture I collected some-not some, but many-of the remarkable texts of Scripture, which describe or allude to the death of our Blessed Lord; and I showed, that if all these texts be collected together, and their scattered rays made to converge, as it were, in one focus, it is impossible to fail to see that the death of Jesus was more than that of a mere patient martyr, and that it is neither unnatural nor illogical to conclude, that his was the death of an atoning Victim, of one "cut off, but

not for himself."

I proceed in this lecture to show, not from the texts which I formerly collected and collated, but rather from certain principles indicated in Scripture, and fairly deducible by our own minds from the language of Scripture, that the death of Christ, in order to constitute the substance, or have a claim to the character, of the "good news,"-to be of any personal, present, and everlasting virtue to us, as sinners, must have been an atonement made, an expiation and sacrifice presented, by the substitute for the sinner. I showed you-what I am sure you must feel to be perfectly conclusive-that the texts I quoted are inexplicable (if those who wrote them understood the use of language) except on the supposition that Christ's death was expiatory, atoning, or a sacrifice propitiatory for the sins of all that believe.

Let me now look at three great propositions which seem to me to necessitate the description of death which I have attributed to Jesus, namely-an atonement for our sins.

Let us look, first, at the law of God. What is the law? It is not holiness created, but holiness simply made known. "Holiness is perfect happiness, sin is perfect misery," would have been true if the sentiment had never been revealed in human speech. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself," was not made when the law was given; it was only proclaimed. The proclamation of the law is mercy, the expression of goodness itself,-for it lets the creature know what the Creator ever does, ever must, and ever will, exact of that

creature.

This law, thus clearly revealed to man, has been broken by us; conscience unequivocally says so: I have failed in obedience to it; every thought in my mind, every affection in my heart, every record in my memory, every pulse in my being, tells me I have broken that law, in thought, or in word, or in deed. I have not trodden the path that leads to happiness; I have not paid the price of which everlasting joy is the reward; I have not done the work of which heaven is the wages. That law clearly and unequivocally tells me, "As far as I, the law, am concerned, I can hold out no hope of a passport to glory to you,-no prospect of everlasting joy,—for 'cursed is every one that continueth not in all things that are written in the law, to do them.'' "These words just describe the condition of every one. Under the curse is that state in which we are born-the cold shadow under which we lie. We do not need to perpetrate some terrible violation of God's law in order to be condemned: we are born condemned; we are born in prison; we are criminals by birth-we need no change in order to be lost, the change must take place in order to our being saved, that thus may be turned our terrible and downward procession, and given us an impulse that will lift us from ruin to a state of restoration, from enmity to God, to a condition of reconciliation and friendship.

Where, I ask, is there any disclosure by the law of the possibility of life through our obedience to that law? We are satisfied that we have broken it; we are satisfied, from its own lips, that we are condemned by it. How shall we escape the consequences? Is there any crevice in the whole of Sinai out of which there is emitted one word of the hope of restoration to the guilty? Is

there any reasoning mind that will show me that God can be merciful to the extent of forgiving all my sins, and yet continue, what he proclaims himself to be, the infinitely holy, the infinitely just, the infinitely true? In other words, as long as I am dealing with the law, and directed by its light only, having no connection with the gospel, and without a ray of its glory, I ask, how long will the mercy of God descend in pardoning?-howhigh will the justice of God rise in punishing? Will he be merciful, and save all? —or will he be just, and condemn all? Where will his justice stop in condemning? Where will his mercy stop in acquitting and forgiving? Must he not be, as far as human light can teach us, inconsistently merciful in order to be just, and inconsistently just in order to be merciful—a God who is a composite of contradictions and impossibilities, if so be that sin is to be forgiven without an atonement, or an expiatory sacrifice? Is there one intimation, however faint, of forgiveness from law? Is there any hint, however dim, in nature ?—is there any rock on the earth, any star in the sky,—any flower on the field,—any tree, or cloud, or created thing,—is there any page in memory, any pulse in conscience,―any intimation in the height or in the depths, any exquisite analogy, any beautiful and fair revelation, in the currents of Providence, that tells me that there is forgiveness with God? There is none. I can read or hear none. Wind, and wave, and flower, and star, earth and sea, memory and conscience-all are dumb, hopelessly dumb; they do not give the least hint of forgiving mercy in that holy God against whom we have sinned.

Let me look at another division of human nature, and we shall see from it the necessity for that atonement of which I have already treated. In every man's bosom there is what is called a conscience; and that conscience responds to the moral, just as taste responds to the beautiful, and reason to the true. Any one who will speak honestly, or express his feelings honestly, will tell you that his conscience, however seared, however deadened, however it may have been bribed and stupefied, still responds, more or less distinctly, to the good, and remonstrates, in more or less unequivocal terms, against the evil. Does it not often speak to you in spite of you? Does it not often, indeed, excuse? but

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does it not still oftener accuse? Do not its accusations, on the whole, outnumber its apologies? Does it not talk to you in your most silent and meditative moments of a righteousness that is wanting, of a Judge that is waiting, and of a destiny far beyond, that will be for ever blackened or brightened by what you aresad and sorrowful, or radiant with joy and glory?

Does not conscience often ask, in its calmest moments, what was asked by the prophet of old: "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" And in order to answer this question, you have tried fastings, austerities, mortifications of the body; but none of these have satisfied you. You have fled to the cell of the monk, to the solitude of the anchorite, or, like Martin Luther, you have climbed on bare knees the penitential stairs of St. Peter's; but conscience, unreached by these external penances, has smitten you and accused you still. Or, perhaps, priests have absolved you-popes have given you indulgences, councils have proclaimed long and lasting jubilees; but you have found that neither in priest, nor pope, nor in council, nor in absolution, nor in jubilee, nor in mortifications, nor in austerities, has there been any virtue that could penetrate the soul, and touch and heal the inner and sore part of the conscience; it cries aloud-You are sinful!—and it concludes, on irresistible evidence, that there is no remedy in law, or in nature, for its malady. Thus, if we look at God's law-uncompromising and undiluted law-we see the necessity of something being done to right us in relation to that law. If we examine our own consciences, we feel the necessity of something being done to give these consciences peace.

If we examine, in the next place, the very nature of sin, we shall see the necessity of some such stupendous interposition as that of God in our nature, our sacrifice, and our atonement. Sin is, in the history of the universe, a new thing, a strange phenomenon, an awful interpolation-hateful, frightful, destructive. We do not see or feel it as it is. Our insensibility is propor

tionate to our spiritual deadness. The more sin contaminates, the more it blinds us to its nature, its demerit, and its effects. Sin is unlike every other thing. Not its least awful characteristic is its endurance; it stretches into eternity, and acts for ever as a corrosive and consuming curse. There is no evidence that sin originates its own cure. If there were evidence from analogy, or from experience, or from history, that sin, like a fever, exhausts itself, and not only leaves no injurious effect behind, but lets the patient return to freedom and happiness, one might conceive it possible to be eternally happy without an atonement. But there is no evidence in this world that sin exhausts itself, or leaves its victim, or loses its virus; and there is no evidence that in the world to come the state of the lost shall be mitigated, or their sufferings, the penal results of sin, mitigated, or the curse that wraps them like a shroud ever put off. Let me illustrate my meaning. Suppose a convict is banished to a penal colony for a term of seven years. If he spends the seven years, he exhausts his punishment, and he is let loose, and he returns again to his native land. But suppose that convict, in the course of the seven years, commits a new offence, that again he receives the sentence of other seven years: and suppose that in the second term of banishment he commits a fresh offence still: you can see a career of ceaseless sin, and, therefore, a course of ceaseless penalty. It is so, my dear friends, with the lost. By the very nature of their being, they are ever sinning, and ever suffering. Sin in the realms of the lost is an eternal evil, never working out its own cure, but ever working out its own perpetuity. By their very instinct, by the very laws of their nature, they go on sinning; and by the law of God they must go on suffering. Who knows but that the awful characteristic of the sufferings of the lost may be, that their sins and their sufferings accumulate for ever, and that hell, in an arithmetical, or a geometrical, or some dread ratio, goes on increasing in its terrors, as the lost multiply their transgressions and their blasphemies against God?

It is thus that we see, whether we look at God's holy law, or at man's own conscience, or at the nature of sin, that some grand interposition man is incapable of devising is needed, before that law can be magnified, conscience pacified, sin expiated, extirpated,